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Why and How To Ensure Brand Consistency in Your Company’s Social Media Marketing

Why and How To Ensure Brand Consistency in Your Company’s Social Media Marketing
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brand consistency

The most successful social media marketing campaigns are consistent across all channels, with content – including images, video and copy – that are all closely tied to your company’s existing brand identity.

Why worry about brand consistency

Typically, performance on social media is measured using metrics like likes, shares and followers – but these are all meaningless if your content doesn’t succeed in promoting your brand. Your business goal is to secure conversions, or sales.

Also, all social media platforms are highly visual. If all your posts have a consistent “look and feel” that’s consistent with your company’s branding, they become easy for visitors to recognise at a glance. This boosts brand exposure and makes brand recall more likely.

Finally, any lack of consistency can lead to confusion about what your company offers, its values and its target market. This can discourage followers and lose you potential conversions.

Tone

Brand identity is determined partly by tone, or how you say what you say.

It’s true that social platforms require a fairly informal tone, not least because of the need to keep messages succinct.

However, make sure your social content creators don’t go overboard. Much of the social media marketing industry actively cultivates a certain image; it’s all “young creatives”, trending topics and skydiving on weekends. Don’t let their branding get confused with yours or result in a split personality for your business.

Social marketing is subject to the same basic rule as all other marketing. Know your target audience, and speak to them. An experienced digital marketing agency can help you determine how best to do this.

Imagery

Ideally, work with your team or agency to determine what type of imagery best conveys your brand, and then ensure consistency across all channels.

This applies to:

  • the type of photos you use – including their composition, colour saturation, use of filters and other attributes
  • the ways your products and/or services are depicted
  • the demographic characteristics of people shown in images (especially those using your products or services)
  • the colours in your graphics
  • fonts for any wording you add.

For social media marketing purposes, it’s a good idea to work with your team or agency to build up a library of suitable images – ones consistent with your brand – to draw on for social media marketing purposes.

Level of interaction

You always want social content to engage visitors, but consider how much two-way interaction you really want to encourage.

For example, if someone makes an enquiry – or complains about an aspect of your business – do you want your community manager to answer directly online, or would it be preferable to message the person privately? If someone compliments a photo, do you say thanks, or do you just stick to answering direct questions?

This is something it’s ideal to decide from the beginning, and to make consistent across all your social media channels.

Shared content

A brand conveys not just what your company does, but what you care about and find interesting.

Sharing third-party content on social media is a good way of reinforcing these aspects of your brand – and eye-catching, interesting or “trending” content is great for boosting engagement with your company on social platforms.

However, shared content must be properly curated to ensure it’s in keeping with your company’s brand identity.

Choosing your platforms

It’s important to maintain consistency across the multiple social media platforms your company uses, especially in terms of your company’s name, profile picture and description. This helps make your brand easier to recognise at first glance.

However, what suits Facebook doesn’t necessarily work for Instagram, LinkedIn or another platform – so while consistency is important for your brand, content must still be tailored to suit each platform’s characteristics.

Speak to the experts

At Gnu World Media, we help companies promote their brands through effective social media marketing. Contact us today to discuss how we can help your business grow online.

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