7 Easy Ways To Keep Your Brand, Design, and Messaging Consistent

We’ve all heard marketers touting the phrase “CONSISTENCY IS KEY!” This is definitely one of the phrases that I keep in mind with almost everything I do. While this reminder is useful in many ways, it’s particularly applicable to your branding & marketing strategies.

Consistency can show up in many forms: 

• Posting on social media every day

• Releasing podcast episodes that are similar in length

• Writing blog posts that cover specific topics

• Starting work at the same time every day

• Holding a team meeting at the same time each quarter

• Using a morning or bedtime routine

• Having dinner with your spouse every weeknight

• Walking the dog every afternoon

Consistency communicates to others what they can expect from you. If you take your dog for a walk around the neighborhood every afternoon when you get home from work around 6PM, then you can count on seeing a happy little tail wagging for you around the same time each evening. 

Use these 7 easy steps to start creating consistency for your brand today, and you’ll save yourself time, connect better with your audience, and build a business that people will love and remember.

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1. Use a Brand Guide

A great brand guide essentially serves as a playbook for your brand. It will cover everything from visuals to messaging to tone of voice, and more. You’ll be able to refer to it for every piece of content you create and you can also send it out to any contractors you work with so that you don’t have to explain how you want your collateral to look, feel, and sound over and over again.

At its core, every brand guide should include:

• Logos: your full logo, secondary logos (don’t forget a logo that fits into a square!) and any icons

• Color Palette: ideally, you’ll include primary and secondary colors plus their hex codes

• Typography: font styles, typical sizes, and spacing (designer tip: use wider letter spacing on headings for a custom look)

• Imagery: examples of typical photos and illustrations you want associated with your brand

• Brand Voice: the kind of language you use and emotions you want to convey

Once you’ve created your brand guide, you can pull it out any time you start to work on a new project or piece of content. This will serve as a reminder for how you want your brand to look and feel, and it will be a huge help in keeping you consistent. When I build websites for my clients, mood boards are automatically included with their web design service. A mood board is a smaller board that serves as more of a visual guide than a full Brand Board does.

If you want a brand board for your business to keep all of your content and visuals consistently on track, let me know! I would love to build one for you.

2. Pick a Color, Any Color!

When you release anything out into the world that’s connected to your brand, try picking just one main color to start branding it with. Studies show that people make a subconscious judgment about a brand or product within 90 seconds of initial viewing and 62-90% of that assessment is based on color alone. When you consistently use the same color over and over again on your website, your social media graphics, your podcast cover, and your product titles - your branding will start to become synonymous with your name. When you consistently show up with the same color palette attached to your marketing, your audience will soon be able to quickly and easily recognize your brand which will help your message rise above the cluttered streets of the interwebs and finally be seen.

Image Credit: The Logo Company

3. IDENTIFY YOURSELF - Name, Logo, Face

To really go simple while still increasing your brand recognition, pick one unique aspect of your business and put it on EVERYTHING. If your business is just you, choose your face or name. If you’re a larger group or retail shop, use your logo on every single piece of your visual marketing. 

• Put your personal signature in the bottom of every newsletter 

• Include a picture of your face on every page of your website 

• Use your logo on every proposal, contract, and invoice 

The internet is becoming an increasingly anonymous place. Depending on where you spend your time, it can also be full of hackers, scammers, liars, and racists - which is why it’s more important than ever to constantly and consistently identify yourself to your audience. Take a look at the social media profiles of some of your favorite brands (the ones you feel like you know personally & engage with the most), then take a mental note of how many times they identify themselves to you. 

More often than not, the brands we connect with the most are consistently showing the faces behind the business, the logo you’ve come to know and trust, and have a signature style & brand identity that you could pick out of a crowd.

4. Choose Pronouns Wisely - I, Me, We, Us?

I get this question a lot while guiding my clients through the content creation process for their websites. 

Should I refer to myself in the first person, third person, or in the plural to imply that I have a huge staff or team?

The pronouns you use in your marketing can define your brand’s authenticity, and you want to make sure that whatever you use, you use it consistently. Don’t start saying “we” then in some places use “I”. You’ll confuse your audience, and they’ll feel less connected to you if they’re not sure who they’re talking to or working with.

If you go searching for a second opinion on this, you will undoubtedly find more than you’re looking for. But if you want my opinion, there are only a few times you should use “we” in your marketing, and if you’re a solopreneur, those times are far and few between.

It can be tempting to start your mission statement with “WE offer products & services that…” Trust me, I’ve heard all the reasons why people want to use WE when they should be using ME: ‘it sounds more professional, it sounds like you’ve been in business for longer than you have, it sounds like you have a team of support staff which would make clients feel better about working with you, blah, blah, blah.’

The truth is, it’s just not true. Unless you have a VA (Virtual Assistant), business partner, or work with contractors who will regularly be interacting with your clients, then you’re just a YOU - not a WE. If you start using terms like WE but your clients already know (or start to notice) that you don’t actually have a team, you’ll begin to lose their trust. It may not be immediate, and you may not lose it in full, but it will start to stack up over the course of your relationship and could also hurt your chances of regaining their trust should anything go wrong in the future.

Nobody likes to be lied to, especially not people who have invested their time and energy into working with you. Even though this isn’t a huge lie, if it’s not the full truth - my opinion is that you just shouldn’t do it.

5. Design Templates (Or Hire A Pro To Create Them For You!)

Your first time doing anything will be harder than your second time doing it, so why let the second time be hard at all? As soon you identify a task or project in your business that you know you’ll do again, make it a template.

If you use Gmail and find yourself sending the same emails over and over again, go ahead and save yourself some times: 

• Log into Gmail, 

• go to the settings gear in the upper right corner, 

• click “See All Settings”

• Go to the “Advanced” tab over towards the right

• Look for the “Templates” option, and click the radio button next to “Enable” 

  • Don’t forget to save your changes & test it out!

The same goes for social media posts, blog articles, operating procedures, anything! Take something you’ve already done, simplify it down to a general outline, then make 3-4 different versions of it (if you want variety). Save it somewhere you can easily access it at any time like Google Drive or Canva. Then, use these templates over and over again, adjusting with each use, until you have a template to choose from for every repeatable task or project in your business. 

Are you working in Canva but just can’t seem to get the design you want? I’d be happy to help!

6. Find Your Topical Oasis

You’ve heard it before - FIND YOUR NICHE! To get into your topical oasis, you need figure out what kind of  conversations people in your industry are having, then join them! To make it easy, narrow it down to 4 main subjects you’d like to be an authority on. If you’re not sure what these might look like for you, click around! Look at what other businesses in your industry are talking about, and see if any of those topics align with your mission & audience. 

Another easy way to find your core topics is to look at what your audience is asking. Log into Facebook and join some FB groups that you think your target market is hanging out in. Take a look at the questions they ask the group, the things they need help with, and the services they’re looking for. Then you can tailor your topics to fit your audience’s needs. That, my friends, is what we call a WIN-WIN.

If you really want to get down and dirty with specific keywords to help you find your topical oasis, you can use the Google Ads Keyword Planner. 

But how do keywords help you figure out what topics you want to talk about?

Try searching the Keyword Planner for “Meal Delivery”. What you’ll see is a huge list of related keywords that people are typing into Google every day related to Meal Delivery, how many people are searching each term, and how high the competition is for those terms. 

You’ll see that there are a high number of monthly searches for Vegan Food Delivery. Knowing that, you may want to create a blog section or start writing social media posts on vegan recipes.

Now, creating content can feel overwhelming, but narrowing it down to 4 specific topics will help you hone in on the tasks at hand and help prevent you from going too broad or getting lost, while keeping your brand and content consistent.

7. Batch Your Work

One of my favorite things to do with ANY kind of task is to batch work whenever possible. Batch working is grouping similar tasks and doing them all at once. It’s almost like plucking one step of a process that you’d typically do at different times, on different days, or for different projects then consolidating them into one block of time and knocking them all out together. 

For example, you know you want to grow your audience and post on social media every day. If you try to come up with a post every afternoon while you eat lunch, you’ll inevitably spend a ton of time trying to think of what to say, how to say it, and what image to attach to it. Plus, each post will likely have a different look and each caption will have a different tone of voice depending on the mood and environment you were in when you put it together. Not to mention, you won’t have much of a strategy if you’re trying to come up with something on the spot.

If you were to set aside a 3 hour block and plan out all of your posts for the upcoming month in one sitting, there’s no doubt that all of your captions would be written in a similar tone of voice, your images would better coordinate with each other because you selected them all together, and you’d be able to plan out how your topics of discussion would tie into the rest of your content strategy. 

Some things you can easily batch work are:

• Creating Social Media Posts 

• Writing Email Newsletters

• Making Sales Calls

• Meal Prepping

• Writing Blog Articles

• Running Errands

• Filing Business Receipts

Setting aside a single block of time to batch work certain tasks allows you to get into a creative flow, see the bigger picture of how your tasks connect, and create consistency across the board. So that’s it. My top 7 tips to keep your brand, design, and messaging consistent. I truly hope you find this is helpful!

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