It’s pretty easy nowadays to quickly create websites, blogposts, emails, ebooks, and other content assets. But when considering your online reputation, it’s crucial that any materials, communications, images, and content be vetted thoroughly for brand consistency. Your brand messaging should build awareness of your product or service, and should nurture trust and loyalty in your customers.
Every interaction a customer has with your brand should be consistent and reflect your brand values and promises, whether online or off. Foster a strong brand personality that isn’t open to interpretation or customization. Here are some ways to stay consistent with your company branding.
Develop Brand Guidelines
Many large, successful companies, as well as some small-to-midsize companies, have guidelines for the style and usage of their brand marketing, with guides for ensuring that messaging and asset use is consistent for all departments, including their marketing team and employees. These guidelines spell out how their brand messaging should align with the business’s mission, vision, and core values.
You may not be as large as Walmart or Adobe, but if you’re in the process of establishing your own brand, consistency is key, and messaging guidelines will ensure that you create a solid branding foundation that meets the needs of your target audience while aligning with your business goals.
Create Content with Brand Consistency
When you create content, keep consistency in mind. Use your style guides and messaging guidelines in the following approaches:
- Select the right content topics for your brand — When making decisions about scheduling your content calendar, make sure you’re creating content that makes sense for your unique brand. Topics posted and videos and webinars should be consistent and on-point. For example, if you are in the building industry, appropriate topics might be new sustainable resources or technological advances in construction. Remember that you’re trying to brand your company, product, or service, so stay away from content that focuses solely on you or your interests – unless you yourself are the brand.
- Stay Consistent Across Multiple Channels — Tone and personality matter, when it comes to launching a successful B2B marketing campaign. Sending mixed messages by showing different personalities on multiple channels will confuse prospective customers and undermine your branding efforts. If your brand is friendly and fun on Facebook, it also needs to be the same on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other social platforms. The goal is to have every interaction, whether online or off, at events or trade shows, be consistent and unwavering in the messaging sent out.
- Align with Influencers Carefully —Influencer marketing is one of the best ways to market to your target niche right now. The problem with pairing with a social media marketing that isn’t suited to your brand is one that B2B marketers make often. It’s not their popularity or how many fans they have that will benefit your company, it’s how well your branding matches with their persona and their followers’ needs and niche. Teaming up with the wrong social media influencer can boomerang if their persona does not represent your company well, and can lead potential customers to tune you out if they think the influencer doesn’t really use your products or services. Before working with an influencer, ensure that they appeal to your target audience, their personality complements your brand, and whether your product addresses pain points they frequently post about.
