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[Video] #MarketingMonday – Brand Consistency and WHY it’s important…

by Amanda Daniels-Allen | Jan 15, 2018 | Brand, Marketing Tips | 0 comments

Today’s Marketing Monday is about… Brand Consistency and why its important…

Transcription

Hi, Amanda here from Koogar.

Today is “Marketing Monday,” so, I wanted to discuss brand consistency and how important it is. Everybody has a brand, everybody who runs a business has a brand, but a brand isn’t just about the logo that you have, the colours that you use. The brand is actually about a lot of different things, so the brand should consist of the message. I spoke about message last week and how you can make it as impactful as possible.

Your brand consists of your values, the values that the company has, the ethos the company has, the reasons why your company does the things in the way that your company does it. You’ve got the brand USP, what is your unique selling point or unique selling proposition, what makes you, you.

You’ve got the marketing elements of the brand. That includes all the marketing activities, all the different bits and pieces that you do, whether it’s social, direct mail, telephone, website, all of those different kinds of things, and actually, the final thing is the brand identity.

What does your brand stand for? Who do you stand for in terms of who are the perfect customers, who are the perfect clients that you want? So, brand isn’t just about logo. It’s not just about those tile-y things that you sit with a graphic designer and spend that time with. However, it has got to do with a lot of other bits and pieces.

What I wanted to talk about today was first impressions.

A brand is something that you want people to see and you want people to recognise.

Every single Business Owner that I speak to wants that. They want people to remember the company name, they want them to remember your name. Even if they don’t remember your name they’ll remember your face or your business card or your website, or they’ve heard of you, yeah? A lot of people want that. So, a first impression is really important, and there is that saying that you never get a second chance to give a first impression.

So, what I thought I’d talk to you about today is brand consistency and how it’s important, and sometimes it’s not just about putting everything that you possibly can on to a flyer, leaflet, website, a presentation. It’s not just about overloading the person who’s looking at that thing, whatever that may be, with information about you, ’cause sometimes less is more.

What you actually want to do is give them a clear consistent, concise message of who you are, what you do, how you do it and how your brand is different from everybody else’s. Because, there are a lot of other people out there that do what you do, but they don’t do it in the way that you do it. They don’t do business in the way that you do it. They haven’t got your experience, they haven’t got your life experience as well as work experience. So, there’s a lot of things that you do differently and just because they do marketing or coaching or videography or film or whatever, it doesn’t mean that they work in the same way. So, brand consistency is huge.

One of the things that I’d like you to think about, is, now that it’s the new year, I know that we’re a few weeks in, we’re in what, third week in, now it’s a new year, what I’d like you to consider is go through all of your social media profiles, Facebook, your Facebook page, your group, Linkedin, your personal page and your company page if you have one, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, all of those different things.

I want you to go through all of those things and have a look at your brand consistency. Is the right logo on your social media platforms? Is it the right logo on your website? Are you upgrading or are you changing or are you tweaking? What do you need to do so that every single thing that people see, the touch-points that people see of yours are consistent? Because what you don’t want them to do is that you don’t want them to click on either Instagram or whatever, and they don’t see your icon, they don’t see your logo, they don’t see anything of your brand, and actually it’s more about you than about the business. Does that make sense?

So, what I’d like you to do is consider going through all of your social media and your website and your marketing materials. It’s a new year, you’ve got time to do this, it’s a bit of housekeeping. Maybe you should have done it in the tail end of last year, but what I’m saying is if you can do it now you’ve got the rest of the year that you don’t have to worry about that kind of thing.

This is something that I’m doing. This is something that I do every year at the beginning of the year. I have a look at what I’ve got, what I want to achieve, who I want to achieve it with. Is my message right, is my brand right, is it across all the different platforms that I’m on? And, does it actually tell people who I am and what I do? Will they remember me?

So, have a look at your social media platforms and double check everything! Double check that it’s all the way that it should be. Check that your Facebook page has got the right telephone number, the right email addresses, the amount of times that I’ve spoken and sat down with the business owner who hasn’t got the right telephone number on their Facebook or even an email address. How are people supposed to contact you? You’ve got to give them as many different ways in which they want to contact you. It’s not the way that you want them to contact you, unfortunately.

Have a look and make sure that all of your details are correct. Have a look that your brand images are correct, that they are actually branded, or are they just pictures that you’ve taken off free websites or paid websites and that you just put on there. Can you brand them? And if you can, do it. If you can’t, then just mention where you’ve got those images from.

Make sure that your brand message is correct. We talked about this last week, but your brand message is really important, because that’s the thing that makes people go, that’s what I want, or that’s what I need. Your brand message is what you say when you go networking. Your brand message is on your business cards, it’s on your website. It’s that thing that makes people go, “They are the person that I want.”

Make sure that that brand message is across all the different platforms that you use and in all the marketing materials as well.

Make sure that everything’s up to date, because if it’s not, there’s nothing worse than potentially missing a bit of business because they’ve rang the wrong phone number, or they’ve tried to send you an email, and they haven’t been able to get through to you, okay? So, make sure that everything is as branded as it possibly could be.

And then finally, with those brands, with the consistency that you’re putting out, tell people that you’re doing it. Tell people that things have changed slightly or that you’re looking to tweak, or these are new services that you’re doing in the future, but one thing I want to make sure that you do is make sure that you have a call to action. It’s great to put social media out there. It’s great to tell people that you’re doing different things, but actually have a call to action. Tell people what you would like them to do once they’ve read your message, seen your brand, read a leaflet, flier, been on your website, what is the next step? What do you actually want them to do?

That’s it for brand consistency today. I just wanted to talk about that because I think it’s really important. As a graphic designer I see a lot of bad graphics, just going to say. I see a lot of bad graphics, and I see a lot of things that I think, whether people have done it themselves, it just doesn’t look right, and that consistency is so important. You just don’t want people to go, “Are you that company that does this or is that somebody else?” You want them to be 100% that is definitely Amanda, that is definitely [Scott [00:07:36], that is definitely [Joanne [00:07:36], okay?

So, that’s what you want, brand consistency across all of your different platforms. All of the different marketing materials that you use because those touch-points.

What are Touch-Points?

Touch-points are things that your current customer sees. So, a touch-point could be that you’ve called them, it could be that you sent them an email, they’re part of your email marketing, they’ve downloaded a free eBook, they’ve been on your website.

All of these different touch-points lead them to the end result, and the end results is them turning into a customer if they’re not a customer already. So, that’s what we want. So, that’s why it’s important to have that call to action to get them to take the next step. So, I’ve got a couple of things that people have said here. So, I’m just going to reply to those a little bit later on further down in the comments. Thank you very much for joining. I appreciate it because generally I’m here by myself. So, I’m going to carry on doing it anyway, but I appreciate you spending the time to listen.

Another thing that I just wanted to let you know is that we still have the Koogar Academy going on, and it’s going on really well. We’ve got a separate secret group going, and a lot of people are taking action, which is brilliant, because I’m telling them what to do, they have a masterclass once a month, they’ve also got four or five downloads that they could do, with exercises that they need to do, and they’re going through it. They’re asking questions. It’s helping people think differently.

So, if you wanted something like that to keep you on board, to keep you on track, to make sure that you get to where you want to be, the Koogar Academy could be for you.

So, again, I’ll leave the link below to let you know if you’d like to join up. That will be great. At the moment we have 22 people joined in our group. I’m going to say it’s quite good because being part of it enables them to ask a question specifically about their business, about their industry, how would you do it if you were in this, or wanted to get this result. So, it’s about writing your questions, asking people what they think about the message that you’re putting out there or what you think about this text that I’ve sent to people. And people are actually starting to get business straight away, which is great.

So, if you want to join that, that would be brilliant. If not, no worries, just carry on watching “#MarketingMonday.”

I hope you found today useful, and I will see you soon. Take care.

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