Like the theme tunes to our favorite shows, brand consistency is the most memorable aspect of a business. As well as helping companies to stand apart, a consistent message can help to create trusting relationships as well as smooth new leads. Yet, as the need to spread brand messages expands to multiple marketing platforms, saying the same thing across them all is becoming increasingly challenging.

This can create a real sense of disconnect that, as well as sending mixed marketing messages, can pose significant problems for getting customers to convert in the first place. The question is, how can you overcome the risks of mixed messages to finally patch the holes in your brand consistency for good?

Write Better Brand Guidelines

When you have multiple people working on wider marketing strategies, it’s vital that you make sure they’re all singing from the same hymn sheet. Brand guidelines help you do precisely that, providing a go-to resource that helps you to keep brand consistency within easy reach at all times by considering crucial factors of branding such as:

• Logo design
• Color palette
• Typography
• Voice and tone
• And more

By ensuring that every member of your marketing team can access and easily interpret what those brand guidelines entail, you bring consistency within far easier reach despite even remote, or expansive, marketing teams. Admittedly, creating brand guidelines can be a lengthy and involved process but, once they’re in place, they can save you significant time having to chase up rogue marketing focuses or the leads you’ve lost as a result.

Stay Consistent In Your Delegations

If you delegate social media management to one member of your marketing team on Monday, but someone entirely different on Tuesday, then is it any surprise that your brand voice is a little unpredictable? Even when working within the same guidelines, the simple fact is that everyone has a very different take on what good looks like. By making sure to delegate the same tasks to the same members of your marketing team each day, you can at least ensure a more consistent application of your brand guidelines within specific platforms which, when taken as a comprehensive whole, should enable the broader consistency you’ve been working towards. This, along with the specialist knowledge that consistent delegation offers, can better position a marketing team that understands not only what they need to say, but how to get more followers on Instagram, Twitter, etc., and also how to ensure loyal conversions as their audiences grow. This is the pulling power of consistency, but it’ll never be possible if your delegations are more patchy than your grandma’s latest knitting project.

Centralize Your Marketing Assets

Along the same vein, marketing assets that are stored and distributed in a silo are never going to achieve the comprehensive approach that you rely on. Hence why you also need to centralize your marketing assets and ensure that the relevant individuals are always able to access those key materials. Keeping logos, pre-designed templates, and press releases/marketing announcements in one simple-to-access file is the best way to do this, but success here relies on more than just a master marketing file that you email to each member of the team. Instead, you need to find ways to manage, and centralize, your marketing materials in real-time for adaptive, permission-focused access where relevant. Cloud-based platforms are the best ways to achieve this goal, but marketing asset management tools based in the cloud take these benefits one step further, ensuring secure sign-ins and centralized dashboards that enable you to provide in-the-moment marketing updates that keep your team in the know and consistent as a result.

Allow For Customizable Templates

While you want your marketing team to sing from the same hymn sheet, it’s essential to remember that a good song relies on harmonies and different tones. In this respect, consistent branding needs more than just a stable baritone. Instead, your team needs the ability to sing the same song at different pitches depending on everything from location to platform and even different target audiences. Customizable templates are the best way to balance this compromise, ensuring branding that forever fits nicely within the guidelines that you’ve set out while leaving room for the personalization that 73% of consumers continue to favor.

As marketing platforms continue to proliferate, consistent branding becomes more crucial to success than ever. Are you ready to cut a straight line down the middle of your mixed marketing messages?