Find and Fix Brand Inconsistencies
Five Ways You Can Improve Any Potential Brand Inconsistencies
Most marketers and brand strategists understand the dangers of brand inconsistencies: without a well-defined logo, color scheme, and brand voice, your brand won’t stand out in consumers’ minds. And if consumers can’t remember your brand, you won’t have a chance against competitors.
While brands are constantly trying to uphold a strong visual image, the internet is always on the watch uncovering small inconsistencies (many of which reside in the most unexpected places.)
To make sure that you’re covering all the bases, here are six potential places where brand inconsistencies tend to hide — from the depths of your product descriptions to that email you’re about to send.
- Tone and Style of Writing
From email to blog posts, you want every piece of content you publish to reflect your company culture and ideals. A consistent brand voice makes this possible.
Whether your content team is small or large, you’re inevitably going to end up with different writing styles. Having a range of voices is a good way to keep your audience interested, but there’s a fine line between an interesting variation and writing that’s inconsistent. When the tone of voice or the writing style goes from one extreme to the other your readers will be confused about the message you’re trying to send.
Try to make sure everyone is on the same page with what message your company is trying to send to their audience. One way to achieve this harmony is to create a detailed content style guide. This guide can include information such as what types of stock photos to use, whether or not to use oxford commas, and what language to avoid.
- Search Engine Results
If you need information, fast, where do you typically go to get it?
We’re going to take a gamble and say that your answer was Google. People looking for information about your brand probably have the same train of thought. After all, Google is seen as a trusted method for finding information.
Make sure that your brand is up to date with the your newest logos, titles, photos, etc. Google will pull up anything that is under your brand name, so make sure it’s the things you want to see. SEO is a huge part of keeping your brand on Google’s pages. Set-up a Google Adwords/Keywords account to keep track of your SEO and other marketing strategies. You can also look into HubSpot which is a great resource for keeping all your files in one place.
- Product Descriptions
Product descriptions are designed to do one thing well: sell the merchandise. Consequently, they sometimes ring false because the branding and voice are different from what the consumer seeks on your blog or in your emails.
Before you write product descriptions, read some of your other content to re-familiarize yourself with your brand voice. Keep that voice in your head as you craft your descriptions, staying true to the tone and inflection you have developed elsewhere.
- Social Media
Most likely, your brand has an official Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. But, with so many options for marketing your brand on social media, it’s hard not to feel pressured to have a presence on all of them. However, trying to tackle all of these platforms is difficult — can you really maintain and post regularly on all of these sites? If you can, you might have an employee that focuses social media marketing, which is great, but if you don’t it can be a daunting task with all the other things you have to manage on a daily basis.
The best way to stay consistent on social media is to choose a few platforms that make sense for your audience and your product — then master them. Delete the profiles that you don’t use and make sure to keep an eye on how much you are posting on them. If someone adds you on Twitter, they might re-consider if they noticed you haven’t published a tweet since 2014. This wouldn’t make a very good impression so it might be a good idea to either delete the platform or to give it more attention.
- Reviews / Ratings
Since product review sites are regulated by people who usually know nothing about your brand, they often portray the wrong information. Whether your business has the wrong location, or is missing a proper company description, review sites can be a huge source of concern for potential customers.
First, reach out to these sites and do whatever you can to correct your brand’s information. Another way to boost your presence on review sites is to reach out to your best customers and ask them to leave a review (if they haven’t already). This will help filter out the not-so-positive reviews, so people visiting these sites understand both what your brand is about, and what people honestly think of it.
We hope you’ll consider these tips and try to implement them for your brand. These are simple ways that you can boost your brand name and appeal to more customers.
Source: HubSpot
