Nowadays, marketing your brand on social media is a no-brainer. The potential is huge, as millions of your potential customers are logging onto social media portals on a daily basis.
Top platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat receive the majority of the social media traffic.
Therefore, you need to ensure there is brand consistency in your marketing activity and that your approach is strategic and clear across every social media channel you use.
Every post, social share, and social media account must contribute to your brand message in a coherent manner.
Otherwise you risk the chance of confusing your customer with regard to the identity of your brand.
In this post, we will share with you the key elements of brand consistency, and how it can be maintained during the course of a social media marketing campaign.
After reading, you’ll have some actionable tips that you can implement today.
Top Components of Brand Consistency
A brand should be recognized and identified no matter where the messaging and imagery appears.
Consistency across all channels is a must, but what factors must be consistent?
Let’s take a look at some of the top elements that you should ensure meet consistency standards:
- Brand name: the company name should be the same everywhere. If you have nicknames and variations that people use in slang terms. leave them out. It takes on average about 9 visits to a website before the users decides to make a purchase. Therefore, your brand name has to remain the same in all instances of advertising.
- Branded watermarks: include a watermark on any images that you use. This ensures that followers will recognize the image as yours, and it reduces the risk of people stealing your images.
- Images: to ensure that you are unique, avoid using stock photos. Shoot your own photos, and use the same ones across the various marketing platforms. Followers of your brand will easily identify you because of the images.
- Consistent theme related messages: the social media posts you put out should have a theme. By being focused in your marketing campaign, you can emphasize certain key benefits of your products or services.
- Posting frequency: your rise on a social media platform can lead to a quick decline if the posting frequency is poor. Ensure that you get into a rhythm, and post regularly. Followers like to engage with brands that give them regular content.
Top Brand Consistency Tips on Social Media Platforms
The most popular brands on social media platforms tend to follow a few key principles to ensure longevity, high rates of user engagement, and sales leads.
In order to understand how to be consistent on the biggest social media channels, take these tips into consideration:
Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thinly Across Social Media Platforms
It’s far better to excel on a single social media channel, rather than having a weak attempt at dominating several.
To begin, try to take it slowly by focusing on a single social media channel.
Once you’ve mastered the basics there, then move onto another one.
Each channel is different and requires a unique approach for maximum success. So take the time to study what the audience expects at each location.
Integrate Multiple Channels Correctly
Once you’re actively marketing across multiple channels, you must figure out how to get followers to subscribe to other channels.
For example, if you’re marketing on Twitter, let your followers know about your Facebook page, and vice-versa.
This allows you to increase the size of your following without having to do much extra work.
Ideally, each follower should be subscribed to as many of your social media channels as possible.
This ensures that they see your brand several times in a short period of time, which in turn increases the chances of closing a sale.
You’ll appear as an authority in your niche if a follower can see you being active across multiple social media channels.
It oozes of professionalism, and that’s the kind of brand that gets the most sales.
Maintain Visual Consistency
Some followers might recognize you by visual means only.
This could be from your logo or the pictures you’re using.
Therefore, it’s important to retain visual elements of your marketing campaign across all channels.
For example, if you’re in the habit of posting an image on Facebook with a motivation related quotation underneath, then do the same on Twitter and Snapchat.
Just by looking at the format of the post, followers will quickly realize that it’s yours.
Also Maintain Emotional Consistency
The message and principles behind your brand message need to be consistent. The emotions that are induced onto the follower should be unchanged as you move from one platform to the next.
Colors do a great job of causing a particular emotion, which means they should remain the same.
One important datapoint to consider is that colors increase brand recognition by up to 80%.
Therefore, ensuring that you use the same colors consistently stands to work to your advantage.
For example, the Coca Cola brand is famous for using red in their marketing and product labels. You need to mimic this type of approach in your own branding.
Figure Out the Target Audience
The brand messages should not be aimed at the entire population, but at the demographics of your customer base.
For instance, if the majority of your customers are business professionals, then treat them as such.
Don’t send marketing material that reflects something a teenage girl would respond to.
Typically, a brand fails at engaging their customer base because the type of content is not focused at what they can identify with.
Consider the reason for why they might be interested in your brand in the first place.
Be Sure to Track and Manage Your Brand’s Reputation
An important part of branding is reputation management. This involves answering questions at the end of a post or dealing with unhappy customers in a public forum.
Take note that reputation management is typically not executed by one individual, but instead by anywhere from a few to hundreds of team members.
Therefore, all employees and outsourced individuals must be given clear instructions regarding the brand message they have to deliver when interacting with the public.
Stay On Top of Customer Engagement
Using a robotic approach for interacting with your customers is a bad idea. Your followers prefer a human touch, which makes identifying with the brand easier.
Your posts should have laid back language, the kind you use when writing an email to a friend or family member.
Leave the boring corporate stuff for the official website.
Social media is a laid back medium, and that’s the type of tone you should be using on your social profiles.
Focus Only on the Highest Quality Content
No social media strategy can work without great content that will stand out among the competition. At the very least, you have to bring something unique to the table.
Don’t copy what competitors are doing; followers will notice and are unlikely to respond kindly.
Trevor Morgan, a social media strategist from Essayontime explains: “The foundations of your social media activity is the content you put out on a daily basis. It has to educate or entertain the audience. Fail to do that, and you are in danger of losing your followers”.
Understand How to Measure Return On Investment (ROI)
Blindly executing social media campaigns without tracking the progress is a novice mistake.
By knowing how to measure the ROI on the campaigns, you’ll be able to figure out what’s working and what isn’t.
You need to keep an eye on the posts that are providing a positive return on the investment.
Therefore, you can increase more of the post types that are working and decrease those that are not working.
For instance, if you implement A/B split testing and measure the ROI of each social media post, then you can see which performed the best over time.
Part of brand consistency is to ensure that your posts can consistently convert casual social media users to potential clients.
Don’t Overlook Social Media Advertising
In addition to creating a free account and posting on social media, you can include advertisements in your campaign.
However, the adverts have to be similar in tone and style to the posts you have been creating.
Therefore, brand consistency will be retained, and your reach extended.
Even when some ads are not performing well, at the very least you are saturating the different portals of attention.
If the target customers can see you staying active with posts, marketing channels, etc., it gives you more exposure.
Conclusion
Achieving brand recognition on a social media platform, and being consistent about it, is a long game.
You cannot rush the process, but what you can do is maintain consistent efforts over time.
The brands that win on social media are the ones that persevere.
By implementing the various strategies mentioned in this post, you can take your brand consistency to an entirely new level.
This can help you establish yourself as an industry leader, and therefore drastically increase your share of the market.
However, the tips here are only the beginning. Try to cook up your own new strategies as well.
After all, social media is a new technology that’s evolving every single year.
Feature Image Credit: CC 0; Public Domain. View original feature image on Unsplash.com.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
Sophia Anderson
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- Social Media Tips to Improve Brand Consistency - January 8, 2018
