‘Brand consistency’ is a term thrown around a lot by marketing types but what does it really mean? Is it how often your brand appears in front of consumers, or just how often you’re posting on Instagram? More than anything, your brand consistency refers to your brand’s image and presence being harmonious across different channels, reinforcing the same type of brand persona at all touchpoints to make your business easily identifiable and memorable for consumers. This can refer to consistency across multiple social media platforms or it can refer to consistency within one platform - is your brand voice the same in your post captions as it is in your bio?
Establishing brand consistency is important for not only sharpening up your professionalism as a business and showing genuine thought and consideration into the public face of your brand but also for solidifying your market position and carving out an identifiable place for your business online.
We’ll cover the major 3 areas you should be focusing on to achieve brand consistency in your social media marketing.
Content and Voice
Well thought-out brands and businesses often have company values, mission statements, impact statements or similar that underpin what they do and their company ethos. We recommend having yours on hand to easily reference when constructing social media profiles or planning posts. This a valuable way of ensuring your online activity is in accordance with your core branding and will help you to maintain consistency across your digital presence.
If one of your company values is transparency, you may want to highlight that by showing behind-the-scenes social video footage or data and figures that the customer might not usually see. If one of your values is community support, you may want to share some of the charitable work your company has done for the community. Perhaps you could tag the local organisations you support in your Instagram bio or have a Stories highlight dedicated to snapshots of the work you’ve done with them.
It doesn’t always have to be conventional posting - there are several ways you can creatively incorporate your brand values or pillars into your social content. You can also extend this to themes and key messages your brand focuses on, including seasonal themes or topics focussed on current campaigns or events. Many of these are often emotionally-driven, so it may be helpful to think about the type of emotion you are hoping to elicit from the audience with each post or profile change. If you find it’s changing often, that could mean needing to work on your consistency here a little more.
Your brand voice is also something that should remain consistent across platforms, as well as across mediums within each platform - Stories, text posts, video captions, guides and more. If you use playful sarcasm, let that permeate your tone of voice whenever you write social copy or create a post. It’s also helpful to think about your audience here as well; for instance, if you’re a construction business dealing with clients in their 50s or 60s, using TikTok slang might not be the best fit. Being clear on your target demographic and keeping them front of mind when creating social content can help tremendously to reinforce brand consistency.
Visuals
Visual consistency is likely the most obvious form of brand consistency you should be aiming to maintain and is the first one new customers and visitors to your profile will notice. You may want to implement visual consistency by using the same image filter over all of your posts, or adding a branded watermark or logo to them. You may have a specific colour palette you want to stick to or even themes in general (for instance, if your company installs pools, you might implement a visual theme of luxury living or summertime family fun).
Developing your own style of social photography or content will help to make your posts more easily and quickly identifiable as belonging to your brand and are often how audiences will recognise a post is yours. You can extend this to the layout or format of your post, as well - for instance, a self-help coach might use the caption space within Instagram as a micro-blog, and these long form captions become a part of their branding. An influencer might do MAFS recaps or reviews each week on their Snapchat stories from the same corner in their study, establishing a visual consistency of the background as well as teaching their audience to expect this content on Snapchat and head there specifically for it. Visual consistency can be extended to the appearance of certain emojis in your captions or even to the number of hashtags you use.
Posting
Finally, the consistency of your posting should be a major area of focus if you are wanting to win over the favour of the algorithm. Above all else, algorithms will favour consistency, so whether you’re posting two times a week or five it shouldn’t matter - so long as those posts are going up at the same time every week. Not just on the same days, but at the same times during the day! The exact split between the types of content you post (video, stories, live, static imagery, text posts) or which platforms you use more will vary from business to business. Still, the key is ensuring they are worked into your social media schedule harmoniously and in a consistent, reliable pattern. With some experimentation and A/B testing, you should be able to find the right content balance that works for you and is achievable with your workload.
When it comes to sticking to the schedule, we say - automate it! There’s planning it out the old-fashioned way in an Excel spreadsheet, but you may find using a scheduling tool like Pallyy or Later is more convenient. With their auto-publishing features, you can set-and-forget. This opens up the option to batch-plan, batch-create and batch-schedule content to make more efficient use of your time. Many scheduling tools also have insights and analytics dashboards, meaning you can optimise your posts and see what will bring you the best engagement.
Remember that posting on social media should never be an afterthought; it can be an incredibly useful tool for growing brand awareness and your revenue stream and each post represents the possibility of bringing your brand front-of-mind to a handful of potential customers. Posting strategically and with consistency lets, you make the most of this. Pre-determining the exact number of times you are posting on a weekly or fortnightly basis is the first step in achieving this.
Ready to create some consistent ROI from social media? Take a look at our social photography and social video packages and arrange an on-brand content creation session with our team!
