Simple Steps To Optimise Your Online Presence For Brand Consistency

Brand Coherency: What Is It And How Do We Get It?

Brand coherency is more than just having your logo and business name on every page, profile, and product. It’s about creating a real personality that comes to be associated with your brand consistently, regardless of which platform you’re on.

It means brand colours, fonts, writing style, and even how you dress or present yourself in photos, videos, and interviews. With brand coherency, you should be instantly recognisable across all platforms.

Preparing Your Brand

There are some basic steps that come with setting up your new brand: getting a logo and brand colours are an obvious starting point. They should be eye-catching and represent the nature of your brand.

So, before you go out and hand over a wad of cash to your graphic designer, let’s stop and think about the brand you’re creating:

Think about personality traits you want to associate with your business. Is it:

• fun and quirky?
• serious and straightforward?
• light, bright and loud?
• or soft, gentle and approachable?

These traits should help inform your logo, colour and font choices. You’ll be using these a lot, so really think about the style you’re looking to achieve.

Creating Brand Consistency

To get started, you want to make sure that all of your platforms are aligned with your logo, colour scheme, or specific brand fonts. If someone visits your website, they should get the same impression that they would from visiting your Facebook page.

Think about making your display pictures on social profiles the same — either your logo, or a picture of your face if you are your brand.

You should also have similar cover images for things like Facebook & LinkedIn profiles, YouTube channels, or your monthly newsletter header. This creates a feeling of continuity between your platforms — the content might differ, but the branding is the same.

Remember that different platforms have different image size requirements. Check to make sure your new headers fit without being stretched, squashed or cut off.

Social Media Templates

Another area important to your brand consistency is social media. Consider creating (or commissioning) branded templates for your social media posts. These templates are brand-coherent backgrounds that you can superimpose text and images onto to create posts on Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest.

By using the same style of image consistently, your brand becomes more recognisable without even reading who posted it. You can even create branded video intro/outro visuals for use on YouTube.

Your templates should be just as recognisable as your logo or business name. Many apps, like Canva or Over, have pre-programmed sizes for social media templates, but be careful: Instagram templates aren’t suited to Facebook and vice versa.

Prepare Complementary Content

It’s important to have a content schedule to help keep you on track and support brand consistency. Make sure to create content that is complementary across all platforms and relevant to your ideal clients. This could mean focusing on a specific theme across a weekly or monthly period.

Try to include different forms of content on the same topic across your platforms. For example:

• a blog post on your website
• then reference this blog across Facebook and Instagram
• provide a link to the blog in your newsletter
• create an instructional or inspirational video around this topic for YouTube.

You can see how this kind of content marketing allows for each audience type to interact with the same content. Some clients may visit your website, some stumble across you on YouTube while others know you from your Instagram profile.

Maximise your reach by creating a schedule that discusses each topic in-depth, in various ways across all your platforms. By optimising your coherent brand presence through images, tone and style, you’re creating brand cohesion.

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Originally published at https://www.optimiseandgrowonline.com.au on February 9, 2020.