Having all of your company’s messaging having a similar tone of voice, visual styling, use of colours across all of its marketing materials, both offline and online, allows customers to quickly recognise the brand and know exactly what it is that you are offering them. Having consistent branding is a highly effective way of both differentiating your company from its competitors and encouraging customers to make a purchase.
This is why it is important for your company to adopt some of the tips and tricks that are listed below on how to maintain brand consistency.
Organize All Of Your Advertising Assets
The easiest way to ensure that your company’s branding remains consistent no matter what channel it is used on is by having all the advertising assets in one central location that everyone can access.
This is where a digital asset management tool comes in extremely handy to use. They let you store all of your company’s advertising assets, such as color guides, product images, logos etc. in a single place. Doing this allows everyone in the company to have access to view and use them from where it is that they are based.
Digital asset management tools are a highly effective way of keeping things organized, whilst also helping to ensure that all of the branding is consistent across whatever channel it is used. One of the very best tools for this is offered by Brandfolder. For anyone interested in using their product, then read this guide from Brandfolder.
Reuse Content
By reusing the same content over again, your company can reach brand new audiences, whilst also reinforcing any messaging that you put out with very little effort required on your part. Adding a new layout or a new design to a piece of content that already exists is a quick and easy way of refreshing it. This type of content can and often does provide a good amount of value to those customers who have not yet already seen it. This process gives your company the opportunity to really fine-tune its brand and the messaging that it puts out.
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Some of the ways in which your company can reuse or repurpose pieces of content that already exist are by transforming survey results into a highly visual infographic; turning sound bites into clips for use on social media; compiling blog posts into an ebook, and using client presentations to produce a slide deck.
There are numerous pieces of creative software currently available on the market that can be used to do some, if not all, of these things. They allow even those people who are not creatively trained to easily make edits, change colours, and format the sizing on various pieces of content.
Make Use Of An Advertising Calendar
Having a centralized advertising calendar can keep everyone in your company in the loop about what is happening and when. This is true even when there are multiple different advertising campaigns all running at the exact same time. Although inputting all of your company’s advertising activities into a single calendar can be very labor-intensive and time-consuming, doing it will work to make success more likely to happen, as well as saving time in the long term. By planning in advance, it provides your company with more time to tweak the messaging that it puts out in order to ensure that it is all consistent, no matter what platform it goes out on.
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With an advertising calendar in place, your company will be able to review the effectiveness of previous campaigns and adjust any future advertising endeavors accordingly; schedule advertising content, such as social media posts and emails, far in advance; and manage advertising campaigns that run over various different channels.
Produce A Set Of Brand Guidelines
An important step in creating brand consistency is by producing a clear set of standards and rules that must be adhered to for all written and visual materials that are produced by your company. Doing this will provide everyone within your company something to focus on when launching new advertising campaigns. Areas to focus on include frequency, copy, fonts, images, logos, colour palettes, and tone and voice.
With respect to frequency, your company needs to think about how often it posts on social media, sends emails out to customers, or advertises its products or services. It is important to establish where there may be cases or either too much or too little communication happening. It is important to connect with customers, but not too much, as this can be off putting.
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The words used in the text copy that your company produces reflect greatly on the brand and so it is important that the brand guidelines help to create a consistent and clear message. Think about whether you should be using industry or specialist jargon and even smaller details,such as the capitalization of all the words in a headline or not.
The vast majority of brands use a single font for most things and then have secondary ones that are used sparingly for things such as titles or to emphasize certain points. By limiting the number of different fonts that are used in the content that your company produces, it helps with the purpose of brand recognizability.
In a set of brand guidelines, there should be guidance and advice on the types of proprietary and or stock images that are used. Here it is important to consider how they relate to the brand and if they are appropriate. For instance, some products or services may suit a more contemporary style of imagery, whereas others are better suited to a more vintage styling. Where the photographs contain people, make sure that they are representative of the actual people who the advertising is actually targeted towards.
Rules need to be put into place relating to how the company’s logo or logos are used on different types of content and across different advertising platforms, both offline and online. This should include guidance on horizontal and vertical formatting.