Building and Maintaining Brand Consistency

November 05, 2018 | Strategy

With the plethora of digital and print options available today, brand consistency should be the primary focus when approaching each medium. It’s imperative to build a solid foundation that guides your brand voice, ensuring it aligns with your organization’s goals and the needs of your target audience. Today, we at Black Flag Creative have some tips that can truly help you when it comes to your brand.

A few examples of where your brand will be presented include your website, email marketing, banners, flyers, billboards, social media and marketing videos. Wherever your brand is introduced and being represented, it is important that brand consistency is established.

WHAT IS A BRAND?

A brand is a name, symbol, or design that distinguishes an organization or product from its competitors and appeals to its consumers and/or customers.

Now let’s dive deeper into what exactly shapes a successful brand and how it can properly represent the uniqueness of your company or organization.

Your brand is the recognizable and consistent face of your company.

It’s how customers will recognize and remember you.

It’s how you exert your message and how it makes customers feel.

Your brand should always make a personal connection.

Think of it as allowing people to enter into a parallel universe that you create and making a positive impact in their daily lives.

Whether you’re in the process of establishing your brand or you currently have an established one, it’s always important to remember that keeping your brand consistent is one of the best things you can do for your company.

HOW TO MAINTAIN CONSISTENCY

Now how exactly does a company ensure their brand is being used in the most proper manner?

The answer is simple… Brand Identity Guides.

Identity guides are very valuable in helping organizations stay consistent and true to their brand and who they are. They provide a clear set of guidelines for how your organization should be marketed both from a print standpoint and digitally.

With a branding guide, you establish a clear direction on the use of your logo, color palette, typography, and even imagery. All of these items play a key role in keeping your brand recognizable across the board.

MAINTAINING BRAND AWARENESS

Having a brand identity guide is not only important to your company but it’s just as important to your audience.

Statistics show that maintaining a consistent brand experience increases customer trust and loyalty by 30%

Your brand should always seek to build awareness. It should always maintain the same personality, characteristics and focus as this ultimately leads to the desired customer satisfaction.

Remember, having a cohesive message across all digital and print efforts will allow customers to make a personal brand connection.

Is your company contact info up-to-date and does it show off your brand in the best way possible?

Here are a few things to keep in mind when building branding awareness:

  • Ensure that all email signatures display your logo correctly and contain the accurate contact information
  • Likewise, make sure that all social media accounts do exactly the same
  • It’s a little more difficult to reflect contact info updates in the print world but don’t let it discourage you from taking a few hours to update your business cards and order new prints
  • Maybe you have recently updated your branding… Order new apparel and stationery

Be sure to marry online and offline marketing efforts in order to build and maintain brand awareness.

Here’s a perfect scenario in building brand awareness…

Let’s say you are attending a tradeshow event and you printed brochures to hand out to potential customers. As your customers begin acquiring your material, this is your very first step into engaging and introducing them to your brand and your company.

Now, obviously, somewhere on the marketing material you will be displaying your logo, text using your font families, a website URL and using your brand imagery. If you are not, however, shame on you.

The moment a potential customer then chooses to visit your website, they should instantly see the branding connection between how they were first introduced to your brand at the tradeshow, to now continuing that branding experience on your website or even social media.

Maintaining a consistent brand not only can potentially increase customer satisfaction by 20% but can also increase revenue by 15%… And who wouldn’t want that? I don’t but some of you might.

Wherever your users turn to engage further with your company, your branding efforts should be familiar.

CONCLUSION

Before sailing off into the horizon, remember this, build and maintain a memorable brand by establishing consistency across all digital and print mediums. No matter where your customers turn, your brand should be cohesive and recognizable from logo and color palettes to typography and imagery.

If you need assistance, find a design agency or even reach out to our crew at Black Flag Creative. We can help you sail the course of establishing a solid foundation for your brand and marketing message.

So ask yourself, is your organization establishing a consistent brand experience? Does your organization need a brand identity guide or need help maintaining consistency across your website or mobile app?

Take the right steps forward in building a successful brand strategy and watch as your brand builds awareness and produces results.

Thank Ye for Reading Matey!