The Importance of Brand Consistency: Optimizing Channels and Social Listening

More than just your logo, your brand encompasses messaging, emotional connection, and brand voice. (For a deeper dive into branding, read our blog 3 Important Aspects of Your Brand That You’re Overlooking.) Brand consistency is vital to business success because it directly affects your brand’s perception. 

A reputable online presence is essential to your business’s success. To help you ensure your digital footprint accurately reflects and is consistent with your brand, we’ll walk you through social profile optimization and social listening for brand perception.

Brand Consistency Across Channels: How to Set Up and Optimize Profiles

Getting someone to buy your product or service one time is easy – turning them into loyal customers and brand advocates isn’t. However, it is possible to go beyond brand awareness to advocacy with consistency. 

Why is that? Inconsistency is confusing – your target audience doesn’t know what to expect from you. Brand consistency demonstrates your business’s reliability and credibility, building trust with your target audience and establishing a solid reputation. You can achieve brand consistency on a channel-by-channel basis by implementing your brand guidelines when setting up your profiles and creating content. (Don’t have a brand guide? These 7 Must-Have Brand Guidelines You Need in Your Guidebook will help you get started.)

Optimized Profile Checklist

Before jumping in and making changes to your social media profiles, evaluate them one channel at a time following this checklist to get started.

• All profile fields are complete
• Profile picture is clear and not cut off
• Header image accurately reflects your brand and speaks to your business’s Unique Value Proposition (UVP) 
• About or Bio section emphasizes your business’s Universal Value Proposition (UVP)
• Business information (e.g., address, phone number, business hours) are current
• Overview text is strong and informative

Optimized Content Checklist

The next step is to assess your content. This checklist will help you check for brand consistency in design and messaging and reflect on the content you share. 

• Content is shared consistently (e.g., every Monday at 10 a.m.)
• Post imagery follows brand guidelines
• Written post content aligns with brand messaging and uses the brand voice
• Posts include a healthy mix of messages and resources to address all stages of the customer journey (Learn the types of messages your potential customers need in our blog The Right Message: Digital Marketing Strategies Across the B2B Customer Journey.)

After using the above checklists to review your social media profiles, your next step is to compare your profiles to each other. As you compare them, ask yourself: Are your profiles and content consistent across channels? If not, where do they differ? This gives you insight into how your target audience experiences your brand.

Armed with this information, you can update your social media profiles to be consistent with each other and your brand. Depending on the results of your content audit, your next best step might be rethinking your content marketing strategy so your brand is consistent for your target audience, no matter which stage of the customer journey they’re in. 

Social Listening and Brand Perception

These days, most of the buying process happens online. This is true for B2C and B2B buyers. Part of their journey is reading online reviews, which can shape how your brand is perceived. 

In the blog Social listening: Your launchpad to success on social media, Sprout Social defines social media listening as a “marketing methodology that involves collecting and analyzing conversations in the marketplace.” By paying attention to the conversations your target audience is having about your brand and industry, you gain valuable information that you can use to improve your products, services, marketing, and more. 

A key part of social listening is getting a pulse on your brand’s health. Constantly living and breathing your brand, you can lose sight of how people experience it for themselves. Reading positive and negative online reviews about your brand allows you to take their perspective and see your brand in a new way. You learn what your customers love about you and why they choose you over your competitors (it’s likely not what you would have guessed!). Though they might be unpleasant to read, negative reviews reveal how to create a better customer experience. 

Some social scheduling software like Sprout Social and Hootsuite include social listening tools. If you don’t have software with social listening capabilities, you can conduct social listening for brand perception manually.

DIY Social Listening

Brand Perception

Create a spreadsheet or table to organize your notes. At a minimum, include three rows: one for your average rating, one for the date of your most recent review, and one for your notes. Add a column for review sites, and add a row for each review site you analyze, such as your Google business profile, Facebook page, Yelp, and Glassdoor.

Pro Tip: If you have a large volume of reviews, copy and paste them into an AI tool like ChatGPT to speed up your social listening. You can then ask the AI to tell you what the reviews have in common, how they reflect on your brand perception, and to list the adjectives used most frequently.

Reputation Management

This gives you a baseline for understanding how your brand is perceived. From here, you can work to manage your brand reputation by replying directly to reviews to express your thanks, resolve issues, and more. Knowing what you know now about your brand’s reputation, you will understand the importance of staying on top of reviews and proactively requesting reviews from customers.

BoostGenie™ is an automation software that includes a reputation management dashboard. You can see the number of new reviews, review sentiment, average ratings, and more all from a single interface. It saves you more time by allowing you to respond to reviews from within the software, and it streamlines the process of asking your customers for reviews.

Brand Monitoring

Part of social listening is brand monitoring. The purpose of brand monitoring is to be aware of what people are saying about your brand. You can’t be everywhere all at once, nor can you scour the internet for every mention of your brand.

Set up Google Alerts for your company name, industry keywords, leadership, relevant key phrases, etc., and receive an email notification when it is mentioned. You can adjust the email frequency and even alert source geography to prevent your inbox from overflowing and weed out irrelevant results. This is a simple way to be aware of the conversations happening about your brand; once you set up your alerts, you don’t need to do anything else.

Competition Monitoring

While you’re setting up Google Alerts for your brand, take another minute to set up alerts for your competitors. Through these notifications, you can observe and compare who gets more mentions. Also, you’ll be alerted anytime they’re in the news for new offerings, leadership changes, issues, or more. A regular awareness of your competitors’ brand reputation gives you an edge. It allows you to see their customers’ pain points so you can create a better experience to win them over. It gives you insights into how you can improve your marketing content and even your products and services. The goal is not to copy your competition but to learn from them.

Our Top Tips for Maintaining Brand Consistency

Once you’ve optimized your social media profiles and set yourself up for ongoing reputation management and monitoring, your work is done…for now. 

Brand consistency is measured over time, which means you must regularly take steps to audit and course-correct when necessary. We recommend adding these four steps to your processes so you consistently assess your brand consistency.

• Annual social channel audit and optimization

The social media profile audit and optimization described earlier in this blog should be repeated annually at a minimum. Doing so ensures your business information remains accurate and fresh. 

• Brand voice

Your brand voice is what gives your brand a personality. Ideally, you have a brand voice guide outlining how to communicate as your brand (if you don’t, start there!). As your business scales, your brand brand voice might change. Audit your guide and update it to reflect your brand’s present identity. If your brand voice hasn’t changed, check to see whether your content still reflects your brand appropriately. Randomly choose several pieces of content and evaluate their use of brand voice. If your content isn’t hitting the mark, update it to restore brand consistency and adjust your workflow to include brand voice checkpoints.

• Brand visual strategy

The look of your brand is a significant part of your brand identity. Your logos, colors, fonts, iconography, and images should be explicitly covered in your brand guide. If your business has grown, you may have rebranded or added sub-brands into the fold. Whether you have scaled or not, invest the time reviewing and updating your brand guide. We recommend evaluating your visual content for brand consistency as well. Because visuals can be more difficult to correct and update compared to brand voice, we suggest creating and updating templates for as many types of content as possible to maintain consistency moving forward.

• Content strategy

If your business has grown, your target audience may have shifted, which could mean your content strategy isn’t reaching them effectively. Review your customer persona and make changes or create additional personas to align with the current state of your brand. Are your marketing channels and content types what’s needed to reach your target audience? If so, what types of content are performing well? This is your opportunity to assess the effectiveness of your marketing tactics and adjust your efforts for improved consistency and impact. 

Conclusion

How does your brand best compete for attention in a sea of digital content? Brand consistency! Beyond just a logo or a tagline, consistency permeates every facet of your brand, from messaging to visual identity, from social media profiles to customer interactions.

Brand consistency isn’t a one-time task: it’s an ongoing commitment to aligning every touchpoint with your brand’s essence. From optimizing social profiles to monitoring brand perception, brand consistency is a multifaceted and continuous commitment

By embracing brand consistency, businesses cultivate trust, credibility, and loyalty among their audience. They become not just another option in the market but a trusted companion along their buying journey. And as the digital landscape continues to evolve, brands that prioritize consistency will stand out.

Investing in consistency can propel your brand toward lasting success. If it sounds like a lot to stay on top of, let us do it for you: https://keystoneclick.com/services/digital-marketing/.