Brand consistency- all you need to know and more
Branding is the look, feel and experience of your business. It is how customers recognise you and when done well, will affect how they respond when they interact with your business. There are a few important steps to having brand consistency.
- It should align with your individual business and your ideal customer
- It should be clearly defined
- You should apply your branding consistently across all digital and physical marketing
- You need to consistently live up to your brand promise or the experience that your customers come to expect.
If you miss any of these steps, your branding won’t give you the results you desire.
What is Branding?
It is important for your branding to be original and personal to your business – it should give your audience the vibe of who you are and what your business stands for.
It starts with visual elements such as your logo, fonts, colour palette and the style of images you use, but also extends to a whole experience including the personality and voice of your business, the way you communicate with customers and what causes you support in the community.
Your use of colour and imagery is so important, especially in social media feeds when people are scrolling and scanning so quickly.
People make judgements about your business within the first 90 seconds of interacting with your branding, and studies show that at least 60% of their judgements come from colour alone.
Colours are highly emotive and have a very strong psychological effect on people, so you should choose your brand palette wisely. Up to 80% of brand recognition comes from your consistent use of colour.
Your brand should give your audience the vibe of who you are and what your business stands for.
Why is Brand Consistency important?
Using your branding consistently across platforms and promotional material is essential for a few reasons.
Brand Consistency:
- helps to build a relationship with your customers. They start to become familiar with your brand and to trust it.
- helps you to create and then communicate a clear message to your audience of who your brand is, what it stands for and what they can expect from you.
- sets you apart from your competitors and helps you to stand out from the crowd.
- makes you look and feel polished and professional.
Your repeated use of your branding should give your audience the same experience of your business each time they come into contact with it. They will start to know what to expect, and should already have positive feelings about you upon each new interaction.
If your branding is haphazard or non-existent, it will take much longer for your audience to get to know and recognise your business.
Branding gives your business a personality, and engages directly with each person you are trying to attract. Customers buy from the businesses that they relate to, who understand the pain points they face and provide the easiest and most ideal solutions to their problems.
Consistent use of branding helps people to recognise you and build a relationship of trust in your brand, whereas a lack of branding has the opposite effect.
What is Brand Consistency?
Having a clearly defined and original look and feel for each of the following:
- Business name
- Business tagline
- Logo
- Fonts
- Colour palette
- Consistent graphic templates for social media
- Profile pictures and banners
- Style of images
- Design layouts across digital marketing and physical promotional material
Your Branding Should be Authentic
Your branding needs to be matched to your business, but this isn’t something that should be forced – it should come authentically. Your branding will work best when it is honest, and when it comes from your mission and vision, and the why of your business.
You need to build your branding around reality, and also consistently live up to it. It isn’t just a set and forget, it is something that you need to continually work on and stick to.
The Importance of Brand Consistency – Final Thoughts
- Your branding should be customised for your individual business, giving the look, feel, and experience of your business to others that you want. This will include your logo, colours, fonts, and images, but also is much much more than this.
- Branding should give your audience an understanding of your business, its values, products, services, personality and vision.
- When you use your branding consistently and regularly across your digital and physical marketing material, clients will start to become familiar with your brand whenever they see it.
- You should choose visual elements to represent your brand.
- You should then use these consistently for your audience to engage with, including on your website, on emails, on promotional material and of course on social media profiles and all posts.
- Your branding should emanate the experience you want your customers to have. It is key to have branding that communicates the vibe of what you do and why you do it.
Would you like to find out how I can help you with Brand Consistency and get you on your way to achieving a brand you’ll love and others wont forget?
Learn more about my Branding packages HERE