How To Make Sure Your Marketing Is Consistent Across All Channels

Let’s face it: There are many different marketing channels available to your business. Whether it’s social media, display ads, or OTT, each channel provides a unique opportunity to reach your customers where they spend their time.

But with so many channels available, your customers are likely interacting with you in multiple places, making marketing consistency a real challenge. Whether you mean to or not, you may be sending mixed or inconsistent messages to your audiences.

Creating a unified brand voice and messaging ensures that your brand is recognizable and trustworthy. It’s not just something nice to have, it’s mission-critical! Let’s look at how you can ensure your marketing is consistent across all your channels and what you can do to provide a seamless experience for your audiences.

START WITH YOUR BRAND GUIDE

The first and most important step toward making your marketing consistent is to make sure you’re adhering to your brand guide. Your brand guide is the foundation for all your marketing efforts.

If you don’t have a brand guide (and every business should have one, not just the big guys), now is the perfect time to create one. Brand guides provide blueprints for everything from the font you use, your color scheme, how your logo should (and shouldn’t) appear, and your messaging (your voice).

When you have a brand guide, it doesn’t just create rules for you, your employees, and your partners to follow, it unifies your voice, messaging, and look to your audience!

If you don’t have a brand guide — or you want to give your current one an update — here are a few things to consider.

Define Your Voice: Think about how you want your brand to sound to your audience. Is your business casual or more formal in the way you want to communicate? As a jumping-off point, we often ask our clients to think about who their brand would be if they were a famous person or movie character — it can literally be anyone!

Establish Your Visuals: This includes everything from your logo, logo usage, your brand colors, and your brand fonts. These are the most powerful elements of your brand guide as they will be the things your audience will recognize first when seeing your marketing.

Note Any Tone Differences Across Channels: While you want your messaging to be consistent across channels, you simply can’t communicate on Instagram the same way you do in a display ad. Your brand will need to adjust to fit the tone of each platform, so taking the time to define those differences to stay true to your brand voice is critical.

Make Your Guide Available: Okay, great, you’ve made your brand guide! Now, you need to make sure that it’s freely available to the people who need it. Don’t simply let it languish in some forgotten folder on someone’s desktop. Make it easily accessible so that any team members who need to view (or review) it don’t have to hunt. Share it with your marketing partner(s) too!

CREATE A COHESIVE MESSAGING STRATEGY

When creating your brand guide, it’s easy for us to say: “Create a consistent message.” But, what does that actually mean?

Creating a consistent strategy isn’t about using the same content everywhere, it’s about adapting the core message you want to send to the appropriate channel. For example, creating educational content to inform your customers is great for a blog, but that message will get muddled if you try to cram it into a display ad.

When you create a unified strategy you’re able to take your message and ensure that all your marketing channels are working together to communicate your message. Here are a few things to consider that work across all industries.

Identify Your Message: Once you identify the message or idea you want to communicate you can get to work marketing.

Adapt To Each Channel: Take stock of all the channels you plan to market on. Do you understand how they are different or the ways they are used to communicate with their audience? Once you understand the platform, tailor your message to its format.

Keep Your Language Consistent: Keeping your language, taglines, and phrasing consistent across your platforms will help with overall consistency.

COORDINATE YOUR CAMPAIGNS

If you want to maintain consistency across channels with your marketing campaigns, you need to make sure that your teams aren’t siloing information. If your campaigns are inconsistent when your audience sees them on different channels, it will look like the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing. That’s siloing!

Create a process and workflow to keep your cross-channel campaign planning simple and access to your assets easy.

This will look different for each organization, but it may include things like a master planning calendar; a living document with key details, checklists, and messaging; and a shared folder with access to resources.

Being consistent is the cornerstone of all good cross-channel marketing campaigns. When you align your visuals, messaging, and strategies you set yourself up to better communicate with your audience, build trust, and make sales.If you find that making sure your marketing is consistent across all channels feels overwhelming, the team at Federated Digital Solutions can help! Contact us today to find out how we can help you simplify your process and start maximizing your marketing efforts.

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