030116_blogpostBrand consistency is crucial to widespread brand recognition. The stronger your brand identity, the more likely you are to be at the front of your audiences’ minds. Every time someone interacts with your brand, they should get the same feeling about it each time. This gives your brand an identity and builds a connection with a customer. Maintaining a consistent brand requires a time, resources, and ongoing commitment across your company. These five tips will help get you started!

1. Do your research.
There are two aspects to this; make sure you know your external and internal audiences and how they perceive your brand. Understanding your external audience, how they feel about you, what resonates with them and how they will react to your choices is crucial to brand consistency. But it’s also important to do an internal review and understand your people within your company represent your brand.

2. Create brand standards.
Create a framework of your brand standards that everyone can reference. This can be anything from an elevator pitch, talking points, email signatures, letterhead, logos, taglines and so much more. The harder it is to find the right brand assets, the more likely someone is to snag something off the internet rather than take the time to go digging for the right file.

3. Make sure everyone is on board.
You need to educate people on why your brand standards are important if you want to convince them to adhere to them. Everyone can buy into an idea that it is valuable to be associated with a well-recognized and highly regarded brand—both in the present and the future.

4. Implement processes.
It’s helpful to establish some processes that will keep people in the hang of running things by your marketing team before putting them out into the world. Creating a system for these kinds of requests will ensure your brand standards are protected, but will also make everyone knows how the process works, and will likely cut down on back and forth time.

5. Be firm, but kind.
It’s important to establish yourself as approachable and helpful, not intimidating and aggressive when it comes to executing your brand consistency. Making sure you explain, face-to-face rather than in email, about an issue will go a long way in making your employees understand, and appreciate, your brand strategy.