How Consistent Branding Can Increase Sales

Several surveys prove that customers are more willing to buy from a company they trust. So how do entrepreneurs build trust? Through consistent branding and marketing efforts. Unfortunately, many companies struggle with maintaining brand consistency.

Statistics say that about 1/3 of USA B2B sales and marketing professionals struggle with implementing brand identity consistently. Various reasons can contribute to these, such as undervaluing brand importance, lacking uniform guidelines, lacking a single place to find key branded collateral and other departments creating collateral in compressed timelines.

However, brand consistency is crucial as it can increase average revenue by 33%. Plus, it also offers other benefits that are hard to ignore. Read on to learn more about brand consistency and how you can ensure consistent branding.

Why is It Important to Ensure Your Brand Message is Consistent?

Imagine you meet someone new and start to get to know them, they have certain personality traits that you understand and identify with. Now imagine after 3 months of this personality they move on to a different set of personality traits, some completely inconsistent with what you knew them to be. Then after three more months, they move on to an entirely different set of traits, dismissing any of their old interests completely. It could be very difficult to figure out what this person is all about.

The same thing also happens in the corporate world. A company wins a potential customer with one article and says something different to them with the next. Or it engages them through its marketing then loses them when the salesperson gives them a collateral piece that doesn’t look or sound like the company website at all.

That is why brand consistency is important despite your goals. It always ensures that you deliver messages that are aligned with your company’s goals and identity. Consistency means that you expose your audience to the same messages repeatedly.

Brand consistency is important as it helps:

Build brand recognition – One way companies can achieve brand recognition is by being consistent. This way, their target audience will recognize them immediately. Consistent messages create a perception that your brand is unique, which is valuable in today’s competitive marketing.

Build trust and loyalty – Trust is key when selling your products or services. Brand recognition helps raise awareness of your products and services and helps customers know it on a personal level. When customers trust your brand, they will likely purchase from you. Through brand consistency, customers will know what to expect from a brand’s products or services. Therefore, they will be loyal and trustworthy to it.

Evoke positive emotions of a brand – Communicating positive messages to your target audience can help evoke positive emotions. With time, they will begin associating these positive emotions with your brand, although this takes time and persistence.

Benefits of a Strong Brand

A strong brand is well known, highly recognizable, has a loyal following, and people perceive it positively. Having a strong brand offers various benefits, including:

• Generate More Leads

A business with strong branding means that people recognize it better than the one that doesn’t have it. A salesperson reaching out to a prospect who’s seen ads, or heard of your brand through events, has a better chance of connecting and having a conversation. It is a way of warming up prospects before anyone reaches out.

When more people recognize your business, it makes it easier to make connections which lead to more business.

• Increase the Price of Your Product

A strong brand helps marketers position their goods as unique. Thus, they can control the price. If marketers can establish their products or services as desirable, many customers will be willing to match the price as they can’t get it from anywhere else.

For instance, although you can get a baseball at $3.50, when Mark McGuire broke the home record by hitting his 70th home run, the baseball sold at $3million in ten minutes. The baseball itself is functionally the same, but the story behind the baseball brings the value. The same is true of a brand, a consistent story can raise the perceived value of your product or service.

• Gain More Purchases Faster or Close More Deals

As we have mentioned earlier, branding can help you build trust and awareness. Customers these days are willing to purchase from companies they trust.

Picture this; you want a phone, and you have the option of an Apple phone or another brand that you’re not familiar with.

You are most likely to consider buying an Apple phone even if it will be expensive. Why? Because the company has built trust and awareness.

According to statistics, businesses with a strong consistent brand are 3.5 times more visible to customers. As such, they can stand out in a crowded marketplace.

How Can a Marketer Keep Their Brand Strong?

#1. Determine Your Purpose

All businesses aim at making money. But your purpose needs to be deeper than this to build a strong brand. Review your vision and mission to help you know what your purpose is. Then use it internally to help motivate your organization to identify #2.

#2. Know What Makes You Unique

Determine why a customer would want to buy from you instead of your competitor. This is your unique value proposition. Position your brand such that customers think of it differently.

#3. Be Consistent

People recognize a strong brand as it is consistent with everything. Your fonts, styles, images, messages, and actions need to align with your company’s core. Think of a style that can help you retain consistency and ensure that your activities and actions support your brand’s heart.

Also, consider distributed marketing. This model helps activate a brand at a local level. It focuses on the tools, processes, and teams that make assets and messaging of a brand available to local affiliates and ensures that these resources are used consistently as per the brand’s guidelines and standards.

Distributed marketing helps build brand consistency as it ensures marketing messages are controlled at corporate levels. Therefore, it can help maintain your identity at the local level.

You can learn more about distributed marketing and other marketing solutions from MarcomCentral.