Best Ways to Maintain Brand Consistency across your Website
Your website is an incredibly powerful branding tool and a key player in your online presence.
When your marketing efforts build to create a message that communicates a consistent tone of voice, colors, visual identity across all of your channels, including the most important of all, your website, it lets people memorize your brand more easily and understand your offerings.
Brand consistency allows you to position yourself on the market and stand out from the competition.
But the ultimate value of brand consistency is that it enables you to gain and maintain credibility, making your marketing more persuasive and increasing your ROI in the long run.
Keep in mind that building your brand is much more than choosing your logo. It is everything that your company represents, from the content that you create and visual representation of that content, to the people that humanize your brand and the tone of voice you use to communicate your message.
As your company grows, maintaining your brand consistency can be challenging. So how do you build and maintain brand consistency across your web?
We’ve done our research to help you find the best ways to maintain your brand’s consistency. But before that, let’s first see what brand consistency implies.
Table of Contents
What is Brand Consistency?
Brand consistency is not only about the colors, tone of voice, and typography. It is also about declarations of value — about the company’s core values, mission, vision, what it stands for, and what makes it stand out from the rest on the market.
In other words, brand consistency is all about communicating the right message to the right people and promoting the value of your services and products in a consistent style, and, in the process, building loyalty and trust with your consumers.
Here are a few ways how you can maintain it across your web.
1. Understand your mission
From the very beginning, your brand image should be closely connected to your core values, which should communicate who you are and where you want to be over time.
Even if you have already created your logo and built your visual identity on your website, you can still make some smaller tweaks to make sure you are communicating the right message to your audience.
This way, they will gain an insight into who you are, what you represent, and what you strive for. It’s generally best to hire the best website design company you can find, to ensure that these tweaks hit the right note.
If you decide to change your logo design drastically, you need to be clear about your mission statement and core values and then make sure your logo aligns with them.
However, if you change your logo frequently, you may appear flaky and inconsistent — and we don’t want people to see you as someone who is not clear about what they are doing.
2. Set Brand Guidelines
Setting your brand guidelines is probably the most important step in the process of building and maintaining your brand consistency. This includes creating a tone of voice, logo, color palette, images, fonts, frequency, copy, messaging.
These guidelines should help you stay focused when creating your marketing campaigns and make your marketing more memorable.
- Color palette — select a dominant color and then 3 or 4 complementary tones. This will make your visuals consistent but not monotonous. Also, if you work on the uniformity of your colors, you will strengthen your brand and make it more impactful across your web and other channels.
- Images — Think about what kind of images you want to use — illustrations or proprietary images. Think about what would perfectly resonate with your brand — would you go with the modern look or more vintage one? Also, if you decide to use images of people, make sure they represent your target audience.
- Copy — The way you use your words in the content you produce plays a major role in building brand consistency. The best way to stay on top of your content is to create writing guidelines, some kind of a manifest where you would define precisely what kind of language you will use to communicate with your audience. Will you use industry jargon? Or will you be more formal? You should even agree upon details like whether you should capitalize every word in your headlines or not.
- Font — Choose one dominant font and secondary typeface that you can use variously for paragraph texts, captions, and titles. The uniformity of your fonts will help you increase your brand visibility and authority, much like the color palette that you choose.
- Tone and voice — Think of your brand as a person and what characteristics you would like it to have to get other people’s attention. For instance, if you have a law firm, you should definitely choose a more formal tone of voice because you want to sound more serious. On the other hand, if you have a hairdresser’s studio, you should make your content more fun and approachable.
- Logo — as we have mentioned above, make sure you clearly define your business’ core values, mission and vision, and what you want to achieve with your business.
3. Place your logo strategically
A company’s logo is probably the first thing your visitors will see when they visit your website, regardless of whether these are your existing or potential customers.
Besides paying close attention to every detail when creating your logo, you should also think about where it is displayed on your website.
Most companies place their logo in the top left corner as most languages are read from left to right.
Your logo is the first image your visitors see when they go to your website, which is why it should be visible. On the other hand, if you wish to set new standards and be original, you may want to disregard this conventional top left model and choose a different, more unique layout.
But, whatever you do, make sure you think about how to optimize the user experience
4. Add personal details
For people to be able to truly connect with your brand, you need to provide them with some kind of genuine human touch on your website.
You need to focus on the vision that tells people that you care about what they think and how they feel and that you are there to help them.
If people feel engaged, they are more likely to support you. The easiest way to do this is to fill your website with some personal details that would create a personal experience for each and every of your present and potential customers.
The first thing you can do is to tell your customers who you are and how you can enrich their lives. But, make sure you are concise and clear and that you are socially minded.
Also, once you have defined your mission statement, try to incorporate that into your brand web design. For instance, create behind-the-scenes team photos that will create an authoritative and community-oriented vibe. This will significantly energize your website with life and vibrancy and will bring your customers closer to you.
Another way you can communicate your brand’s values and your mission is to create testimonials, stories, articles and videos and designate a place on your website for this kind of content. This will tell your potential customers that your brand can be trusted and that you can deliver on the mission.
5. Create a consistent content plan
One of the ways how you can build authority and make people want to visit your website and read about what you do is to create a quality content plan consistently.
You should focus on creating a web editorial content plan where you can map out your entire content strategy. Also, make sure you clearly define the frequency of your posts, whether you will publish articles once a week.
Once you determine the frequency of your posts, make sure you stick to your plan because, in this way, you will help your readers know when to expect your new content.
Another thing you need to think about is the topics you want to write about. The idea is to provide different segments of your audience with the content they will actually want to read and that resonates with them.
If you do not have enough time or insights to find out what topics would attract your readers’ attention, try using one of the many tools that can support you on this journey. Some of them include BuzzSumo, Google Trends, HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator and others.
Also, try to use different forms to publish and promote your content. Some of them are infographics, animations, white papers, case studies, videos, brochures, e-books, etc.
Ensure that you create your content plan 4 to 6 weeks in advance and that each of your writers has enough time to do in-depth research and complete their tasks on time.
Take the next step
If you still haven’t started working on your brand consistency, you should start now because this is one of the best ways to build and maintain your authority in the long run.
We hope that these tips will help you achieve the best results.