Your products and/or services alone will not secure your longevity in business. However, your brand will. This is why it’s important to maintain brand consistency, especially in a world where there is a whole lot of noise to contend with.
You want to be able to offer your target audience a unified experience, no matter the channel or whether it is online or offline. A strong and consistent brand allows you to stand out amongst the noise and aids your target audience’s purchasing decisions.
“Your products and/or services alone will not secure your longevity in business. However, your brand will.” – Alex Strologo
Maintain Brand Consistency
Now, with your brand front of mind, I will cover some valuable tips for maintaining a consistent brand identity. Whether you are establishing your brand or already have one, each tip provides valuable insight and direction for further optimisation. Furthermore, I give some personal suggestions, where I have identified a best practice. Remember, no two brands are the same, you want to be consistent, at the same time, authentic.
1. Brand Guidelines
This is a crucial starting point for individuals and businesses. Brand guidelines are a series of documents that provide details about your way of doing things. They make the execution of tasks a whole lot easier. Just imagine how you would convey your brand to a future employee or outsider, a guideline makes that easy.
Your guidelines should cover everything your brand is and stands for. This includes, but is not limited to, how your creative assets will be created and used and your message and tone. Your brand guidelines’ main point is to ensure overall consistency, so include anything you want to be consistent.
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2. Creative Assets
This is a big one for me personally, as I do my best work when I am organised. So, what does it mean to organise your creative assets? Put simply, how you structure your content library. This will be different for every brand. In my case, I keep everything offline and organised by the channel, content type and individual post.
For businesses, I recommend using a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS allows for the streamlined distribution of creative assets, to which each department has access. Bear in mind, that a CMS, generally speaking, is a tool for managing websites. However, beyond that, they are a great solution for the organisation and distribution of creative assets.