Countless social media platforms and inbound marketing strategies can make it hard to maintain brand consistency across all formats. Without brand consistency, you may cause confusion amongst your potential and current customers and/or viewers.
As you may know, it’s important to claim usernames across all social media platforms with your brand name. In doing so, you’ll have a lot to manage and your brand can get clouded. But, with careful adaptation to the following tips it will be clear and soar online.
Establish Brand Voice Guidelines
In creating guidelines for your company’s online voice, you will be able to maintain consistency on multiple platforms. It’s not what you say, but how you say it. That carries across all social media and inbound marketing efforts. With an established brand voice, you’ll begin to truly strengthen your brand and build rapport. A brand voice is an expression of the people behind the brand and the brand’s personality itself.
So let’s get down to it. To get started, concentrate on these two areas while beginning to create these guidelines:
- The tone of your brand’s voice is a great first place to start.
- If your brand was a person, how would it speak?
- Would it have a fun tone to its voice or would it be more buttoned up?
- Would it be cheeky or more technical?
- What type of vocabulary does your brand use?
- Consider what differentiates you. In order to stand out from your competition, decide how you will make that happen when it comes to conversations online. For example, if you were a retail brand and your competition focuses on framing its voice around product, maybe you want to focus yours on the thought and expertise behind that – like the fashion choices.
Visual Consistency
Online viewers digest visual content at an extremely high rate. Visual content is currently being shared more than written and is favored to it’s written counter part. Thus, establishing how visual representation will be just as important as creating your brand voice guidelines are.
Dive into your brand’s visual aspect by focusing on a few key points:
- Building off your established brand voice, what theme would images your company shares contain?
- Would your brand be partial toward bright, cartoonish types of imagery?
- Or does your brand prefer more formal images such as stock photography?
- Remember to carry your brand’s visual guidelines into the online space.
- Brand identity colors should be maintained across all platforms.
- Logos should be consistent across all profiles as well.
- Fonts that are associated with your brand’s identity should carry over in any profile attributes and images created to share.
Maintain Consistent Brand Values
Lastly, it is crucial to carry how your brand reacts, performs and thinks across all online formats. The values your company exudes through content is seen as the expression of your company, instead of just the tone of voice. A brand’s values also continues to help establish trust with consumers.
Ask yourself and your team a few questions in order to establish the values you will portray:
- Take into consideration the values in which your company was founded. These can be translated to content you share, create and post online.
- What value does your company provide to its consumers, new or potential? It is important to think about your viewers in order to gain response and engagement from them. Consider the “what’s in it for them” mindset when formatting online content.
- As touched on earlier, really use these values to differentiate your brand from the competition.
Maintaining brand consistency through all online and inbound marketing will help establish your brand. It also helps a brand build trust and rapport with current and potential customers. It will also help a brand’s content become more susceptible to engagement. These guidelines are meant to help you get started with establishing consistency. It is by no means the end all, you’ll find a lot of other aspects to expand on!
What does your company do to ensure brand consistency? What piece of advice would you give other online and inbound marketers?
