Digital marketing is no different. There’s no shortcut for growing your online presence -success isn’t the result of a single blog post and your first post on social media probably won’t attract millions of followers. For long-term, sustainable growth, you need to take a more consistent approach to your marketing.
There are two main types of consistency that you need to be aware of for a digital marketing campaign - brand consistency and content consistency.
Brand Consistency
Brand consistency is the practice of delivering messaging in a way that conforms with the identity, values, and strategy of your brand. Today, there are more ways than ever for your target audience to come into contact with these messages - social media platforms, websites, and online ads all present potential avenues for engagement. While this creates many opportunities, it also makes it more difficult to manage the messaging of your brand across all these platforms. This makes actively focusing on brand consistency even more important.
The most important reason for being consistent with your brand’s messaging is that brand consistency equals brand recognition. How many times have you watched an ad and known who the commercial was for before you saw a name? That’s the power of brand consistency in action. By being consistent in your messaging you can make your brand immediately recognisable by your target audience.
Having a recognisable brand is one way to harness the familiarity bias, or the tendency for individuals to choose options that are familiar to them rather than new options. The more customers experience your brand’s consistent messaging, the more familiar they become with it. If they have been seeing your messaging regularly, by the time they come to need a service or product in your area your brand will benefit from seeming familiar.
Brand consistency also helps to build trust in your target audience. A consistent experience and branding leads to confidence among customers that your business can give them what they need. Customers like to know what they’re getting. Having a consistent brand message is one way to reassure customers that the quality of service they received or heard about before is representative of your business, which increases conversion rate and ROI. Research published in Brand Management in the Digital Age (2020), found that a coherent brand presentation across all platforms increases revenue by up to 23%.
In a similar way, keeping your messaging consistent builds a positive connection with your audience. By consistently using carefully selected words and imagery, you can evoke positive emotions in your target audience. Over time, those positive emotions become associated with your brand to the point where they are evoked with exposure to just the logo or your brand name. Positive emotions mean happy customers, and happy customers are more likely to buy.
Establish a brand style guide to define your brand elements and branding rules should be your first step to keep your materials and messaging on-brand across platforms and teams. Brand consistency doesn’t mean that everything must look the same, but it does mean that you should strive for cohesion in style and tone. The guide should include the brand values, the colour palette, fonts - including different ones for different purposes, if necessary - brand voice guidelines, and photo and imagery styles. Refer back to the document when creating online messages to ensure that they are consistent in style and tone with everything else.
Consistent Content
The second part of consistency relates to the content that your brand produces. Here at Rumble, we’re big advocates of content marketing as one of the most effective forms of digital marketing. There is a catch, however: content marketing only works if you’re consistent with it.
Consistent content has two qualities - consistency of quality and consistency of publishing. Content should be of a consistently high quality, whether that be long-form content or engaging social media posts. However, content should also be posted with consistent frequency in order to engage users and rank in search engines.
The most important reason for producing consistent content as part of a content-based marketing strategy is that the more high-quality content you produce, the better it’ll be for your SEO efforts. While Google’s search engine algorithms may be complicated, understanding how to use them to boost your site isn’t. A key metric for search ranking is your EAT score, or your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. The content on your site is a major factor in determining this. Search engines reward content that is fresh, in-depth, and useful to users. This means consistently publishing high-quality content is one of the most powerful tools in your digital marketing armoury.
Consistent content will also position your brand as an authority and thought leader within your niche to your potential customers. Regularly providing useful information and content will build a relationship with your target audience. Over time they’ll come to see your brand as an authoritative source of information, making them more likely to trust your advice and recommendations. Consistent high-quality content also gives individuals a reason to return to your site, increasing organic and repeat traffic.
In addition to driving traffic, keeping your content consistent will increase your conversion rate once potential customers are on your site. Customers are more likely to purchase from you if they see your brand as reliable and an authority in your niche. High-quality, consistent content helps build your audience’s trust in you and gives them information they need to make an educated purchasing decision. Content can also be used as a way to guide visitors to your landing page through a call to action (CTA).
Consistent Effort
To be consistent with your branding and content, there’s a final type of consistency that’s needed: consistent effort. Producing high quality messaging and content isn’t something that can be done once and then be forgotten - it requires consistent effort to produce and maintain brand standards and content. In addition, spending consistent effort in developing buyer personas and targeting your messaging is required in order to get the most out of your content.
A second option is to outsource your digital marketing so that you can focus your effort on other areas of your business while being safe in the knowledge that your business is receiving consistent branding, consistent content, and consistent effort. If this option appeals to you, then have a look at what Rumble can offer your business.