While every person who uses the Internet — so, really, most of the world — is bombarded with several ads a minute, it’s likely that some brands will leave a better impression on them than others. When it comes to making a lasting impact that can be translated to great revenue and solid brand loyalty, brand consistency is the KEY.
Brand consistency helps you build trust across all marketing channels and customer bases by delivering a brand message that aligns with your business’s identity and values. It is one of the prime factors to build brand identity – which helps you to stand apart in this super crowded market where every business is vying for your customer’s attention.
Now let’s take a look at some data. As published by Forbes, consistent brand presentation across all platforms increases revenue by up to 23%. ¹ So, delivering a consistent brand experience is a must if you are trying to thrive in a saturated market.
While maintaining consistency across all external branding channels is important to create a brand voice and is directly related to brand recognition and revenue, brand consistency is also critical for streamlining internal processes and workflows. Inconsistency can directly affect process efficiency leading to inefficient outcomes and poor ROI.
Suggested reading: Check out our comprehensive guide, The Brand Consistency Toolkit, for an in-depth look into the importance of brand consistency and best practices to ensure it!
Why is it hard to maintain in the first place?
As much as we love to wax poetic on brand consistency, you’re likely already well aware of its importance and how it can massively impact customer experience and brand value. The problem is that while it has always been critical, the shift to serving an ‘always online’ world has made things more complicated.
To start with, there are now more brand assets to manage than ever. Brands have to digitise all of their assets — from images to logos to graphics — in vast amounts to suit the sheer number of marketing channels out there that are, you guessed it, DIGITAL. This inevitably leads to oversaturation problems and confusion on how to manage them.
Also, with the need for constant A/B testing to find out what works best, there are several versions of all vital digital assets, which makes managing a brand’s digital content while maintaining consistency quite tricky.
That’s not even going into the rising popularity of disparate teams. Brand consistency is impossible to maintain if employees aren’t working with equal access to the same approved, on-brand digital assets, and you, as a brand manager, have to deal with mismanaged workflows. It can lead to confusion for your team members and discourage creativity and efficiency across the board.
All leading to a loss of control on your end. It’s difficult to have complete visibility and control over important tasks when managing a huge volume of digital assets across multiple platforms and a distributed workforce. There are just too many processes to keep track of and often no way to get that level of visibility in the first place.
That said, the right software can resolve all these problems efficiently while helping you maintain brand consistency. Modern technology-driven brand management tools have made branding easier than ever. Here’s how you can ensure complete brand consistency without breaking a sweat.
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Brand management software is key
Maintaining brand consistency is now easier than ever because brand management software provides complete support to marketers and brand managers.
Robust and intelligent brand management software can sort out the complicated process of brand asset management and provide other exceptional features to fine-tune your branding — so that you’re not only delivering a consistent message across your channels but a GREAT one.
Here’s how the different features of the right brand management platform can help you maintain brand consistency.
- Digital & Print templates: These templates allow you to quickly create and customise branding material through an intuitive editor. It saves both time and resources while ensuring complete brand consistency throughout your workflows. It also promotes the reuse of your existing brand assets to ensure that you’re getting the best ROI out of them as possible and reduces the need for localised teams to request customised assets.
- Editable brand guidelines: Easy-to-share and edit brand guidelines are essential to maintaining brand consistency across teams and departments. It makes collaborations easy, and efficient and ensures that every employee follows the same idea of what good looks like to guarantee top-tier assets.
- Integration with your critical apps: An integrated platform is what you need to ensure that all your brand materials are consistent. A powerful brand management software will support integration with all your critical MarTech solutions so that you can have a single window to access, follow, and manage all processes.
- Streamline approval processes: Single-point approvals are vital to maintaining consistency of all brand content. A brand management software should simplify multi-stage approval processes through automation. Tailored approval workflows are ideal to fit into your exact process, providing a streamlined system for quick approvals.
- Reporting insights: Detailed insights on how your teams use brand assets are exceptionally helpful in ensuring brand consistency. Starting with updates on access or sharing a resource, a top-notch brand management platform will provide you with detailed insights covering every action on the platform.
- Digital asset management (DAM): A DAM serves as a centralised platform for storing all of your digital assets, solving and preventing duplicated or misplaced content. It provides total visibility over your brand content while ensuring consistency and security through permission-based file access, direct file sharing, and automated metadata creation for every asset.
Tread carefully with your software choices
Okay, so while we can’t speak highly enough about the benefits of taking up the software to better your branding, we must remind you that that doesn’t mean ANY software choice would be the right one. If you’re considering using multiple tools to cover the different features we’ve just talked about, it’s time to think again. While using several tools might seem like a good idea, it will actually make things worse.
Having a tool stack that is too convoluted and includes too many unconnected parts can easily lead to more complications. It increases the chance of redundancy and can impact performance. Plus, using multiple tools to manage your brand content can easily lead to brand inconsistency. To top it all off, too many tools make it even more difficult for you to keep track of what’s happening and leads to issues like duplication of content across your platforms.
The solution of choice should be a single platform incorporating all the crucial features of brand management software and advanced brand management capabilities. As an added bonus, it should easily integrate with other fundamental applications you have in your repertoire.
Suggested reading: Brand management software has a whole host of benefits in addition to brand consistency — find out more with our blog 6 Problems Solved by Digital Brand Management Tools!
Brandworkz brings consistency across the board
Brand consistency isn’t just about giving your teams a better chance of maintaining their work so that you can get to market faster (though that’s obviously important.) It’s also about enabling the growth and success of your brand.
We believe that truly great brand management software should streamline your workflows while supporting creativity, efficiency, and better ROI. That’s why we developed our solution: Brandworkz.
Brandworkz is an integrated suite of software designed for brand management and excellence. It provides a home for all your digital assets, streamlines processes across the organisation, supports creativity, and helps you ensure brand consistency with ease. Brandworkz is the ideal choice for solving the challenges of modern brand management and getting your brand to market faster. To see the benefits of brand management software for yourself and guarantee brand consistency across the board, book our Brandworkz demo today.
