As the world of marketing shifts ever more digital, building and maintaining a consistent brand identity across the multitude of touchpoints is of paramount importance. Creating the right brand image requires time and dedication to attract a diverse customer base. To achieve the best and quickest results, you can either undertake thorough strategic research and attempt to create it yourself, or choose to collaborate with reputable digital branding company Frost.
What do we mean by consistent branding?
Consistent branding revolves around ensuring that your company’s presentation and core values remain constant across all marketing channels. This approach also encompasses promoting your business to the public through advertising and maintaining ongoing communication.
Your brand is the most valuable asset of your company. How your business appears and communicates directly influences how both potential and existing customers perceive it. For a successful brand, organisations continuously develop their image through cohesive actions that define the essence of their brand.
The importance of consistent branding in digital marketing strategies
Today, digital marketing serves as the most effective means of reaching customers. The essence of consistency in digital marketing lies in being readily recognisable to the public, establishing trust, and conveying your brand’s unique personality. When customers can identify and positively associate with your brand, they are more inclined to make purchases and become loyal customers in the long run.
Furthermore, your brand consistency also plays a pivotal role in equipping your customers with the attributes they can easily reference when recommending your brand to their friends and social media followers.
Research has found that 68% of businesses say brand consistency has contributed to revenue growths of 10% or more.1
Brand guidelines help maintain consistent branding
Brand guidelines are the rules and standards that a business sets to maintain a consistent brand presentation across every touchpoint. They’re not just rules on logo use, colours and fonts. Effective brand guidelines need to outline everything element of the brand from what you look like across traditional and digital touchpoints to what you sound like and how you should communicate. Having comprehensive guidelines and adhering to the guidelines is crucial for ensuring brand consistency.
Consistent branding helps provide customers with uniform experiences when interacting with your business. Without guidelines it will be a challenge to maintain consistency, especially if you are an organisation with multiple teams working on your internal or external communications.
The key elements of brand guidelines
Most brand guidelines will consist of three main elements:
Audience Elements: This involves defining target audience personas, language choices, and communication frequency, as well as the voice and tone used in marketing efforts. This will cover who you are, what you stand for and how you must communicate to your various audiences section. Check out the work we’ve done for CFH recently, our 80-page brand bible ensures the consistency of their brand across every single touchpoint.
Just maintaining a consistent signature colour online can increase brand recognition by 80%.2
Language and Communication Elements (tone of voice): The word choice you make plays a critical role in capturing your audience’s attention. Understanding your target audience, their needs, and their challenges will allow you to select the most appropriate message for the right channel to attract them. Consistency in how you communicate your brand message, particularly in terms of vocabulary and sentence structure, is essential for success. By personalising and humanising your messages, you can evoke emotional responses that leave a lasting impact on your audience. Our work for Southampton Hospitals Charity delivers clarity to their audiences. You can see the work here.
88% of consumers say authenticity is important when deciding what brands they like and support.3
Visual Elements: This aspect includes your logo, tagline, colour palette, images, and fonts. Taglines will enhance product campaigns and build brand identity, helping to increase brand recognition. Your chosen colour palette is crucial as it shapes your brand’s personality and the emotions it evokes in your audience’s minds. Employing consistent imagery that aligns with your brand’s overall personality or offering significantly contributes to how your brand is perceived and associated with particular emotions.
Maintaining a consistent brand tone of voice helps you differentiate from your competition, attracting and retaining customers while fostering a loyal fan base that advocates for your brand.
Having a consistent brand voice could increase your revenue by as much as 33%. Some research even says that 64% of customers would pay more for brands they trust.4
To summarise
Consistent branding in digital marketing is indispensable when it comes to reaching the vast potential customer base. This approach entails careful planning, strategic execution, and leveraging the desires and emotions of your target audience to make your products and services highly appealing.
At Frost Creative, we understand the essence of consistent branding and can help you craft a compelling brand identity that resonates with your audience and sets you apart in the digital landscape.
1. Source Lucid Press 2021. 2. Reboot 2018. 3. Stackla 2021. 4. SE Ranking