The value of a strong brand is well known in business, but developing a consistent brand identity can be challenging. You want to portray a consistent message with all your communications, and to do this, you’ve got to be very focused on your brand identity.
These five steps can help make sure your communications exemplify your brand and that you’re portraying a consistent picture to your customers.
Know Your Values
If you’re looking to define your brand, then a perfect place to start is with your company values. What does your brand stand for? What is its purpose?
The great branding you’re looking for generally comes from the inside. Of course, you need to learn how to cultivate it and portray it effectively, but your brand already has character; it’s just about encapsulating it.
Look at your mission, and let it guide your brand identity.
Develop Your Brand Voice
The words you use matter. Whether it’s sending an email, creating content, posting on social media, or any other interaction, people judge your brand by the voice you use.
Defining your voice is a step you should take early on in branding, so do some brainstorming and write a few ideas down. Think about the key characteristics that should define your voice (e.g., techy, relaxed, enthusiastic) and write them down.
Once you understand how you want your brand voice to sound, then it’s all about being consistent with it.
Create Clear Content Guidelines
Defining your brand voice is one thing, but consistently implementing it is much harder.
Your brand engages with people in so many different ways, on lots of different platforms, and it’s important it retains the same characteristics throughout. To achieve this, you have to have good content guidelines and make sure people keep them in mind whenever they create content.
This will make your content creation much easier and allow creators to immediately tap into your voice.
Collaborate as a Team
Big brands will have lots of people working on their marketing. This makes it much more challenging to produce one consistent brand voice.
To expand your output, you need to have multiple people working on your messaging, but it’s important there’s a high level of collaboration. Apps like this slack competitor can enable your teams to work more closely and really make sure they’re producing a consistent brand voice.
You might be lots of people, but you’re one brand, so you’ve got to work together closely.
Share Your Work
Your brand wants to be everywhere your target audience hangs out.
To do this, you’ve got to be growing your reach across different platforms and sharing your work. You put a lot of effort into each piece of content you create, so make sure you’re sharing it as much as possible.
You never know where you might find your next customer, so don’t be afraid to grow your brand through lots of different platforms.