In Marketing—Of Any Kind—It Pays to Be Consistent!

BrandWhat do your Facebook page, your primary business website, your Twitter feed and your direct mailing materials have in common? Hopefully it’s a lot of things, and not just the fact that they are part of your content marketing and branding strategies. Although these are all different media, it’s important to make sure that your branding standards are both consistent across all social channels, and in alignment with your corporate website and overall branding guidelines.

Individual campaigns can be promoted through specific imagery, and graphics used for campaigns and posts — including campaign imagery — can be “pinned” to the top of each channel’s page for a period of time. As long as your content is consistent, and in line with your branding, you can achieve the dual goals of reinforcing your overall brand and providing attention-grabbing differentiation for individual campaigns.

Again, this doesn’t mean you have to be static and boring. You may wish to change the background visual from time to time to freshen it, but only if the new visual is relative to the overall brand and not  limited only to individual campaigns.

So, what does it mean and what’s involved in being both fresh and familiar?

For starters, your marketing should incorporate elements and colors that are consistent with, and reminiscent of, your website imagery. As noted by Roger Sametz of Sametz Blackstone Associates, early corporate marketers long ago “identified and realized an opportunity that is still important to us. They understood that the more communications reinforced each other visually, the easier and faster constituents would come to know and recognize a corporation or program.” Sametz points out that it’s difficult to completely control any aspect of your brand, but notes that there are three primary components that should absolutely be consistent:

Logo/Logotype: “Thoughtfully conceived and consistently implemented, it will be shorthand for what you stand for, your promises, (and) what people can (and do) expect from you.”

Color: Think about UPS and its consistent use of that familiar brown: brown trucks, brown delivery driver uniforms, etc. The colors you use create a strong visual signal that reminds your audience of your brand.

Type: The font, size, capitalization, etc. of your company name, key brand statements and other text.

Imagery: Whether your logo includes a handful of pine trees, a bright yellow sun, a smiling family or any other imagery, incorporate it into your marketing every chance you get.

Composition:

With all the channels available to marketers, consistency isn’t easy. As Desmond Wong notes, “with all of the social media platforms available to us…it…becomes more and more difficult to present a cohesive message across all the channels. One thing that we’ve noticed — and struggled with ourselves — is that the experience from one social network to another can feel really disjointed.”

But it doesn’t have to be disjointed. And it shouldn’t be. There are a number of ways to ensure brand consistency across even the most seemingly diverse marketing channels, and that consistency really pays off in greater brand recognition and appreciation.

Recommended Reading:

The Everything Guide to Customer Engagement

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