Brand Consistency: Why It Matters and How to Get It

As we head into the holiday season and new year, our wish for you is to experience more success and satisfaction from your business than ever before.

As you start thinking about your business goals for the year ahead, it’s a great time to take a fresh look at your brand and consider whether it’s helping create that success for you. As you do, don’t forget to think about one very important factor that a lot of businesses overlook: brand consistency. Brand consistency means that your business shows up the same way anywhere your potential clients or customers encounter you.

Consistency is a key part of our branding approach at DesignGood. We believe that your brand must align with who you authentically are and speak directly to a specific audience in order to draw in the people, projects and opportunities you desire. To do that, all parts of your brand must work together seamlessly. 

So how does a consistent brand help your business? And how can you ensure brand consistency?

The Benefits of Brand Consistency

To understand why it’s important to have a consistent brand, it helps to remember the role of a brand in the first place. The clients or customers you want to work with have a lot of choices. Your brand shows them why your business is the one best able to fill their needs or meet their goals.

When someone is learning about your business, brand consistency makes it easier for them to find out the important things they need to know to decide whether you are a fit for them: 

First, your audience needs to see that you are trustworthy. We’ve all made purchases we regret, and it’s not a great feeling. Your potential customers or clients want to feel safe making the investment that’s required to buy from you or work with you. Brand consistency helps them feel confident in you. When your brand looks and sounds consistent, that exudes professionalism. Inconsistency, on the other hand, sends a message that you are not detail-oriented. Think about it: What judgments would you make about a business that looks totally different on its website vs. its social channels?

Consistent brands also create clarity. The whole point of your brand is to make a connection with your desired audience. You don’t have a lot of time to make this connection. So anytime your brand fails to communicate your key messages and strengths, that’s a missed opportunity. If you give your prospects a brochure that describes what you do differently than your website does, that makes it harder for them to get to know what you’re really about. We’re all super busy and distracted these days. Think about all the information you encounter during a single day – and how little of it you actually retain. When your brand is consistent, it’s more likely to stick with your desired audience and ensure that they think of you when they need the products or services you offer. 

Finally, consistent brands are energetically powerful. Have you ever manifested something in your personal life by creating a vision board? Your brand is the vision board for what you want your business to be. The more consistent your brand is, the more effectively it calls in everything you desire for your business.

How to Create Brand Consistency

To create brand consistency, you may need to shift how you think about your business’s brand. A brand is not a single thing. Instead, it’s what your desired audience thinks and feels about your business at every point of interaction.

That means you really have to think big picture when it comes to your brand. Too many entrepreneurs mistakenly assume that if they hire someone to create a cool logo, then their branding is taken care of.

But no matter how good-looking that logo is, it won’t do much for your business unless it’s part of a thoughtful and connected total experience for your clients or customers. We believe this so strongly at DesignGood that we don’t accept one-off projects like designing or redesigning a business’s logo. Instead, we create logos and other branding materials only as parts of packages. That way, we can make sure that all aspects of a brand work well together and that they reflect what really makes your business unique.

Here are a few more of our best practices for creating consistent brands.

• For your brand to consistently convey the right messages, you first have to decide what those messages are. So document the key facts about your business before you even start exploring branding work. Who is the audience your business serves? How do you make their lives better? What makes you so good at helping your audience? What’s special about the experience of working with you?
  

• Ensure that your branding is present wherever your audience encounters you. If, for example, you tend to get a lot of leads through Instagram, don’t spend all of your budget on your website and leave none for making your social feeds stand out.
  

• Budget for consistency. Quality should be consistent across all aspects of your brand. You undermine the credibility of your beautifully designed website if it’s filled with typos and blurry or stock photos.
  

• Build relationships with branding experts you trust. If you hire one freelancer to design your site, another to write it, another to program it and then someone else to design your business cards or sales materials, it’s challenging to get everyone on the same page and, as a result, your brand will likely feel fragmented. You are more likely to achieve consistency if you work with the same team to create all aspects of your brand.

The best way to see the power of consistent branding is to check out the brands we’ve created for DesignGood clients. No matter what our clients do, you’ll notice that all aspects of their brands come together to help you quickly understand what they’re all about. We’d love to do the same for your business. Through our proven process, we help you identify your passions, your unique strengths and the audience you feel called to serve. And we make sure all of those things infuse your brand with memorable energy. To learn more, schedule a chat with me now.