Brand consistency is no longer optional. It’s the most important requirement if you’re aiming to build a strong and recognizable online presence. However, it can be a challenging task, especially as your business grows and operates across various platforms and touchpoints.
If you’re also struggling in the process, this article will help you lay the groundwork to build a strong and consistent identity.
How to Ensure Brand Consistency
- Create Brand Guidelines
- Match Visual and Verbal Identity
- Assemble Marketing Assets
- Train the Team
- Communicate with External Partners
- Conduct Regular Audits
Let’s explore each of these points in more detail to understand how to ensure brand consistency.
1. Create Brand Guidelines
Creating a brand style guide is the first step to ensuring brand consistency across all platforms. This document serves as a manual that outlines how to present your brand in a cohesive and professional manner.
Ideally, it includes information on the proper usage of your logo, details about your color palette, preferred imagery style, and specifications for typography. However, we recommend that you also cover the verbal elements, including the tone of voice and messaging style, to ensure all communications reflect a unified brand personality.
If you want a deeper dive into creating style guides, check out our article, “How to Create a Brand Style Guide.” Also, if you want to see how popular brands create their style guides, check out this article, “17 Brand Guide Examples.”
2. Match Visual and Verbal Identity
We focus on coordinating all our visual elements and maintaining verbal consistency. However, we overlook the importance of integrating these two components together to create a truly cohesive identity.
For example, if you have an emphatic brand tone that conveys compassion and respect, your visual elements should match this energy. You should use soft or neutral colors, easy-to-read fonts, human-centric photos, etc.
3. Assemble Marketing Assets
You need to ensure all your marketing assets are assembled and organized in one place. It includes your logos, codes for your color palettes, typography details, imagery, and other templates.
This step will help you streamline the content creation process, making it easier for your team to access the assets efficiently. It’ll also reduce the risk of errors and inconsistent use of brand elements.
4. Train the Team
Branding elements are created within the design and marketing teams so they are aware of how to use them across different platforms. However, everyone else in your company, including your sales team and customer service representatives, is left out of the loop.
Thus, we recommend you take the time to train your entire team on the importance of brand consistency and the correct usage of brand elements. This will ensure that every interaction and communication from your company, regardless of the department, aligns with your brand guidelines.
5. Communicate with External Partners
On the same note, it’s equally important to communicate your expectations with your external partners, including your vendors and freelancers. For example, we work with various businesses and always encourage them to share their brand guidelines and other relevant details with our designers. This ensures that our team fully understands their brand’s visual and verbal identity, allowing us to produce materials that are consistent with their standards.
Similarly, you can share your brand guides and set up proper communication channels to minimize the risk of brand misrepresentation.
6. Conduct Regular Audits
Regular audits are the key to maintaining brand consistency in the long run. They can help you ensure that all your brand’s communications, assets, and marketing materials, from social media posts to T-shirt designs, align with established guidelines.
You can conduct them at scheduled intervals and document all the findings and discrepancies. Then, start addressing the problems by realigning visual elements, revising the messages, or updating procedures to ensure consistent implementation. You can also communicate these errors to the relevant teams to prevent more issues in the future.
Summing Up: How to Ensure Brand Consistency
Brand consistency is what leads to strong and recognizable brand identities. We cannot overstate its importance in shaping how your brand is perceived by your audience. This is especially crucial when it comes to outsourcing to an external company.
That’s why we recommend always partnering with agencies like us, which specialize in building brand identities. We pay extra attention to ensure that each design aligns perfectly with the brand’s guidelines and values.
Sign up for our unlimited graphic design services today to elevate your brand through visually compelling and cohesive design solutions.
