Your branding is a reflection of your business and it is created by both you and your customers. Branding helps tell your story, it draws in your target audience, and helps keep them coming back in the future. It helps build trust, loyalty, and an emotional connection with them. It also helps build trust, loyalty, and pride among your staff.

Consistency and Continuity…

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when it comes to branding is being inconsistent with their marketing. To avoid this, you should hire a professional designer to create a brand style guide. Since a designer might not be in the budget, you should do research to create it yourself. The brand style guide provides consistency and continuity for your marketing campaign. It helps your brand appear professional, trustworthy, and helps your audience differentiate you from your competition. Without consistency and continuity your business appears to be unprofessional, disorganized, and unreliable.

Changing your logo, slogan or motto, and colors often creates a disconnection with your audience and makes your brand less memorable. If you are always changing things around, your audience is not getting the repetition they need recognize your brand. People need to see, hear, and interact with things multiple times for it to stick. If you are doing any of these things you want to reassess your plan and adjust accordingly.

What does consistency and continuity in branding do for you?

Creates a sense of dependability

You start to develop views, thoughts, and expectations of a person as soon as you meet them. This is no different when people encounter businesses. They are less likely to interact with businesses that are all over the place or that send mixed signals. Being consistent reinforces that the business is reputable and can be counted on.

Helps make an emotional connection

Most purchasing decisions are emotional, not practical. In order to make an emotional connection, you need to build trust. You cannot build trust if you are constantly changing things. People like predictability, that’s why they buy and stick to certain brands.

Takes your marketing to the next level

Over time with consistent branding, you can turn first time customers into recurring parts of your business. It can also help you to go from convincing people to purchase from you to having them plan their next purchase from you by just seeing your logo. This cannot happen if your branding is all over the place though. Pick a lane and stay in it. It’s okay if you need to make small adjustments along the way, just make sure they reflect your brand.

Category: Advanced Tactics, Integrating with Traditional Marketing, Social Media Marketing 101