No doubt about it, when it comes to your brand consistency is key.
Consistency in your tone of voice, consistency in your messaging, consistency towards your strategy and consistency in your look.
When it comes to starting your brand and business, we often have an idea of what you want it to look like. But along the way, it evolves and before long you’ve got a bit of a mish-mash of variations of logos, fonts, image styles and messaging.
In order to get this back in line and achieve a streamline look to your brand, start by following the few steps outlined.
- Conduct a marketing audit on your own brand. To do this, pull together all of your external brand items. Brochures, letterhead, business cards, signage, screen shots of your social media accounts, your website and anything else externally facing your brand puts out to market.
- Review each item, is the logo sitting consistently in the same place/size/position as it should be, and are your colours the same across the suite? Are you using a landscape or portrait style logo where you should be. Do you have the right versions of your logo to achieve what you want. Are you using an acronym version where you shouldn’t be?
- Are the fonts used consistent across headers/paragraphs/bold/size. Have you changed your fonts, and if so what are they now? What needs to be updated? Do they suit your brand and your look?
- Have extra colours snuck into your material? Re-establish what your primary and secondary brand colours are and remove any others from the mix.
- Review your imagery, what style of imagery is being used, and is it what you want it to be. Perhaps you started with colour images, but moved to black and white. Perhaps you have close ups of people’s faces, but have moved away from this. It’s important to understand the style you want to convey. Particularly now we live in such a visual world – we want people to know your brand immediately when they see it.
- How does your website work with all of the above changes? So often we find the look and feel of websites to be completely different to the rest of the brand suite. If this is the case – see my previous blog about updating your website
- Lastly, set out an action plan to update these changes, and pull it all together in a quick one/two pager style guide so you always have it on hand when you require a new piece of marketing material to be developed. There is an example of how you can pull together a quick style guide below.
Above all remember, consistency is what you are looking for, you need to be the controller of your brand and if anything looks off don’t be afraid to go back to your supplier to fix it. Be your brand’s gatekeeper – it’s only got you to protect it!
