To strengthen your brand recognition and increase consumer confidence, we created a brand consistency checklist to help you make improvements.

Companies large and small have challenges maintaining brand consistency. Bigger companies may have more resources, but more possibilities for oversight. Smaller companies often lack the resources and expertise to get the job done. Regardless of your job title, you can play an integral role in improving your company’s brand consistency.

Below we examine why brand consistency is so important, the mistakes companies often make and how to fix them.

Why Is Brand Consistency So Important?

Brand consistency is essential for your company’s reputation and for maintaining a professional image. Even for executives with strong personal brands, closing deals can be harder when company branding is off. The image of the company created by its website, marketing, social media and team can have a significant impact on buying decisions.

Benefits of Brand Consistency:

1. Brand Trust. Consistent brands are reliable. They communicate a clear purpose to their customers, creating positive associations with the brand.
2. Increased Revenue. Customers buy from brands they know and trust. Marketing research has shown that brand consistency can increase revenue by up to 23%.
3. Brand Awareness. Consistency (and a bit of witty marketing) makes your brand stand out! Repetition breeds recognition.
4. Improved Brand Experience. With brand consistency, customers can easily identify your brand and know what to expect, no matter where they are interacting with it.
5. Customer Loyalty. Brand consistency makes it easier for customers to remember your brand when they’re ready to make another purchase or need to make a recommendation to a friend.

Branding Mistakes That Companies Often Make

If your company has made one of these mistakes, you’re not alone!

• Failing to define brand strategy clearly
• Not evaluating competitors’ brands
• Forgetting about employee impact
• Focusing more on visual brand elements and not enough on messaging
• Being inconsistent across different platforms

Successful brands have a clear purpose in mind with their messaging. They know their target audience well and have taken the time to research their competitors. They coach their employees and brand advocates on how to communicate about the brand. By creating a strong brand identity, they can reach audiences in unique ways. Importantly, they also know when it’s time to let go of branding techniques that aren’t working.

Brand Consistency Checklist

Perhaps the single most important branding mistake that companies make is failing to be consistent across different platforms. To help keep your company on track, here is a brand consistency checklist:

1. Define Clear Brand Guidelines

These should encompass visual and contextual rules for your brand. This includes visual identity – things like fonts, color palettes, and document templates – as well as contextual elements like tone and formatting.

2. Create Social Media Guidelines

These guidelines should include brand voice, brand-appropriate images, and etiquette tips for when they are communicating about the company on social channels.

3. Centrally Locate Brand Resources

Once you’ve got a strong set of guidelines and supporting documents, store them in a place that’s easily accessible for your entire time and share them in a way that they can easily find and implement them.

4. Assess Messaging Across Channels

• Website. Evaluate content on your website to ensure the brand messaging is current and consistent.
• Social media. Make sure your social media page descriptions are up to date. This is especially important for LinkedIn, where your company receives traffic from potential customers, employees and competitors.
• Partner marketing. Inform strategic partners of any changes to brand messaging. Send them updated language (such as a new company description) so they can include it when interacting with their customers.
• Promotional and sales materials. Don’t forget about print media (brochures, flyers, etc.) and slide decks or demos. The sales team should be fully abreast of new brand messaging and have the resources to support their conversations.

5. Coach Your Employees on How to Implement Brand Consistency

Your employees are the front line of your business. Spend time training them on brand messaging and guidelines and explain why following them is so important. Help them understand that they can put business at risk if they don’t follow them. Employee branding has a significant impact on building brand awareness and trust, so encourage employees to be brand advocates. Give them reasons to get excited!

6. Share Plug & Play Messaging with Your Team

To ensure cohesion and keep things simple for your whole team, share various forms of brand messaging with them that are ready for quick use. Include helpful content they can include in emails, on social media posts or in presentations.

7. Be Diligent with Cleanups

When updates are made, remove old templates and documentation from your shared files so as not to confuse your team. This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s often a cause of poor brand consistency! Be sure to communicate any changes to your branding to your team.

Position Your Brand for Success

Creating brand consistency positions your company as a trusted industry leader. Educating employees on the importance of it and encouraging employee advocacy further strengthens your brand. For executives with many other priorities, making time to audit and improve brand messaging for greater consistency isn’t always possible. If the brand consistency checklist isn’t enough, bringing on a consulting firm can be beneficial.

Point Road Group helps companies attract customers and drive revenue by strengthening brand trust and credibility. We achieve it through company messaging, LinkedIn optimization and employee branding. To learn more about our corporate branding services, contact us.