However, you cannot call yourself a brand if you
don't have consistency in your branding strategy. Consistency determines the flow of your branding strategy. Consistently presented brands have
3.5 times higher brand visibility than those who have inconsistent branding strategies. So, the success of your efforts is determined by how well you approach brand consistency.
What is brand consistency?
This notion describes the pattern of actions that you take to affect the way that consumers think about your brand. So, let's say you want to bring your business closer to the consumers. One of the steps in your branding strategy, therefore, could be doing Q&As via social media.
Valeria Lipovetsky, a model and an entrepreneur from Canada, often employs this strategy and posts Q&As on her Instagram Stories:
As a result, brand consistency is achieved through many channels that complement each other: content, design and marketing strategies. The branding strategy of your business should
represent your brand's voice and values. To achieve this, you need to consistently follow through with steps that shape the values of your business into a message that defines your brand.
Here are three ways to develop a branding strategy for your business with branding consistency in mind:
1. Research your target audience
As with any marketing strategy, developing your brand starts with researching your target audience. If you already have a strong online presence — especially on social media — demographic data shared by your audience will help bring consistency to your branding strategy.
This demographic data, however, doesn't only include information on gender, age, location and language. On LinkedIn, for instance, you can also view the primary job function of your target audience:
You can also view the seniority of their job position:
Additionally, you can view the company size:
If you decide to place your brand on Instagram, business accounts can also receive social data on how and when your audience interacts with your content.
You may be asking why you can’t just target
everybody for your branding strategy. With such an approach, you risk receiving
no attention whatsoever. Even with viral marketing, when you seemingly target audiences wider than your initial following base, your primary audience is the one who will start spreading your message.
So, researching your target audience, their demographics and their content preferences would be the first step in developing a consistent branding strategy for your business.
2. Find content that resonates most with your audience
Regarding content preferences, building a content strategy that will represent your brand also depends on social data provided by your audience. Before you start developing content for your brand strategy, study the types of content that you already introduced to your audience and find the ones that performed the best.
Here's how you can check the performance of your content on Facebook, for instance:
Reach and engagement on the image above specify organic/paid outreach, post clicks, 'Likes', comments and shares. Look for organic reach to create a content plan for your branding strategy; organic reach will deliver the most consistent results in your branding efforts.
This way, you can also determine the
types of content that would perform best to create your brand image. To do it, you can also try social listening techniques and survey your audience directly to get their opinion on what content would do best to represent the values of your brand.
3. Maintain consistency by planning your activity
Maintaining a branding strategy is where many brands lose consistency. To keep your branding strategy from losing its initial intent, you need to create a content and outreach plan that determines your branding strategy for the foreseeable future.
To create this plan, you can reach out and find the best
writing service, which can not only help you develop this plan but to also create content. Alternatively, you can also develop this plan yourself.
*Image courtesy of Pixabay