Consistent brand messaging is crucial for effectively reaching your audience, building consumer relationships, developing brand recognition and fulfilling a brand strategy. Monitoring messaging efforts, using audience-specific content, creating brand strategy and implementing a content calendar will help your company achieve complete consistency. Are you looking for ways to keep messaging consistent in your company? Below are the Do’s and Dont’s for brand messaging and how to strategically utilize efforts to your advantage.
Do: Monitor messaging efforts and brand voice.
Don’t: Allow your messaging to become overwhelming.
When your brand messaging is everywhere, it becomes overwhelming and could hurt your brand. Your audience may see your message too often or your message may deliver the wrong meaning. Over-emphasized brand messaging is common for smaller, but quickly expanding companies and large companies where it’s easy to lose track of quality assurance. Messaging efforts can be lost as new team members are added or as brand direction changes. Media platforms often have different controllers where brand voice becomes inconsistent. Inconsistency makes ads appear unrelated or unsupported by your brand.
Do: Craft audience-specific content for each marketing channel.
Don’t: Forget brand voice and messaging in those different platforms.
Inconsistency alters consumer connections and makes it hard to build relationships with your brand. Companies are 20 percent more successful with strong and consistent branding, according to a study by McKinsey & Company. This also proves that inconsistencies create a challenge for developing brand recognition in multi-channel marketing. Messages are crafted differently for each platform, which is where brand consistency through multiple channels can be tricky. It’s important to implement the correct message for the specific audience of each platform, while remaining consistent with brand messaging. For example, an email newsletter, a website blog, an Instagram post or an online ad, will all have different messaging, targeting a specific audience with a definite goal, yet still have a consistent voice and message.
Do: Create a strategy through purpose, emotion and consistency.
Don’t: Think that branding only occurs through products, logos or colors.
Consistent and effective branding starts with a strategic plan. Brand Strategy lays out the entire plan from beginning to end for promoting a brand and idea, including individual tactics and goals along the way. A brand is not only a company product, logo or colors, and instead represents what distinguishes your value from the rest. Effective brand strategy comes through purpose, emotion and, you guessed it– consistency. Differentiate yourself from competitors with your purpose, evoke emotion and make a connection to your audience, then create a style guide for remaining consistent with your brand.
Don’t: Build gaps in the content schedule that make a strategy ineffective.
Creating a content calendar is the best way to remain consistent across all platforms. Providing a visual timeline of content helps to catch inconsistency gaps while seeing all platforms at once. For a large company with a team of content creators, a content calendar is highly effective for keeping all members in line for consistency. Use a content calendar tool to schedule, manage, integrate and execute all content to various outlets, while implementing communication tools for ultimate team collaboration.
Chris Gomersall is CEO and founder of cloud marketing calendar ATOMIZED.