Consistency is key

By Liniar’s Simone Sangha.

This month I’m focusing on a more traditional but still highly relevant topic: consistency within your marketing strategy.

Brand consistency is effectively your company voice, so ensuring this is suitable is key to speaking to your target audience.

I will be discussing three main points to consider, ensuring your brand aligns with your message, and that your message stays consistent. Remember, it’s not just about what a company does, but who it is that makes it a brand.

Tone of voice. The tone of voice can be best described as the voice in which you use to represent and express your brand; ultimately the voice of your business. This usually needs to be adapted depending on the platform you use, for example posting on LinkedIn should be much more formal than Twitter. However, the message still needs to consistent, so planning ahead makes all the difference.

A consistent tone of voice can help develop a healthier image of the brand, creating a sense of loyalty, reliability and credibility in the long term.

Communication. Who better to advocate your brand than people working for that brand; communication needs to be consistent both internally and externally to really maintain that same message.

This requires more than just using your logo on internal documents but an attempt to cultivate a brand voice into the company culture and have a brand promise that resonates with the rest of the senior team. This message can then be drip-fed through the business.

Employees should be brand ambassadors too.

Branding. Creating guidelines to guarantee consistency through your branding is imperative for most large and medium-sized businesses. These guidelines not only aid us marketers but can assist other departments too. I mentioned codification in the last column, and this is a great way to ensure your whole company sings from the same hymn sheet.

I’d recommend setting up a document with your brand guidelines if you haven’t already, mentioning elements such as key colours to use, your logo and some dos and don’ts as a starting point.

Tip. Creating a communication plan can help better align your message across different platforms and makes scheduling emails, social media and other jobs much more efficient.

We use Trello here at Liniar and it’s a great way to use the whole team’s best ideas and collaborate in a much more consistent way.