Picture the situation: You’re on the sofa bingeing on your current favourite series and the annoying ads break comes round for the millionth time at the crucial cliffhanger moment. You mute the TV because, annoying ads, and one commercial comes on that you haven’t seen before. From its mood, colours, lighting you instantly know it’s an ad from a specific brand. This is without seeing their brand or hearing the music they use or voiceover. Massive congrats to this company. They’ve built up brand consistency and an identity that’s recognisable to consumers instantly.

In this blog post, I’ll take a proper look at what brand consistency is and what can do to help your business create a successful, sustainable and recognisable brand, including:

• What is brand consistency and what does it mean to you?
• How brand consistency helps build brand recognition
• How brand consistency will help you build trust and loyalty
• How brand consistency can help you build connections with your audience
• How brand consistency can set you apart from your competitors
• Tips on how you can start building a more consistent brand today

What is brand consistency and what does it mean to you?

Brand consistency is how an organisation delivers messages aligned with its core values, customer experience and brand identity elements. Brand consistency ensures that your brand is easily recognisable across all your social media platforms and touch points including your website, email marketing and any other ways you communicate to your community and your clients. 

For you as a business owner, brand consistency means always delivering messages that are in line with the identity and values of your brand. It means that your target audience is exposed to the same core messages repeatedly. The more consistent your messaging, the more consistent your branding. 

How brand consistency helps build brand recognition

When building up a brand, the most important objective to strive for is brand recognition. You want your target audience to begin recognising who you are, what you stand for and how you can solve their problem with your product or service. As a brand you should always strive to be instantly recognisable to your audience. By being consistent in your visual branding but also in your messaging and everything you say, over time, your business will stand out above the competition and stick in people’s minds.

How brand consistency will help you build trust and loyalty

Trust is such an important factor when it comes to building your community and selling your product or service. Brand recognition is all about spreading the word about what you do, but it’s also about getting to know you brand on a personal level. You may have heard of the ‘know, like and trust factor’. Trust is important because much of the time people’s purchases are made on an emotional level rather than for practical reasons. Once you have built up trust, you can sell to people who feel they will know what you expect when buying from you.

How brand consistency can help you build connections with your audience

Speaking of emotions, consistently communicating positive messages can also help evoke positive emotions from your target audience. Over time, it’s possible to build up a brand that your audience will associate with certain positive emotions, whether your brand gives them energy, makes them happy, inspires them or motivates them. This means your brand can have an enormous impact on people, making them far more likely to buy from you.

How brand consistency can set you apart from your competitors

When in a competitive or saturated market, brand consistency can really help set you apart from your competitors. Ensuring that your brand is consistent visually, but also in your messaging can give you the edge when potential clients are making a decision between your offer and that of others. It can help confirm trust and the reason they were drawn to you in the first place. A lot of businesses don’t consider brand consistency as an important factor, or understand how powerful it is, meaning this will put you head and shoulders above them.

Tips on how you can start building a more consistent brand today

Great news! You can set the wheels in motion to build a more consistent brand from today. 

It’s worth remembering that in this digital age, it’s so important to build up the know like and trust factor that I mentioned earlier, and that’s what we’re aiming for with your brand consistency.

Put a name to your brand

The first thing I recommend is to add in some form of personal branding. Quite simply, this is putting a face to your brand. Who are you? What’s your story? Is there any information about you or your team on your website or on social media? When so many purchasing decisions now happen online, it’s so important to add that personal touch to your brand. Get some photos of yourself on your website. Professionally shot on brand ones are highly recommended, but not essential to begin with. Get some shots of you in your working environment. Not only is this important because people want to buy from people and connect, but also, let’s be honest, as humans we’re nosy. People want to know what you get up to. This also adds a uniqueness to your brand that no other business can replicate. You are you and that is your superpower.

Make sure you’re using a consistent colour palette and typography

The colours you use are so important in communicating your brand and keeping them consistent across platform is essential. I often see businesses creating their own social media posts and using completely different colour than this used on their website. This will dilute your brand and confuse your audience. Instead, but creating a consistent use of colour across platforms can much more quickly help you build up a more quickly recognisable brand and take your clients from being followers on one platform to being customers on another. 

Your typography choices can also help you quickly build up brand recognition. If you’re using an instantly recognisable typeface across platforms that communicates the personality of your brand you can use this in combination with the rest of your visual branding to build up brand awareness and ultimately build up trust and loyalty with your target audience.

Canva is an amazing free tool you can use to help you create a colour palette and start looking into your typography options. It features a brand kit that will help you keep consistent with your colours and typography across everything you create on the platform.

Use a brand style guide and keep everything on brand

It can be a daunting task ensuring brand consistency across all touch points. One way you can help make this easier for yourself if you aren’t working with a designer is to create a brand style guide. This is a document that defines your brand elements and branding elements to keep you and anyone in your team on the same page and keep all your messaging on brand. It should include your mission, colour palette, typography including how fonts are used as readings or paragraphs, photo and imagery styles, copy guidelines and any other visual information you might need to maintain consistency. If you work with a branding designer, this is something they should create for you to guide you through how to use your branding attributes once they hand over to you.

Go back to your values and goals and identifying your ideal client

You might be having issues working out what your branding should be and what it should look like, so I recommend going back to basics. Sitting down and going over or sometimes re-evaluating your mission, goals and your brand values can often help inspire you. As well as this, remembering who it is you ultimately want to serve can help you remember who you’re trying to communicate with and how you should be speaking to them. I recommended going back to the above often as we can often lose track of these essentials and get caught up in what others are doing around us.

Be consistent in what you say

Finally, what you say and how you say it is so important. This is a part of branding that often gets forgotten about or left until later. With your messaging, it’s so important to consider who you are speaking to. The copy you have on your website and captions you use on social media should be created to speak directly to your ideal customers. But remember to keep it consistent across platforms. It’s also useful for creating content for different platforms to repurpose your copy, so say you create a blog post, you can then use snippets of what you say in your blog post in your social media posts keeping it all consistent everywhere.

If you’re stuck with keeping your brand consistent or you still don’t know where to start, I can help. I offer a number of branding packages as well as brand consistency power hours to help you start building an instantly recognisable brand that will help you stand out from the crowd. Get in touch to see how I can help you.