Brand Consistency

You likely know your brand is more than your logo. It is your company’s identity: everything a customer feels and sees when they come across your business. It encompasses what is on your website, your social posts, and even your email tone. Keeping all these things aligned with your brand is simple, but is also very easy to botch.

Brand consistency hinges on your brand’s colors, typefaces, and your customer’s messaging and tone and how all these things are aligned. Differing consumer experiences across your website, storefront, and your social posts leads only to confusion when your customers try to decipher who you really are. Confused customers will not trust you.

Aligning everything can be difficult, especially when you have your marketing spread across many people. Your social posts and your website can likely have two very different tones. A big reason brands develop a set of brand guidelines is for their employees to stay on the same page. They typically describe your colors and logos and your brand’s tone.

You don’t need much for a simple start. Something like consistent brand colors across your website, packaging, and socials is a great step one. Your tone can have the same affect. Be you casual and friendly or professional and to the point. Just be consistent.

Consistency over time harnesses trust. It’s nice looking and feeling the same way for your customers so they can recognize you. Easier recognition is a huge factor that determines why they choose one brand over another. It may seem like a long process, but that’s okay because you’ve just got to keep showing up looking and sounding like yourself until it sticks and people recognize your brand.

Just be sure to remember consistency doesn’t equal boring. Change is necessary. The key is ensuring when there are changes you do them uniformly. It looks bad if you update your website but forgot your business cards and email signature. Slight inconsistency in these small things can take away your professionalism even if customers can’t pin point why.

It can feel like admin on top of admin when running a small business with no marketing team. But doing things like using the same profile image across your accounts and being consistent with your fonts will help immensely. It really does make an impact over time and can be a nice first step.

Why Your Brand Colours Keep Confusing Customers

admin

It’s not most brand owners’ goals to confuse customers, but it happens and usually is color related. It might be the case that your blue on your website is slightly different from blue on your packaging. It might also be the case that your social media profile uses an older version of your logo, which is not the case for your website or packaging. Small differences like these, while definitely small, are not unnoticeable to the customer and can detract from the appearance of your brand.

As you might imagine, it’s easy for this to occur. If your website was done by one person, your business cards by someone else, and your social media graphics tossed together by whoever had time, no one checks to the colors as they are all over the place and mini differences occur over time.

It is worrying that customers see these differences, even if they are tiny, because they are not focused enough to appreciate the effect of each. Just because your customers do not evaluate your social media against your website to determine if your brand is consistent, does not mean that a slight difference between these is not eroding trust, especially because of new customers.

This can be an easy change. Start saving the specific colors (hex codes) designers use and reference when they need to. You can then create document where you save the hex codes so they are quick and easily accessible. When having to create anything from a social media post to a flyer, use these dedicated hex codes. No more eyeballing it.

The same can be said for your final approved logo. There needs to be one official logo that is preserved and is the only version that is to be used for marketing. It really is shocking to see how quickly companies lose control of their brand identity and logs. There can be several altered and/or resized versions floating around and people don’t even know it.

Fonts can be just as bad. Using the same fonts online vs in print. Customers may not understand the feeling of inconsistency but they can definitely feel something is wrong even if they can’t explain it.

This doesn’t have to be perfect right away. Fixing brand consistency issues doesn’t happen all at once. Most brands amass these inconsistencies over time, so the fix will happen over time too. Focus on what the customers see most, such as your website and major social media channels, and branch out from there. This is work that, while uninteresting or boring, is important and builds a trustworthy business.

Types of Commercial Umbrella and their Benefits for Business

Christina

An umbrella is about more than just creating some shade. Whilst it’s true they do this, it’s also true that they come with so many more benefits, and you shouldn’t ever rule these benefits out when making a commercial decision for your business. You can choose from different types of umbrella depending on your needs, so the facts are going to be important here. Think about some of the following when choosing commercial umbrellas:

  • Don’t forget the word commercial. This should always be a decision that is made because of money, customer experience and marketing your business. Part of marketing is making sure people have a great experience, so they will keep returning again and again. It’s a good way of getting the customers you want, without having to spend lots of money on new marketing and advertising campaigns.
  • Think about the bigger picture. How can you make your commercial umbrellas work as hard for you as possible? They probably aren’t going to be a cheap purchase, so it makes sense to ensure they are going to do as much for you as they can. Think about using them as a branding exercise. Have your logo professionally printed on the umbrellas, so that people passing by will see your name and your logo. This needs to look completely professional – only use a legitimate marketing and printing company to get the work done, so you can be confident in the quality of the printing. It will also reinforce the message to people who already use your business, reminding them where they are and keeping you at the forefront of their minds.
  • Think about other benefits for your business, outside of the commercial. Umbrellas can help provide a better ambience, and they can also help to keep the building cool if they are placed close to windows. This also makes for a better ambience inside, meaning you may even be able to save money on bills because you won’t need to cool down your property.

These are some types of commercial umbrella that could work for your business:

  • Centre pole. These can be freestanding, or they can be fitted to a table.
  • Cantilever. This is a side arm umbrella that is freestanding and that is highly adjustable, because the umbrella can pivot and rotate on the arm.
  • Octagonal or hexagonal. Umbrellas don’t just need to be square or rectangular. There are many different options depending on what you want to achieve.
  • Aluminium or wooden. Choose the material that is going to be the most beneficial, but also that is going to give you the look you want.

If you aren’t sure exactly of what you want or need, talk it through with a company that can supply your umbrellas. They can give you advice and help you decide on the umbrellas that will be most beneficial for you. They should know their product range inside out, meaning they can give you useful advice and support throughout the consultation, design, manufacture and installation period.

Keeping Your Branding Goals Consistent

admin

marketing-681180_1280

Keeping your branding goals consistent is extremely important. During the start-up business, you must set goals and objectives which you want your business to meet. At first, is it brand awareness or equity which you want to increase? Are you looking to start your business small and slowly establish market share, then expand? There are so many different ways you can go about establishing your brand.

Write down all the goals you have for the business, the objectives that you want to meet and set time limits. Consider how you will reach these targets, and circumstances which may hinder your progress. Consider the amount of people needed, budgets, revenue etc. Once you have a plan on board, it’s time to get started!

Establishing Brand Consistency Online

admin

How do you establish brand consistency digitally? With the world wide web never sleeping, it’s extremely important there’s consistency with your brands online presence.

Make sure the brand logo is at the forefront of anything related to your online presence. This is probably the most obvious tip we can offer, but you’d be surprised how many brands get such a simple process wrong.

If you have a large team, it can be even harder to maintain consistency within the different groups. So create a style guide, this will ensure everything designed, promoted etc looks like it belongs to the company. A style guide is a great way to establish an identity.

Make sure that your team understands why it’s important to protect the brands identity with consistency. By respecting the brand, everyone will understand and strive for the end goal – Success.

How Brand Consistency is Important to your Business

admin

Brand consistency plays a massive role in developing and maintaining the trust people have with a brand; which is itself a massive component in a brand’s value.

Brand consistency is simply put about outlining your company’s modus operandi, its mission statement, and then doing your level headed best to ensure that your company’s continued operations are consistent with those core values, principles, and strategies.

For most businesses this would refer to keeping a promise on price and the value of products, i.e. if you market your company as a high end product retailer, you better make sure that your products are actually high end.

In other situations, you may have made a promise to be responsible and active contributing member of your local community; in which case, operating with a bias towards hiring local people, or performing philanthropic works in the local community is essential for maintaining your image. In this situation, any act which seems to go against this promise you’ve made could back fire in a very bad way.

One of the most important things to remember about brand consistency and reputation management by extension, is that a reputation can take years to develop, but you can quickly destroy it over a matter of hours by making a serious mistake. You should base your brand around something which you feel you will be able to maintain consistently, and then change that on only very rare occasions.