Tips for Building a Consistent Brand

Brand consistency is one of the most important but undervalued ingredients in building a standout brand. Consistency—in written word, visual assets, and more—helps build trust with customers. When they know what to expect from you and your business, they can let their guard down and you can make more meaningful connections with them. This consistency helps your customers and clients feel confident in their purchases and will establish trust and brand loyalty. Consistency also makes your brand recognizable, helping you build brand awareness and authority in your industry.

But how do you build brand consistency, especially while managing a team and endless creative assets? Here are a few simple ways to wrangle your brand assets so you can tell a consistent (and compelling!) brand story.

Develop Comprehensive Brand Guidelines

Brand guidelines (also called a brand playbook) are the rules that define your brand. These guidelines serve as an "everything you need to know" for your business and give stakeholders, partners, and employees a reference point to help them answer the age-old question, "Is this on brand?"

These guidelines are key for consistency whether you work alone or you have an entire team of marketers publishing content on your behalf. Brand guidelines ensure everyone in your organization is speaking the same language and often include visual rules (color palette, logo do's and don'ts, and typography), as well as foundational elements that paint the story of your company. These elements, like your mission and vision statement, brand positioning statement, and even ideal customer personas, give you a jumping-off point for all your communication so you can consistently use the key phrases that tell your brand story. Brand guidelines can and should evolve as you expand your business, discover new pain points your audience may experience that you need to speak to, and launch new products.

Create Brand Templates and Frameworks

Creating templates not only builds brand consistency but makes creating new content easier and more systematic. While you may be thinking of all the visual templates you can create via tools like Adobe, Figma, and Canva, it's also essential to create written frameworks and outlines that will help you write content while maintaining a consistent voice and tone and drawing attention to your conversion points.

These frameworks will give you a plug-and-play approach to content creation, saving you time and energy.

Some template ideas to get you started:

• Outline for a LinkedIn post
• Call-to-action messages to put at the end of newsletters
• Carousel graphic template to promote recently published articles
• Newsletter outline and image templates

While templates streamline your marketing processes, it's also important to recognize when content may feel repetitive or stale. Set a quarterly reminder to review and refresh templates and treat them as semi-custom—some things can change, others stay the same—to keep things fresh.

Prioritize Organization

When you can quickly find the assets you're looking for, whether it's brand guidelines or blog image templates, you're more likely to remain consistent and stay on track. It can be easy to quickly download files from Canva and leave them in your downloads folder. Take an extra moment to move them to your social media content files so everyone on your team can easily access past information and see what's been done already. Maintain file structure and naming conventions so everyone knows where to look and what to look for within a vast file organization system.

Train Employees and Stakeholders on Brand Standards

Your team is an extension of your brand. To ensure they're accurately representing your business and your offer, make your brand guidelines clear and accessible. When a new employee joins your team, include brand guidelines in their onboarding materials and record a video walkthrough so they understand the nuances of your brand. Newly updated brand guidelines—no matter how big or small the changes—should always be re-distributed to your team and stakeholders so they have the most up-to-date information and can continue to tell a consistent brand story.

Don't have a team? Quiz yourself! Set a monthly calendar reminder to practice your elevator pitch and review your core messages to ensure you're consistently using the same messages to tell your brand story.

Conduct Regular Brand Audits

A brand audit will help your team rally around your brand's purpose, align on creative direction, and give open and honest feedback where it's needed most. By conducting regular brand audits (I recommend annually), you can pinpoint what you want to do more of and what you want to skip altogether. This exercise will also help you identify gaps in your brand and understand where you need to concentrate your efforts in the coming months and years.

Want to Build Brand Consistency

My Brand Intensive program will help you build a clear and consistent brand you and your customers love! This 12-week brand strategy process will help you get off the marketing hamster wheel and identify your best brand opportunities so you can move forward and grow your business.

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