5 TIPS FOR BUILDING & MAINTAINING YOUR BRAND CONSISTENCY

Maybe you’ve just completed your branding and want to retain your investment’s value as you move into creating your marketing strategy. Or, perhaps, you have just conducted a branding audit that discovered you’re not consistent enough with your current marketing strategy. With either scenario, steps should be taken immediately to resolve this identity crisis and protect your brand. You want every interaction with your audience to embody your brand principles, values, and attributes.

Why Brand Consistency is Important

Please don’t hate us, LOTR fans.

The importance of Brand Consistency could be an entire blog post on it’s own, so we’ll focus on the nitty-gritty: audiences are loyal to brands they trust, and loyalty means sales.

Brand Consistency builds this trust by helping audiences understand what the brand is about through the process of repetition. In fact, “consistency” and “repetition” are completely interchangeable with each other in terms of branding. 

The marketing Rule of 7 says that a customer must see your brand at least 7 times before they’ll be inclined to interact. This means that, on average, a client or customer must see a consistent, repeated message from you at least 7 times before they build enough awareness to interact more deeply.

As your audience becomes more aware of your brand, the coveted trust begins to grow. 

Tl;dr: Consistency builds awareness, awareness builds trust, and trust means sales.

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5 Tips for Building Brand Consistency

You can probably understand why an inconsistent message not only hurts your marketing and sales metrics, but also your brand. With the importance of brand consistency in mind, here are 5 tips to create a harmonious, consistent brand.

1.Use Your Brand Guidelines

Brand Guidelines, sometimes referred to as a Brand Guide, Brand Bible, or Brand Kit, are made to set the foundation of your brand and should be referred to often when creating literally anything for your brand.

The most common information found in your Brand Guidelines includes:

• Brand Messaging / Brand Voice: Mission Statement, Vision Statement, Brand Attributes, Brand Tone, Target Audience, and buyer personas are all key information for your brand messaging. There are two pillars to your Brand - visual and vocal - and your Brand messaging makes up the stone your Vocal Branding pillar is set in.

• Logo: Wordmark, Symbol, and accepted Variations (Sub-Marks)

• Brand Fonts: Usually a set of 3-4 fonts or typefaces that are approved for your branding and the rules for using them

• Color Palette: a set of colors established for your branding

• Other Key Pieces of Branding: larger, more established businesses or companies that have a lot of products and labels may choose to also include more information about imagery, label placement, illustrations, and artwork that can be used, as well as how to use it. 

  The biggest takeaway from this tip should be: if you do not have a document or guide in place that currently has this information, you need to put one together or hire a professional to do it for you. To put it bluntly, this is non-negotiable in terms of creating and maintaining brand consistency.

2. Educate Your Team on the Brand Guidelines

You’ve taken the time and resources to create Brand Guidelines - now share them! The investment you’ve made is useless if your team (or anyone creating collateral) does not have them to refer to.

Certain teams may only need certain tidbits from the brand guidelines, so it may help to break down the information specific to each team. A good way to do this is to create a “How We Do it” (HWDI for short) for teams, such as a “HWDI - Brand Voice” for the communications team or a “How We Do it - Brand Basics” for your executive team. Breaking down the guidelines helps to keep relevant information for your branding easy to find when a team member needs to reference it. 

It may also be helpful to have a zoom call or in-person meeting with your organization to announce your brand guidelines. Consider doing this at least once a year, as brands tend to evolve year over year. This not only makes it known that this information exists but also gives your coworkers a chance to ask questions, see branding examples, and feel more connected to the brand and its importance.

3. Expand Your Buyer Personas to Further understand Your Audience

You’ve likely already created 1 to 2 buyer personas for your branding with your designers, but if necessary, expand these personas. This is especially helpful if you are creating separate HWDI (see the previous tip) for different teams. Consider creating personas that not only speak to your audience, but also the team you’re creating them for. This tip is mainly focused on how to not only communicate the brand to a team, but also how to help them understand the guidelines and why they are the way they are.

4. Organize Your Brand Assets

The easiest way to make sure your brand is always consistent is to make sure crucial assets are easily available for your team. 

Websites like Google Drive and Dropbox are great for managing this task. Additionally, if your brand uses Canva, consider setting up a Brand Kit directly in the workspace. If you’ve created a brand with us, keep in mind that we offer to add this setup as part of our Branding process!

Some brands may need a more robust system that includes attribute tagging, imagery management, and more security for multiple users. We’re huge fans of Brandfolder here, especially because of their use of AI tag automation for organizations with heaps of branded imagery.

5. Revamp Your Old Content

This is our favorite tip. Who doesn’t love an opportunity to repurpose previous content that resonated with your audience? It not only saves time and reinforces information, but it’s one of the easiest ways to keep your brand consistent. 

Easy ways to do this include:

• creating an infographic with high-level tips from the article;

• Taking quotes from the article and designing a quote post; 

• Expanding on information from content through a new blog post.
  

Get Ready, Set, Brand Consistency!

There are so many ways to keep your branding consistent! If you’re overwhelmed or unsure how to begin with these tips, hiring a Branding Professional to audit your content and create an actionable list of ways to help may be the best move. In the meantime, bookmark or jot down these tips somewhere you can easily refer to them while you’re starting your process. It may seem like a lot of work, but keeping your Brand Consistent is one of the most important ways to help your company thrive.