If you want to ensure the success of your business, you need to maintain consistency in your marketing. But if you haven’t defined your brand identity, it’s going to be pretty tough to do that.

This article explores the often-overlooked relationship between brand identity and consistent marketing, and how this can help you to gain the trust and loyalty of consumers, establish credibility, and set your business apart from the competition.

What Is a Brand Identity?

Brand identity refers to the collection of visual, textual, and conceptual elements that represent a brand and help distinguish it from its competitors. Among other things, this can include everything from a brand’s name, logo, and tagline to the look and feel of its website, communications, and advertising.

Why Is Consistent Marketing so Important?

Creating a strong brand identity is vital for making a memorable impression in the minds of consumers, but to achieve that, it needs to be consistently represented in all your marketing.

This offers many benefits for your business, including:

• Building recognition and awareness: If you want to ensure consumers remain familiar with your brand, you can’t confuse them with inconsistent marketing.
• Establishing trust and credibility: Consistent marketing sends the message that your brand is reliable and professional, but inconsistent marketing has the opposite effect.
• Differentiating your brand: In order to build brand loyalty, your branding needs to be instantly recognizable to consumers, and inconsistent marketing can erode this recognition.

At the end of the day, if you haven’t defined your brand identity, and you’re just doing things haphazardly, it’s going to be tough to maintain consistency in your marketing, and you’re running the risk of causing confusion, destroying trust, or getting lost in a sea of competitors, all of which could result in the loss of valuable leads and sales.

How to Define Your Brand Identity

Defining your brand identity is about figuring out what your brand stands for. This involves defining its values, mission, personality, and how it’ll be portrayed visually.

A great place to start is by creating a style guide that can be used to ensure every aspect of your visual brand remains consistent. Here’s what ours at eVision Media looks like:

We chose to use emperor penguins in our branding because these majestic birds symbolize our brand values, which include things like dependability, commitment, loyalty, and nurturing.

This style guide also acts as a reference for all the other aspects of our visual brand, including colours, fonts, and design elements.

How to Maintain Consistent Marketing

Now that you have a better grasp of these concepts, let’s look at how you can use a style guide to ensure consistency in your marketing.

These are just some simple examples from our marketing efforts, but they should give you a better idea of how you can use your brand identity to ensure consistency in your marketing.

Social Media Headers

Our social media headers, such as the one below, are all fully aligned with our visual brand, making us instantly recognizable on every platform.

Branded Imagery

We also use branded imagery for our content marketing. For example, a purple gradient and visual elements help to spruce up this featured image for one of our blogs, while letting everyone know that this content is from eVision Media.

All things considered, in today’s trust economy, small businesses must define a strong brand identity in order to resonate with their audience, build recognition, and instill trust.

Consistent communication of brand values and messaging throughout all your marketing can help you to do this, while empowering you to differentiate your business and drive growth.