What Is Brand Consistency and Why Is It Important for Content Marketing?

When you go grocery shopping, you select specific brands and items because you know what they taste like or how they pair with your meals. You would be very disappointed if one day you bought your favorite nacho cheese dip and it tasted much spicier than usual. It might even be enough to put you off that brand and encourage you to try a different one.

Consistency is key to loyalty. Without being someone customers can rely on, recognize, and easily discover, you will have trouble maintaining customers.

Learn the secret behind brand consistency in content marketing and five tips to help you improve your brand consistency.

What Is Brand Consistency?

Brand consistency is creating a recognizable and predictable brand. Brand consistency runs deeper than your products. It’s about creating consistency in every interaction and publication. No matter what you do or sell, it should all relate to the brand image you are trying to build.

In content marketing, brand consistency includes:

• Consistent images
• Consistent content
• Consistent video

More importantly, brand consistency is creating a personality for your brand. Just like your fashion choices, hobbies, and food help define you, your imagery and content will represent your brand. If you want a definition your customers can see and relate to, you must invest in brand consistency.

Brand Consistency Examples

You will become more than a brand name if you have a consistent brand. Think about the last time a friend described a brand in a way other than the name. For instance, if someone asked if you wanted to grab dinner at “The Golden Arches,” you would know they were talking about McDonald’s. If someone told you to “Just Do It,” you would instantly think of Nike.

For some brands, like Starbucks, you just need to mention the product and they will be the first name that pops into your head.

Below, you will see how Google uses color to create brand consistency, so no matter which app people use, they still have that tie back to Google.

HubSpot’s resource center shows how consistent branding on your website helps unify your posts. Even though they cover a wide range of topics, they connect all their posts. The posts have similar writing styles and imagery. Just look at those post headers. Each has the same fun image style and orange color palette, giving the entire resource page a cohesive feel.

Why Is Brand Consistency Important?

Branding consistency builds a personality around your brand. Interacting with branded content feels similar to buying name-brand food versus eating generic store-brand food. It is familiar and often better quality.

Here are four of the top benefits of building a consistent brand.

Increases Trust

People are more likely to trust you when you are familiar and predictable.

Next time you go to Starbucks, look at the side of their cups. The baristas use lines on those cups as guides so they know precisely how much ice, coffee, and milk to add. In addition, they have consistent recipes for how much sweetener or shots of espresso to add to drinks. Because of those guides, you can always expect a similarly flavored drink.

Imagine if, one day, the baristas decided to measure with their heart rather than those guides. You would never know whether your drink will be sweet or bitter. Eventually, you will lose trust in the coffee shop and go somewhere where you can predict the flavor of your beverage.

By being a consistent brand through consistent content marketing, your audience and customers know what to expect and trust you because of that consistency.

Builds Relationships

Would you buy a product from a good friend’s business or a stranger’s business halfway across the country?

Building relationships with your customers transforms your business into a trusted advisor. Your clients are more likely to turn to you for advice and products. That relationship comes from being someone your customers can get to know.

As a brand, you should keep your personality and appearance the same across your content so your customers can recognize you and become comfortable with your brand, like a friend. This helps your audience connect with you.

Encourages Loyalty

Loyalty is the natural outcome of building trust and relationships. When someone trusts you and feels connected to you as a friend, they are likelier to remain loyal to you. 

About 72% of customers are loyal to one or more brands. There is comfort in reliability and predictability. When customers find a brand they can connect with or like the products, they will remain loyal.

Establishes a Recognizable Brand

We touched on this point earlier when discussing how easy it is to recognize Google’s apps. Building a consistent brand means more people recognize you across different platforms or even if you have other tools and products.

Apple computers are so recognizable that animated movies will feature an Apple laptop, but switch out the logo with any other design, and viewers still know what brand it’s supposed to be.

You can build brand recognition through consistent colors, design, speaking style, and logos. Not only will customers be able to find you easier, but you will also stand out among your competitors.

5 Ways to Improve Your Brand Consistency in Content Marketing

Follow these five tips to unify your brand and create more consistent content.

1. Unify Your Imagery

Brand consistency largely depends on what your content looks like. This includes:

• Colors
• Fonts
• Styles
• Formatting

Here’s a look at two major chocolate companies: Hershey and Ghirardelli.

 

 

You’ll first notice they both promote chocolate, yet they look entirely different. Hershey uses bright, fun colors and thick, bold text. All their imagery and colors reflect their brand and ideal audience.

Ghirardelli has a more luxurious theme. The colors are natural browns, greens, and blues. This reflects their regular customers.

Choose imagery for your social media, blog post images, and email templates that reflect your audience and who you want to be. Then, stick with those colors and fonts to help your content become recognizable. Using logos can help with brand consistency, but you should be able to recognize your brand even if you don’t have a logo on your post.

2. Stick to the Same Writing Style

Several notable music artists suddenly switched styles, losing a large portion of their fan base. For example, the country star Garth Brooks created a rock persona, Chris Gaines, to explore different genres. That persona soon disappeared after it never gained traction. 

Your audience gets to know your content style. When you switch your writing style, especially if it’s a drastic change, you will lose readers.

To keep your current readers and followers engaged, stick with the style they are familiar with and use it as a guide for all content. 

Here are a few style guides to keep in mind:

• Are you formal or informal?
• How educational is your content?
• How much humor do you usually incorporate?
• Do you have a tell-tale hobby or interest you regularly reference in your content?

You will also want to consider grammar nuances. For instance, if you use contractions, stick with contractions. If you use sentence case in headings, keep sentence case for all your headings. If you use a standard phrase for your products, keep with that phrase.

3. Maintain a Consistent Schedule

Maintaining a relationship with someone who randomly disappears for long periods is challenging. Will they reply to your message tomorrow? Or next month? You don’t know.

Your customers would also like consistency in their brands. Creating a consistent publishing schedule for blog posts, social media, and emails you send helps develop a schedule your customers can count on. For most content creators, that schedule includes weekly blog posts, but the schedule will vary for each brand, your ideal audience, and your niche.

You will also want to set up a consistent response workflow. This may require automating emails that customers receive after completing specific actions. This consistency throughout the nurturing and purchasing process maintains trust and encourages greater loyalty because you become someone they can depend on.

4. Unify Your Communication Channels

Content marketing spans several channels, including websites, social media, and emails. Here is where brand consistency becomes a little more complicated.

The audience you have reading emails will most likely be different than your social media audience. Then, you have blog readers looking for something drastically different than the customers scrolling Instagram.

You want to create unique content for your audience on each platform. However, you also don’t want each platform to look, feel, and sound like entirely different brands.

Find ways to keep your content consistent across channels without copying content exactly on each channel. For instance, keeping the same fonts and colors on all platforms will connect the content, even if what you promote or discuss varies for each audience.

5. Create Brand Guidelines

To maintain consistent branding across channels and teams, create branding guidelines. This is a slide set or eBook that outlines each of those items we walked through, such as your:

• Colors
• Fonts
• Imagery
• Writing style
• Ideal audience
• Unique selling point

When you put all these elements on paper, you can unify your brand, even when several teams collaborate or work with freelancers. 

Brand guidelines act like a recipe book. If you asked everyone on your team to make chocolate chip cookies, you would probably receive a dozen variations. However, if you gave everyone the same recipe and asked them to make cookies, you would have a greater chance of all the cookies tasting the same. 

Your content guidelines act the same way, unifying everything from how content looks to small grammatical rules to keep everything unified and consistent across platforms.

At Express Writers, we frequently receive brand guidelines from clients. These help our writers write content that aligns with your brand and resonates with clients.

Create More Brand Consistency in Your Content Marketing

Working with content creators who understand your brand is a pivotal element to brand consistency.

Express Writers has a team of trained and knowledgeable subject-matter experts who can get to know your brand and audience. When you order authority content, you can choose the same writers for each project to help maintain brand consistency for all your email, blog, and social content.

Explore our content shop for the blog plan that best matches your content needs.