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How a Business Can Maintain Brand Consistency Across the Web
Published on March 6, 2023
Imagine you come up with the perfect idea for your business. You create a website and set up all of your social media accounts and start posting, but you struggle to get clients.
If you haven't taken brand consistency seriously, that could be a big reason why your business isn't growing. Fortunately, the problem is easy enough to fix once you know the steps.
Read on to learn why consistency matters and how you can ensure your business branding is on point.
Importance of Consistent Business Branding
When building and marketing a business, brand consistency is crucial. If you aren't consistent across channels, you could cost yourself followers and loyal customers.
Consider the following reasons to prioritize consistency when marketing your business online.
Reduce Confusion
Some of your ideal customers may only find you on one platform, such as your website. However, they might start to follow you on multiple social media platforms.
If you show one version of your brand on your website and another on Instagram, for example, you can confuse people. Your audience may stop following you.
When they need the services you offer, they might choose your competitors instead. So whether you're marketing your business or providing customer service, you need to be consistent across channels.
Become Memorable
Reducing confusion is helpful, but you can also use your consistent business branding to become more memorable. Customers may need to see or interact with your brand multiple times before they decide to pay.
Consistent branding can help people recognize your company across platforms. Then, someone may see an ad on Instagram then an organic Instagram post the following day.
Soon after, they may see your latest email or TikTok, and they'll visit your website. If your branding is the same across those platforms, you can more easily capture the interest of your ideal clients.
Build Trust
A consistent online branding strategy can also help you build trust with your audience. If you're always changing the colors you use in your posts or the wording, you may lose that trust.
Sure, you need to experiment to see what works with your audience. However, you should make smaller changes if you want to test new strategies.
Stick as closely as possible as you can to your existing branding. Then, you can encourage customers to trust you as an expert in your field, which can then help them feel better about working with you.
Increase Sales
Of course, as you build trust, you may find it much easier to get sales. When people trust you, they may buy more of your product or pay for a larger service package.
That means you can earn more money, and you can get away with raising your rates to increase your income. Getting consistent sales can take time, but it doesn't help if your branding is all over the place.
While brand consistency won't guarantee sales, it can help you. As long as you use branding that appeals to your ideal client, you should have a good chance of making more sales.
How to Maintain Brand Consistency
If you want to maintain consistency regarding your business brand, you should do a few things. That way, you can make your brand stand out like big name companies such as Coca-Cola and Nike.
The more steps you take, the easier it will be for you and anyone you hire to keep everything coherent. Consider the following ways to increase brand consistency for your business.
Fine Tune the Visuals
The visual aspects of your brand can have a huge impact on your business and marketing strategy. Be sure you create a good logo that represents your brand and is easy to recognize.
You should also choose brand colors and fonts and stick to those. Then, use the visual elements when creating graphics to share on your website or social media.
If you want to include pictures on your website, you should also make those match your branding. For example, if you like neutrals, make sure your pictures don't have any bright colors in the background.
Use Templates
If you like to create graphics for social media, you should create templates. That way, you only have to swap out things like the text or perhaps an image.
You can make sure all of the graphics you share on your platforms look cohesive. While it can be fun to design each graphic from scratch, it's easy to accidentally make the graphics look too different.
Templates also come in handy if you decide to hire someone to manage your social media. You can give them the small changes you want for each graphic, and you don't have to worry about their designs not matching yours.
Develop a Brand Voice
Another crucial part of your business branding is the tone of voice and the wording you use. Develop a voice for your brand that you can use across the internet.
You can get ideas of what to say by surveying your audience. Ask them their biggest problems, and get them to elaborate on their answers so that you can write those answers down and use them in your marketing.
For one, this can help you keep the phrases consistent. However, it can also help you speak to your audience and make them feel heard, which can help you book more clients.
Adapt the Voice to the Platform
After you create your brand voice, you may need to make slight changes depending on the platform you use. For example, you may need to write your posts on Facebook but film yourself talking for Instagram or TikTok.
Be sure to also look into character limits and other restrictions for each platform. That way, you'll know if you need to be more concise with your posts or if you can elaborate more.
Of course, you might want to adjust your call-to-action (CTA) for the platform. While you can directly link to your website on Facebook, you'll need to send people to your bio on Instagram.
Create a Brand Kit
After you develop the visuals and your brand voice, put it all together in a brand kit or brand style guide. You can create a document that you store on your computer or in the cloud.
Then, you can refer back to your style guide whenever you don't know what to say in a social post or on your website. A brand kit will also come in handy if you decide to hire a team.
You can send a copy of the document to your new employees so that they know what to use when they create social posts or website content. That will help you keep everything consistent, even when you no longer do all of the work.
Provide Training
If you have employees or hire some later on, you'll need to train your employees on the new brand messaging. Sure, you can simply send employees your brand kit document to review on their time.
However, you might want to meet with an employee. That way, they can ask questions, and you can clarify aspects of the brand style guide.
You should train any new employees you hire that will be working on your marketing strategy. If you ever do a major rebranding, you should also update your brand style guide and train your current employees on the new system.
Review Work From Others
As you start to implement a consistent brand strategy, you may want to review what others do before they post it. That way, you can make sure it sounds and looks right and meets your other standards.
You can use a lot of different tools to have people send drafts to you for approval such as Google Drive or Dropbox. No matter what, take a good look at the post images or graphics, and read through the text.
If you have any concerns, you can ask your employee or the freelancer you’re working with to redo part of the work. Once everything looks good, you can approve it for publication on your website or social media accounts.
Audit Communications
Every few months, you may want to audit your brand consistency to make sure everything still makes sense. You can look at specific posts to ensure the branding looks good, especially if you don't like to approve stuff before publication.
Auditing your branding can help you discover any inconsistencies and fix them. However, you can also use the audit to make sure your branding still appeals to your ideal customers.
Look at your analytics to see if you've had a drop in engagement or sales. If so, you may want to make a small change or two so that you can increase those metrics the next month.
How Will You Maintain Brand Consistency?
Brand consistency can make or break the success of your business. You need to use the same imagery and tone of voice on your website and various social platforms.
Then, you can reduce confusion and attract more of your ideal customers. Be sure to create a brand kit and train any employees you have that will work on your marketing.
Are you ready to start a business offering website design services? View our pricing to learn more and get started.
Imagine you come up with the perfect idea for your business. You create a website and set up all of your social media accounts and start posting, but you struggle to get clients.
If you haven't taken brand consistency seriously, that could be a big reason why your business isn't growing. Fortunately, the problem is easy enough to fix once you know the steps.
Read on to learn why consistency matters and how you can ensure your business branding is on point.
Importance of Consistent Business Branding
When building and marketing a business, brand consistency is crucial. If you aren't consistent across channels, you could cost yourself followers and loyal customers.
Consider the following reasons to prioritize consistency when marketing your business online.
Reduce Confusion
Some of your ideal customers may only find you on one platform, such as your website. However, they might start to follow you on multiple social media platforms.
If you show one version of your brand on your website and another on Instagram, for example, you can confuse people. Your audience may stop following you.
When they need the services you offer, they might choose your competitors instead. So whether you're marketing your business or providing customer service, you need to be consistent across channels.
Become Memorable
Reducing confusion is helpful, but you can also use your consistent business branding to become more memorable. Customers may need to see or interact with your brand multiple times before they decide to pay.
Consistent branding can help people recognize your company across platforms. Then, someone may see an ad on Instagram then an organic Instagram post the following day.
Soon after, they may see your latest email or TikTok, and they'll visit your website. If your branding is the same across those platforms, you can more easily capture the interest of your ideal clients.
Build Trust
A consistent online branding strategy can also help you build trust with your audience. If you're always changing the colors you use in your posts or the wording, you may lose that trust.
Sure, you need to experiment to see what works with your audience. However, you should make smaller changes if you want to test new strategies.
Stick as closely as possible as you can to your existing branding. Then, you can encourage customers to trust you as an expert in your field, which can then help them feel better about working with you.
Increase Sales
Of course, as you build trust, you may find it much easier to get sales. When people trust you, they may buy more of your product or pay for a larger service package.
That means you can earn more money, and you can get away with raising your rates to increase your income. Getting consistent sales can take time, but it doesn't help if your branding is all over the place.
While brand consistency won't guarantee sales, it can help you. As long as you use branding that appeals to your ideal client, you should have a good chance of making more sales.
How to Maintain Brand Consistency
If you want to maintain consistency regarding your business brand, you should do a few things. That way, you can make your brand stand out like big name companies such as Coca-Cola and Nike.
The more steps you take, the easier it will be for you and anyone you hire to keep everything coherent. Consider the following ways to increase brand consistency for your business.
Fine Tune the Visuals
The visual aspects of your brand can have a huge impact on your business and marketing strategy. Be sure you create a good logo that represents your brand and is easy to recognize.
You should also choose brand colors and fonts and stick to those. Then, use the visual elements when creating graphics to share on your website or social media.
If you want to include pictures on your website, you should also make those match your branding. For example, if you like neutrals, make sure your pictures don't have any bright colors in the background.
Use Templates
If you like to create graphics for social media, you should create templates. That way, you only have to swap out things like the text or perhaps an image.
You can make sure all of the graphics you share on your platforms look cohesive. While it can be fun to design each graphic from scratch, it's easy to accidentally make the graphics look too different.
Templates also come in handy if you decide to hire someone to manage your social media. You can give them the small changes you want for each graphic, and you don't have to worry about their designs not matching yours.
Develop a Brand Voice
Another crucial part of your business branding is the tone of voice and the wording you use. Develop a voice for your brand that you can use across the internet.
You can get ideas of what to say by surveying your audience. Ask them their biggest problems, and get them to elaborate on their answers so that you can write those answers down and use them in your marketing.
For one, this can help you keep the phrases consistent. However, it can also help you speak to your audience and make them feel heard, which can help you book more clients.
Adapt the Voice to the Platform
After you create your brand voice, you may need to make slight changes depending on the platform you use. For example, you may need to write your posts on Facebook but film yourself talking for Instagram or TikTok.
Be sure to also look into character limits and other restrictions for each platform. That way, you'll know if you need to be more concise with your posts or if you can elaborate more.
Of course, you might want to adjust your call-to-action (CTA) for the platform. While you can directly link to your website on Facebook, you'll need to send people to your bio on Instagram.
Create a Brand Kit
After you develop the visuals and your brand voice, put it all together in a brand kit or brand style guide. You can create a document that you store on your computer or in the cloud.
Then, you can refer back to your style guide whenever you don't know what to say in a social post or on your website. A brand kit will also come in handy if you decide to hire a team.
You can send a copy of the document to your new employees so that they know what to use when they create social posts or website content. That will help you keep everything consistent, even when you no longer do all of the work.
Provide Training
If you have employees or hire some later on, you'll need to train your employees on the new brand messaging. Sure, you can simply send employees your brand kit document to review on their time.
However, you might want to meet with an employee. That way, they can ask questions, and you can clarify aspects of the brand style guide.
You should train any new employees you hire that will be working on your marketing strategy. If you ever do a major rebranding, you should also update your brand style guide and train your current employees on the new system.
Review Work From Others
As you start to implement a consistent brand strategy, you may want to review what others do before they post it. That way, you can make sure it sounds and looks right and meets your other standards.
You can use a lot of different tools to have people send drafts to you for approval such as Google Drive or Dropbox. No matter what, take a good look at the post images or graphics, and read through the text.
If you have any concerns, you can ask your employee or the freelancer you’re working with to redo part of the work. Once everything looks good, you can approve it for publication on your website or social media accounts.
Audit Communications
Every few months, you may want to audit your brand consistency to make sure everything still makes sense. You can look at specific posts to ensure the branding looks good, especially if you don't like to approve stuff before publication.
Auditing your branding can help you discover any inconsistencies and fix them. However, you can also use the audit to make sure your branding still appeals to your ideal customers.
Look at your analytics to see if you've had a drop in engagement or sales. If so, you may want to make a small change or two so that you can increase those metrics the next month.
How Will You Maintain Brand Consistency?
Brand consistency can make or break the success of your business. You need to use the same imagery and tone of voice on your website and various social platforms.
Then, you can reduce confusion and attract more of your ideal customers. Be sure to create a brand kit and train any employees you have that will work on your marketing.
Are you ready to start a business offering website design services? View our pricing to learn more and get started.