Keeping All of Your Marketing Efforts Consistent With Your Brand

By Ben Allen, Guest Contributor

A successful marketing plan is made up of a variety of tactics. This can range from running a blog, or a pay per click ad campaign, to traditional advertising, or email strategies. It’s easy to lose focus on every single one of them while they run all at the same time with varying degrees of success. ​So how do you keep it together? ⤺ Tweet This!

It’s essential though that you keep your marketing efforts consistent with each other and your branding. Losing sight of this can confuse your consumers and lose customers in the sales process. To ensure your marketing tactics all align with each other and are extremely effective, here are some tools to use.

Starting on Brand

Your brand is basically the identity and personality of your business. Everything from your employees, website, marketing, logo and name contributes to your brand. A strong brand is consistent with a single message they want their consumers to understand and feel. All of your marketing efforts need to be in line with the central message you want people to take away from your business.  

The first step to staying on brand is to identify the purpose of your brand. In other words, what do you want consumers to think about when they think of your business? Typically, this should be focused on what makes your products or business special and unique, like your customer service or providing luxury products.

Then, your marketing all needs to align with that brand. Everything about your website needs to scream your branding, and other digital marketing efforts need to support it. If something doesn’t match your brand, it needs to be fixed.

Staying on Point Across Different Platforms

You can never know what device consumers will be using when they come across your marketing, but you need to prepare for every eventuality. Consumer behave very differently on mobile devices versus computers, and your marketing needs to reflect that.

Cross device marketing is essential to ensuring a consistent message no matter what device consumers are using. That doesn’t mean they need to be identical, in fact, you want to target your mobile user differently from computer users. Look at your data and identify behaviors on each platform and build tactics off of them. Typically, mobile users look for quick and easy to digest bits of information while computer users respond better to more in depth articles and videos. Capitalize on the trends you find to make experiences between the two as smooth and effective as possible.

Consistent Voice On Social Media

Along with your website, your social media is some of your most visible marketing. It’s also incredibly easy to feel like you need to separate your typically branding efforts from you social media so that you are more “friendly.” This can only lead to confusion, especially with long term customers and promoters. A consistent persona is important for your overall branding.

A strong social media campaign is made up of connecting, entertaining, informing and educating content. It’s possible to do all of these things, be personable/friendly, and stay on brand, it just requires having good guidelines and strong understanding by the people running the accounts. People shouldn’t be able to tell that multiple people run the account because all they see is the brand and persona of the business. To do this, users need to follow a style guide and all write in the same voice. If they each plan different posts, they should all work together and not feel disjointed.

Another trial is staying consistent across different platforms. Each one interacts with people differently and has different strengths and weaknesses. While capitalizing on each platform, you still need to keep your brand and voice the same so when people switch between accounts, they know exactly who you are. This doesn’t mean you should post the exact same thing on every platform, in fact that’s a bad practice to get into. Each should be unique for each platform, but should clearly be your business.

Email and Customer Support

How you interact with consumers on an individual basis should be in line with everything else too. Whether you are running a massive email campaign, talking with a lead one on one, or helping with customer support, it needs to match the business.

Every interaction a customer has should feel like they are talking to both the company directly and an individual person. That way, they feel like they are getting the special attention of a specific person and they feel comfortable interacting with them because it’s what they are used to from the company.

All employees who interact with the public at all need to understand the company voice and branding. This emphasis can establish a strong presence in the business world and build a reputation. If you are an entertainment company, every part of doing business with you should be entertaining. Companies like Netflix are great examples of this, with friendly and fun to talk to customer support. Having the branding in these interactions shows employees who believe in the product and the company’s culture.

Making your marketing efforts consistent across the whole business will make it stand out from the competition and lead you to more success. Not only will it make it easier for consumers to identify you, but will create highly satisfied customers who will boost your profits. It simply requires a diligent eye and a focus on the purpose and brand of your business.

Ben Allen is a freelance content creator and marketer who focuses on staying on the cutting edge of technology and marketing. He also writes about small businesses, leadership, and occasionally geeks out. You can read more of his writing by following him on Twitter:@allen24ben.