Substance and Style

Brand consistency is vital to your marketing endeavors. It helps you stand out in a saturated marketplace, be recognizable and memorable, and build trust. If your branding is consistent with the mission and values of your company, it will help you attract the right customers and clients, who will in turn become loyal brand ambassadors. 

Consistency can get tricky when you start building a presence on multiple platforms (should you have the same tone on LinkedIn as on Facebook?), across different types of media (how can branding be consistent with a written blog post and an instagram picture?), and appealing to different audiences (do you direct your content toward potential customers or existing customers?). Here are some ways to build and maintain brand consistency while keeping all of that in mind: 

1. Answer the big questions early on. Who are you talking to, and what do you want them to get out of it? You’ll likely have more than one audience, and more than one goal on the macro level. Once you’ve made a strategic plan for marketing in general and content marketing specifically, you’ll be able to figure out your audience and goal for each piece of content. You might decide to address one audience on one platform and another audience on another platform.
   
   Having different audiences and goals for specific pieces of content doesn’t take away from overall brand consistency if you’ve established strong guidelines from the beginning. Think of it like dating. You might not say the exact same things to someone you’ve just met on a first date as you would to someone you’ve been dating for years, but, if you’re being authentic, the difference would be in degrees of familiarity, not in character.
   
2. Develop visual guidelines. Having a clear set of rules for what things look like helps you avoid brand confusion and low quality design. It also triggers recognition among your audience, even if it’s unconscious. Make sure your website and printed materials, as well as your social media platforms, adhere to these visual guidelines.
   
   Your logo. Your logo is usually one of the first things you design when creating your brand. Put it in as many places as possible. Use it as your profile picture across your social media accounts, and use its visual style as a guideline for what the rest of your content should look and feel like.
   
   Your fonts. You should have specific fonts that you use whenever possible (ideally, no more than three: one for headlines or accents, one for sub-heads, and one for body/regular text). Make sure these fonts complement each other and that they match your business’s personality (don’t use chalk for a serious law firm, for example). A lot goes into font choice; if you aren’t familiar with fonts and aren’t working with a designer, make sure you choose fonts that have multiple weights and are easy to see and read for most of your readers. Make sure they all go together (choose a font family when in doubt), and make sure you aren’t using a font that is heavily associated with a specific brand already.
   
   Your colors. Hopefully, you have given some thought to color psychology and have chosen your brand’s colors. Take your color palette with you to every platform and use it wherever possible.
   
   Your assets. What kind of assets do you use for design? Do you use photographs,  illustrations, both, or neither? Are there people in your content? Do you use video and animation? Establish guidelines about what kind of artwork can be used in your content.
   
   Make templates for each type of post on each platform. Design intros and outros. Create posts that are the right size, aspect ratio, and color scheme, with the right fonts and your logo on them already. This way, you or your staff will only have to change the content itself. Have as many elements of your posts as possible ready to go in advance.
   
3. Develop voice guidelines. Think about your brand’s personality, tone, and level of seriousness. If you’re establishing yourself as an expert, and it is important in your field to be grammatically correct and free of spelling errors, your posts should reflect that. Your tone should reflect your profession and your audience. Posts for doctors, mechanics, and bakers should not all sound the same. Additionally, you should think about what kinds of things you want to comment on and what you should avoid commenting on. It’s important for people to know what you stand for, and it’s important to know what your audience stands for (hopefully, these are the same things). Decide in advance what impression you want to make. It’s important to engage and be authentic, but remember that you are posting as your business. Always be mindful of what you’re putting out there. Only use your brand’s voice to speak for your brand.
   
4. Develop frequency guidelines. It’s more important to provide quality content than to churn out content all the time. Still, you need to have some consistency with a schedule so people develop expectations about hearing from you. Develop a schedule you can actually stick to, even if it’s one blog post and three social media posts a week. It’s better to grow from a small presence than to post five times a day for three months, burn out, and disappear for six months. Develop a calendar in advance, but schedule things that make sense for your brand rather than finding anything to fill the calendar. You can find a holiday of some sort for every day of the year, for instance, but do your customers care? Today is Easter, National Unicorn Day, National Gin and Tonic Day, and National Chicken Little Awareness Day. Not all of these matter to your business or your audience.
   
5. Establish a process for approval. This is especially important if you have a whole social media team or you contract out your content creation. Make sure you’re keeping tabs on what your company is putting out there, or that you’re delegating that responsibility to someone you trust. If you’re the only one creating content for your company, you might want to make a rule that you create content in advance and give yourself time to look at it with fresh eyes. Try waiting at least half an hour before responding to anything (especially anything negative) as your brand, so you don’t make emotional posts that you regret.