When it comes to marketing, consistency is often underestimated. Its seeming simplicity and self-evidentness often keep companies from investing sufficient efforts into keeping tactics consistent.
With many competitors looking elsewhere to generate leads and retain clients, your focus on consistency can become a major advantage.
Let's take a closer look at three types of consistency you should pay attention to during the marketing campaign and beyond.
Consistency of Brand
Brand consistency is the process of delivering a brand message according to the brand's identity and values over time. The information you provide to your customers and clients should always be aligned with the brand's strategy, value, and tone.
Over time, brand consistency efforts help your target audience single out your company among others. They will easily recognize your brand across multiple marketing channels and touchpoints.
Besides helping build a strong reputation, brand consistency efforts have the following benefits:
- Unaided Awareness — when your brand is easily recognizable across different ad channels, consumers are more likely to think of it when it's time to make a purchase.
- Trust — consistency makes it easier to trust your business. That makes it more appealing to customers.
- Word-of-mouth marketing — when you build a certain level of trust with consistency tactics, your existing clients are likely to become your brand ambassadors, thus boosting the marketing ROI.
- Standing out from the crowd — in any highly competitive industry, it's hard to distinguish between numerous brands. With proper consistency efforts, you can jump ahead of the competition, making your company easy to recognize.
When you are clear about your brand consistency goals, it's much easier to create an efficient marketing strategy.
Consistency of Message
To maintain consistency, your message should reflect your brand's voice, tone, values, and strategies. Ad messaging should be seamless across all marketing channels, so the customer can easily recognize your company even without seeing its logo. This is commonly referred to as integrated marketing.
When it comes to digital marketing, message consistency relies on integrated marketing. When running your ads on different channels, all of them should demonstrate your brand's voice identically.
By gaining access to your brand's message on several channels, consumers start feeling more connected to your business. This helps you reap the benefits of consistency even when your company is still fresh on the market.
In this way, using integrated marketing allows you to gain a competitive advantage over companies that ignore its benefits. Such a strategy can help you achieve better brand recognition and gain consumer trust while carving a unique niche to grow the company's profitability.
Consistency of Offerings
Once your brand consistency efforts start showing results, it's imperative to maintain offering consistency. Consumers expect a certain product or service quality each time they pay for it.
Many companies tend to put their best foot forward when generating leads and achieving initial conversion goals. When the efforts pay off, they could start looking for ways to minimize expenses, thus hurting the quality.
The consumer's confidence in your brand increases with each positive interaction. A single negative experience can cause loyal customers to seek new options and hurt your reputation tremendously.
To put things in perspective, it takes about 40 positive experiences to undo the damage caused by one negative review. These quality problems are an excellent opportunity for the competition to steal market share.
Gaining a Competitive Edge with Consistency and Integrated Marketing
Top-notch consistency with your branding, messaging, and offering requires time investment, strategy, and discipline. It's only possible when used in tandem with the best practices of integrated marketing.
When you stay consistent, you build a precious connection with your potential and existing customers who make your brand a part of their lives. Additionally, consistency helps you establish your business as the industry leader while making it hard for other companies to steal your market share.
By delivering a consistent brand message across your marketing channels, you don't just improve your company's bottom line but gain a significant competitive advantage.
