People sometimes use the term “brand” and the term “branding” interchangeably to mean a mark or logo and what that design conveys. But branding is so much more than a visual mark. Branding conveys deeper meanings, core values, experience, purpose, and often mood. Branding is your unique voice in the marketplace. It’s how you stand apart and stand for something. Our definition of branding can be stated simply: branding is the connection between the external perception of your company and the internal reality of how your brand successfully delivers on that perception. This includes both the tangible elements of your brand, as well as the less tangible elements, such as culture and values. Every touchpoint from your customers’ first awareness and discovery through their final interaction with your company, whether days, weeks, or years after they have purchased your product, must support that branding. A brand strategy sets objectives and a plan for why, how, what, and for whom you are branding. It includes consistent messaging across all communications, a consistent look and feel, and a strong company culture that supports delivering on the promises people associate with your brand. Brands convey trust; coherent, cohesive, and long-lasting brands create strong emotional connections with customers. People long to be part of a “tribe” that shares similar values and priorities, and become loyal customers. The promise of what your brand delivers must be communicated through your words, images, services, and diverse interactions across all communication channels. You must ensure that this communication is consistent and cohesive across channels, to engender trust, and an emotional connection with your audience. Doing so will help to create not only loyal customers, but also enthusiastic advocates who will tell their friends and colleagues about you.

Understanding Brand Identity

A strong brand identity—what a brand looks, feels, sounds, and communicates—is an integral component of success in a crowded digital landscape. Successful brands are intentional about how they shape and project their identities, crafting a blend of elements that resonates with their target audiences and differentiates them from the competition. In doing so, they are much like people, developing their own unique personas through the cultivation of specific personality traits, values, and communication styles. The process of building a cohesive brand identity begins—and ends—with a brand’s values. Brand values are a statement of who they are as a business, going far beyond products and services to describe what a brand stands for. Sustainable brands prioritize using their core values to guide their company’s focus. This focus not only allows them to develop a consistent identity but also keeps them grounded in their mission while navigating challenges. Once a brand’s essential values have been defined, they guide the next step in building a brand identity—establishing a brand voice. While a brand voice is part of a comprehensive messaging strategy, it plays a primary role in shaping communications across all media channels. A consistent brand voice—and brand messaging—helps customers identify and acknowledge you wherever they see you. It builds trust. Trust leads to conversions.

Defining Brand Values

To create a cohesive brand strategy, marketers must present a consistent and recognizable identity for their brands. Your brand comprises not only its logo, colors, fonts, and visuals but also its messaging and attitude — the voice and personality that direct your communications. Your brand identity is not logo alone; at a minimum, a brand is a set of intangible assets — in addition to the logo, it comprises the relationships you have built and the experiences your customers associate with your company and its products or services. These interactions deeply impact how your company is perceived — and whether or not it earns customer loyalty.

While you use branding elements to express it consistently, your brand identity needs to be defined first. Therefore, before you start selecting colors or logos, you need to define your brand and its values. Your brand values inform and support your mission. Simply put, brand values are your “why” — the beliefs and ideas that drive you and your team. What is the essence of your organization that attracts and connects supporters? Values are why your supporters identify with you — and intentionally express that by choosing to donate money. But what kind of values are we talking about? How do we determine those that are best for our company? Your corporate brand values explain what combination of passions and capabilities comprise your organization’s true identity and describe the business factors that the organization believes support success.

They not only describe what motivates your company to form and promote a business to the public, but also provide a guiding framework that affects every corporate decision, from hiring, long-term planning and implementation to the customer experience. In addition to engendering support from both staff and consumers, your corporate brand values will also help you attract investors who want to be associated with a specific type of enterprise and will therefore commit funds and resources. And like every good relationship, strong organizational support for corporate branding requires honest communication, if things are to be kept strong and healthy.

Establishing Brand Voice

Many brand marketers do not think of voice as part of identity. But the way your brand speaks to your customers is an extension of your brand values. Just as a person’s personality encompasses how they look, act, and think, a brand’s voice reveals its personality through communication. The tone evokes feelings and builds an emotional connection, so your customers remember you. Consider these examples of brand voice:

Easily recognizable with their playful approach to marketing, the smoothie company opts for a playful and friendly tone in social media posts. This brand voice fits their core values: being fun and kooky (but still loving and caring!).

While sad novelties like greeting cards for funerals and memorial services are sensitive by nature, they write in a warm and personal tone to strike a balance between reach and respect. With subtle humor, they lighten up the conversation while honoring their customer’s needs.

Dove’s skin care products prioritize unpretentious and everyday beauty—showing how women look in real life, not just in magazine ads. Their social media posts and paid campaigns give customers goosebumps; using beautiful but relatable imagery and purely positive messages, Dove gives due credit to everyday beauty (which, in fact, transcends age, race, and nationality). The social media tone evokes familiarity, while the campaign copy is often empowering.

Identify the words that reflect your brand’s personality. Think of your brand as a person: What feeling do you want him or her to evoke? Write a biography of your brand to clarify what that personality is. The bio should detail your brand’s values, the inspiration behind them, and your brand’s mission in a world filled with similar brands. Having a biography ready helps establish a brand voice that feels genuine and congruent across all media.

The Importance of Consistency

Consistency is a vital component of a cohesive brand strategy. Your brand is a collection of visual, verbal, and behavioral elements. All of these elements are a reflection of what you stand for, and if those elements were not consistent across all of your marketing channels, you would risk creating a disjointed experience for your consumers. If your brand is one that people latch onto, it is one that people will go out of their way to search for and spend money on because they love it. Whether they’re headed to your website, social media pages, or an ad for your products, consumers should feel like they know what to expect. Discrepancies in your brand can confuse your audience and disrupt your brand loyalty because it sends mixed messages about who you are and what you stand for. In today’s world, consumers have so many choices available at the click of a button. It’s easier than ever for them to leave a website that isn’t credible and instead buy from your competitor. Presenting a trustworthy brand with consistent energy will encourage consumers to invest in your products. Visual Consistency Your visual branding is what communicates your brand essence to your audience without you needing to say a word. Everything from the colors you choose, to the graphics you use, to the images you post creates a visual story that your audience can identify with. Your website and social media pages should use the same colors and elements to create a sense of familiarity. Small design choices can have a large impact on a consumer’s perception of your company. Authenticity is apparent in your design choices, whether they be fonts that are aligned with your brand narrative or a specific style of imagery. Therefore, all of your visual design elements should be a direct representation of who you are and what you have to offer. When done correctly, your audience will create a sense of brand loyalty that encourages them to continually choose you. Social media allows consumers to share their experiences, opinions, and associations with particular brands. Because of this, there is a high chance that visuals from your consumers using your products will have more impact than anything else that you could create. Creating visuals that are unique to your brand will encourage consumers to take their personal images that contribute to your brand narrative, which in turn, will contribute to the authenticity of your overall brand.

Visual Consistency

Visual identity includes logos, icons, colors, web design, anything visual that a company shows to the public. These visual elements must be consistent across all digital channels. For example, if the profile pictures and cover photos on various platforms are all the same, that visual similarity makes it easier to recognize your brand.

Colors play an outsized role in recognition, so be sure to choose a color palette that is tied closely – if not exclusively – to your brand. In fact, studies have shown that color increases brand recognition significantly and that people actually make a judgment about a product within a short time based on color alone. It’s little wonder then that many companies choose to stick to one or two color families. Red is often associated with excitement, passion, and energy, yellow with optimism and clarity, blue with security and trustworthiness, green with health and tranquility, purple with creativity and luxury, and orange with playfulness and friendliness.

Designers should also think in terms of visual style. The visual brand that decorates social media pages and laces email signatures, for instance, is typically cheerful, colorful, and sharp. These all-digital platforms tend to emphasize bright colors and electronic design elements. Digital companies also have an identity that mixes its color scheme with very basic, colorful visuals. It all suggests fun and fresh. In advertising—TV, print, and increasingly, online video—they amplify that aesthetic digitally, while creatively infusing it with appropriate visual jokes and situations.

Messaging Consistency

Consistency is important for digital brands for many reasons. The first is that people are busy, and having to figure out a different message every time they come across your brand erodes trust and loyalty, an important part of brand equity. The most successful brands have a point of view and consistent messaging that the consumer has come to know. Messaging consistency helps consumers to make quick decisions and align with your brand image. Beyond just product purchases, an important goal of messaging consistency is creating a two-way dialogue; people are looking to engage beyond just a product on a shelf. This two-way dialogue with your audience as part of your digital ecosystem is a foundational piece of trust that translates into action especially when a cause has been taken by the consumer. Take a page from the success of Taco Bell, the taco company is so open and honest about joking with customers about everything you just can’t help but love them. They’re relatable.

Implementing a messaging strategy is how that brand promise to both its customers and employees is fulfilled in real time. Beyond just customer touchpoints, messaging consistency is important in internal communications too since companies are their people and people are often the face of the brand. It is so important that a significant percentage of customers say they would switch brands if a company didn’t align with their values. Tuning brand messaging to the different digital channels that people are engaging with ensures that the overall message will make an emotional impact, translate to brand loyalty, and inspire people to advocate on behalf of a brand.

Digital Channels Overview

In today’s digital marketplace, potential customers engage with brands in myriad places, both online and in person. Luckily, it has become easier than ever for companies to create cohesion and consistency with their marketing messages across digital communication channels. Email marketing remains a powerful direct communication tool for brands looking to promote sales, communicate on special occasions, and keep customers informed on the latest developments. Content marketing offers brands devices to tell their stories, showcase their expertise, and provide useful and engaging materials about their industries. Brands create a home on their website where customers can explore everything important about their business and its products, all while optimizing their page to provide an excellent user experience and show up in search engines. For both B2B and B2C brands, social media platforms are increasingly essential tools to showcase products, interact with customers, and shape the way customers experience their brand and engage with it. From social media accounts allow brands to demonstrate their style while building relationships with consumers. Each of these services provides marketing professionals a unique opportunity to communicate in real-time with audiences around the world and spread important messages. And while social media can be an immediate tool for topical discussions, get your brand into the conversation when something momentous happens, and push users to check out your website, it is vital to remember that it is also just scratching the surface of what digital media provides.

Social Media Platforms

Speaking straight to the target audience, talking to them about their world, and getting them to invest their time and attention is a very hard job. Brands working through the campaigns on the targeted platforms can recruit those first fans eager to experience what they have to say. Nowadays, several social media sites cater to specific needs of a brand and put their message across in a unique template. It can generally be segmented into four types which further specify the need: Social Networks, sharing or community sites, micro-blogging, and blog/media creation sites.

Social Networks are focused on establishing connections with family, friends, or shared interests, brands work through the connections created here and keep them engaged. The sharing sites allow the audience to search and connect with their content. These sites are most often used for new concepts, trailers, etc., while allowing for comments and backlinks from within the space. Micro-blogging sites are characterized by short, concise briefs about updates, with the use of hashtags to allow for topic discovery. The posts refer the audience to other detailed media, like video or a blog/media creation site. Blog/media creation sites are websites featuring text or text and media galleries created by the user themselves or with the help of industry experts. They allow for communicating content and creating a following. Brands or companies target these sites by featuring media on their blog or guests on their websites. The brands then use these connections to engage in conversations about relevant topics, thus pulling in traffic.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is an essential part of the customer journey. Email can be a primary source of communication with your customers, even for very large organizations. Major retailers communicate promotions, discounts, and specific shopping lists to customers by email on a very regular basis. It’s also the preferred communication channel for many non-profits for delivering newsletters, donation campaigns, and specific urgent content. Some retailers are starting to integrate email and text marketing so that customers can opt-in for special deals or promotions via text. Since many people check text messages more frequently than email, it’s a way to connect to a larger number of customers actively engaged with those channels. Marketers also link customers to personalized webpages with static information that comes from your customer relationship management system, shopping profile, or website activity, which displays a “wish list” of special purchases customers are attempting to make when particular items are sold out. The email takes these customers to a ‘back in stock’ landing page generated specifically for them. Others email stylist-generated suggestions of additional items to consider with recent purchases. Even if you don’t have an enormous marketing technology budget, linking to desired actions can turn your email marketing into a dynamic and personalized experience that drives conversions.

With the correct tools in place, anything can be personalized for your customer. If you have the technology, consider collecting an opt-in for your short- or long-form content, and start segmenting various lists accordingly. Deliver specific email series related to those topics. Review and analyze the performance of your various segment marketing campaigns and tactics regularly to learn from those insights for future emails.

Website and SEO

We recommend that all content-driven businesses have a website with an integrated e-commerce solution. There are a variety of platforms that can serve this purpose. Choose the best route for your business by selecting the platform that meets your needs while providing you with the most user-friendly experience. The primary goal is to have a functional website that gets search engine traffic and converts visitors into leads or sales.

While it may be easy to throw together a generic-looking website especially using a website-building service, the better your website is, the more effective it will be at drawing site visitors and converting them into customers or at least collecting their contact information so you can sell to them later. As a marketing agency we see dozens of customer websites that vary in quality, and we’ve provided the following guidelines to potential customer clients that you can use for your business website or share with your own customers.

For the best results in website design, and to limit the need for conversion funnel strategies to close site visitors at a later time, these are the elements an effective site should have: Be eye-catching. Instantly grab attention and be memorable. Be creative, unexpected, and showcase a strong message. Be simple. Communicate your message in 60 seconds or less. Use easy navigation. Be simple to remember and navigate, with pages with clear headings that are easy to open and just a click or two away from the home page. Contain social proof. Feature testimonials, reviews, and ratings to enhance the credibility of your brand. Be responsive. Viewers should be able to easily navigate your site whether on a computer, tablet, or smartphone. Be unique. Communicate your value proposition clearly. What makes your brand unique? What do you offer that others don’t? Be trustworthy. Avoid using dubious marketing techniques and unrealistic promises. Be informative. Provide comprehensive information that clearly explains your offerings. Be user-friendly. Focus on several high-value, highly relevant calls to action that encourage prospects to easily do what you want them to do.

Content Marketing

With the surge of content sharing that has increased exponentially through digital channels, content marketing has become a powerful marketing tool for brands to explore. Businesses also share content, whether formal or informal, while creating meaningful and relevant conversations around their brand. Businesses also often collaborate with influencers who share their opinions on their blogs, as well as newsletters, about these products or services, starting from their initial experience to the lasting impressions, successful results, and recommendations. Businesses collaborate passionately with some influencers only to boost the sales of their new offerings, and those influencers only mention these offerings one day in their blog, or newsletter, in a single line without even a hyperlink. Informative articles on the company blog may direct potential buyers to the company’s website, and if they find what they could use, it could guarantee a sale. If the potential buyers are satisfied with the product or service, they may write reviews on their blogs or social media accounts, sharing their opinion with thousands of followers.

Companies involved in business-to-business (B2B) projects could consider content marketing for their organizational needs as well. Instead of reaching the audience through the marketing promotional advertisements in various social media platforms, companies could share white papers that share industry stats to draw attention. They might subtly link to their product or services through these reports without any blatant marketing campaigns. The report may also go viral, welcoming producers and consumers to start a conversation on social media. Videos can also be engaging content for people nowadays since they tend to skip the lengthy information overload, until they really need it, in the form of long-form articles. While emails have slowed down in their “click here” rates, sharing a video through email can boost the conversation rates through visualization rather than plain words.

Creating a Unified Brand Message

Creating a Unified Brand Message The digital world has made communication easier, but it has also made creating a cohesive brand message more challenging. There are a lot of different channels vying for your audience’s attention, and brand messaging can easily become fragmented or distorted in the shuffle. Different tones and messages across digital channels can confuse potential customers, increase the likelihood of them leaving you for a competitor, or even lead to conflict with your social media managers or content strategists.

In addition to distracting customers, having unclear messaging can make it difficult for businesses to communicate internally as well. If one team member is executing a strategy based on assumptions about the brand message and another team member is working off a completely different interpretation, that can lead to serious problems. That’s why we recommend establishing a unified brand message before you create your digital marketing strategy — it’s easier to execute if everyone is on the same page! With that in mind, this section will take you through the basics of crafting your core brand message as well as bigger picture brand messaging guidelines.

Crafting Core Messages

A brand message is the foundation for every piece of content a business creates. The “core message,” or messaging guidelines, establish the starting point that inspires marketing materials, company presentations, product-marketing communications, and all the other outreach work you do. These guidelines steer what can be a wide range of content towards unified, engaging, brand-supporting messaging. Your messaging guidelines should: 1. Identify a primary audience segment for each core message. Who are you communicating with? What area of your audience do your messages target? Each audience segment usually has its own set of motivations, challenges, and decision drivers, so at least one of those factors should be included when choosing the audience primary segment for each message. 2. Include at least one core strategic message that’s relevant to every audience segment your business communicates with. Some core messages will be aiming at a specific business function; other core messages will appeal to a wider range of target audiences. 3. Relay one specific brand belief, and say it at the one storytelling level that best appeals to the targeted audience. Do not try to cram too many statements into a core message. If a brand belief is elusive to word in a single sentence, consider including a way for users to learn more. Your core messages are not the only messages you’ll ever communicate to your customers. For example, a specific audience might care about a particular feature of a product, while for another audience the benefits of the product or service would be more compelling.

Tailoring Messages for Different Channels

Digital channels are platforms where consumers expect different things from brands compared to traditional advertising channels. Traditional mass media simply blasted consumers with marketing messages, whereas social media marketing opens up a dialogue with consumers. Email marketing gets up close and personal with consumers, who expect personalization of mass emails. Mobile marketing provides brands with the ability to communicate with consumers on a one-on-one basis at any time of day or night. Direct mail provides the opportunity for a more personalized communication with customers due to the nature of directly sending something of value to a customer instead of throwing the same message out into space for billions of people to hear. As a result, marketing messages should be tailored according to the goals of each channel. Below are the specifics of how to tailor messages for these different digital platforms.

Asking customers to like your page on social media or check out your feed is not persuasive in itself but is possibly something that customers would be willing to do if they believe the brand will create interesting and entertaining brand-related discussions. Still, brands must have a good reason for being on social media in the first place. Customers don’t want to see more ads, but rather hope to gain some additional emotional connection to the brand. In addition, customers also want a platform where they can interact with the brand itself, as well as other brand enthusiasts. Social media is the perfect channel to provide customers what they want—in-the-moment updates about the brand or the ability to ask questions or converse with other users. This means brands also have to think about what they want to achieve when they use social media: is it just another marketing-heavy channel or is it a reliable source for information where customers can ask questions and expect answers?

Integrating Brand Strategy Across Channels

Achieving multiple objectives spanning multiple channels without losing the coherence of your overall brand strategy is no small task. People have very different expectations of brands based on where they are and what they’re doing at that moment. A brand should, of course, make its personality clear, but doing that without losing connection with the user’s context is challenging. You have to coordinate all of your marketing activities to make sure your brand shines consistently without feeling forced or awkward. In other words, a cohesive brand strategy spans across channels. Different channels should focus on different attributes of the brand and different messages, while coming together to build a complete picture. You don’t wear the same clothes everywhere, but your style is consistent whether you’re at work or at the beach. Brands do the same thing across channels. In addition to that, some channels work together: a user will often hover between a couple of channels before making a decision or taking action. Some channels serve to incite action, while others serve to inform. In this case, consistency is crucial. If ads promise a discount on a product that isn’t discounted when the user reaches the website, then the discrepancy can hurt the brand’s credibility if not user experience. All of your marketing activity focused on a user should have consistent CTRs.

Cross-Channel Campaigns

It’s not enough to post the same message everywhere once in a while and expect everything to be coherent. You must think how the different messages and tactics combine into a single cross-channel campaign, a common and well-structured idea or action across the most relevant –and often different– platforms. Campaigns are different than just posting on various social media. The main difference is that they have been pre-planned and executed over a period of time. They have special connections, reciprocal actions, and effects on development. The goal of a campaign is to create a multifaceted approach and synergies to increase the impact and effectiveness of the scattered messages.

In order to use the channels to their plenitude, brand campaigns tap into the strengths of each social media and hook users to move them from one channel to the other or to other platforms. These are special types of campaign; and sometimes, all channels are working synchronically and harmoniously to amplify the campaign message or focus its users into another platform with a different purpose or goal.

User Experience Consistency

In addition to messaging and look and feel, consider keeping core user experiences the same across channels. Think of such experiences as the underlying functionality that supports your value proposition. Some examples include searching for products, configuring products, getting support via knowledge bases, e-mail, chat, and forums, and placing orders. If your website supports certain experiences, certainly your apps should as well. And for cross-channel experiences that begin or end online: Don’t forget about the experience on the other channel!

We’re not saying that all of these experiences need to be the same; in fact, if time or budget permit, they should be optimized based on each channel’s unique affordances. That being said, you’ll find that taking such an approach helps ensure that there’s no friction when a user switches channels. They won’t have to relearn anything if they start on one channel and end on another.

Maintaining a level of experience consistency across channels minimizes friction for users that switch back and forth between channels regularly. But experience consistency isn’t always desirable. This is particularly true for experiences that aren’t yet present on all channels. You can take the opportunity to create something new and different for different channels at those points; building user churn and frustration into the experience might help it stand out more—and grow a better fit for users who like to use just one channel.

Measuring Brand Consistency

As a brand manager, the very first thing that you will need to consider is how you are going to measure whether the things you are doing are effective in building brand consistency across different digital channels. The reality is that measuring the effects of brand consistency in general is not particularly simple, but additionally, keeping track of individual performance across various channels, correctly attributing the revenue to whichever channel is responsible, and keeping track of brand-related performance on these channels is even more difficult, as users will very rarely interact with your brand on just one touchpoint before making a purchase.

Traditionally, the brand-tracking activities involved in gathering feedback on key brand-related metrics were done by sending out surveys or using surveys filled out online by the target customers. However, these methods of collecting data can be very time-consuming and interfere with the customers’ user experience, resulting in low response rates if these feedback-gathering activities are not executed well. Luckily, with the growth of digital channels, there are now a multitude of software options available to help conduct market research. These options usually collect data from social media and review sites and allow the brand manager to analyze various metrics of consistency and strength, as well as providing insights on how best to improve any issues that arise.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

A corporation can utilize its performance to measure the many aspects of its consumer experience and, most significantly, how effectively the business is managing those aspects. Although measuring elements of a brand’s strength is complex, numerous indicators, such as website, store, and product discovery and evaluation, satisfaction and loyalty with purchases, and revenue and operational costs, can provide guidance that is particular enough to help determine consistency and inform decision-making. This chapter discusses some of the best-known indicators of brand experience that are commonly used and are increasingly visible to advertising organizations: those that measure business success and profitability.

Success comes from individuals and companies interacting seamlessly and consistently, regardless of interaction location, and all in support of the brand promise. “We’ve been focused on profitability; our cost of sales is 17.5 percent, which is two full percentage points below other retailers in our space. The reason for that is we are a focused brand retailer. There are tremendous efficiencies in selling exclusively our own brands. That’s really what we’re all about!” said Ellen Gordon, Director of the Stock Exchange Trading Company, a food retailer that sells its own private label brands exclusively.

As Gordon notes, when customers view a business over time in many different ways, for example, through communications, advertising, and store experiences, they are much more likely to respond to a promotional effort with a purchase. As such, customer visits at many levels should be measured. Locally, it can be done through surveys. Nationally, or even at the category level, it should be done with standard metrics such as brand strength, customer recommend scores, and market share. More broadly, individual company financials can be cross-checked against overall competitive sales data and relative market share data.

Customer Feedback and Surveys

This is a brief overview of the significance of customer feedback in measuring brand consistency: Achieving brand consistency can be a daunting task, and even when you put your best efforts into your branding, it doesn’t mean that everyone else sees it as you do. One of the best ways to check if your branding is consistent across all your channels is by asking your customers. You can survey current customers or do market research using potential customers. In your survey, be sure to include clear examples of your branding, such as your company logo and brand colors, as well as the message or tone of voice you use in the copy on your website and other social media channels. Ask your respondents to identify the brand based on these examples, or ask them to describe how they would define your brand.

Another good way to check the consistency of your branding is to ask your customers about their own experiences with your brand. Ask them questions about your product/service, your website, ads, customer service, and overall experience.

Customer surveys are a great way to gather qualitative data about your brand. You can gain insight into customer perception by analyzing survey responses. You can ask your customers to rate the different aspects of your brand, including brand story, product design, or aesthetics, customer service, online experience, price, and social media content. All of these aspects contribute to customers’ perceptions of your brand. Based on this data, you can see if your internal perception of your brand matches how the world sees your brand.

Adapting to Market Changes

A business cannot afford to become complacent or stagnant if it wants to survive in the long term. The digital environment is always changing, what is trending today may be gone tomorrow. A brand can easily lose customers to its competitors if it does not regularly check in on what the current online trends are. This does not mean that a brand has to constantly change its image or its ideals in order to stay trendy, because this would not be a cohesive brand strategy. However, as more events happen in the world, as science is proven, and as technology advances, companies may have to adapt how they convey their message through their branding in order to not become obsolete.

Brands need to pay attention to their customers’ changing needs, which can evolve continuously over time. A company might innovate its product or service based on the new knowledge and trends present in the world or based on reviews it receives from its customers. Additionally, if a new health or safety issue is brought to the masses’ attention, companies might need to invest in changing aspects of their strategy to comply with what society expects of them. A company’s responsiveness to the current environment is affected by their size and the resources they have available to adapt, but being able to do so is crucial for a cohesive brand strategy.

Staying Relevant

Creating and keeping a strong brand presence on digital channels takes time. Yet, you must also adapt to your audience’s growth and shifting market demands. That is, just because you develop a strong following doesn’t mean that your audience will stay the same. The values and ideas that once led customers to follow you may evolve as they do. Also, while you may follow your own interests, it is possible to get “hobby-horsed” into topics that bore your audience, or may even be in conflict with their values. As such, it remains important to evaluate the general mood in your target market, aware that the social media environment allows consumers to express these fervently through user-generated content.

Digging to find some indications of trends in the conversations happening in your niche is critical. For example, a search could show you how keyword interest has trended over time. A search could show you hashtags that were recently popular. Additionally, checking competitor digital channels would make clear what your audience has been recently interested in, as seeing a competitor post about a current relevant topic would predict that competitor performed research to confirm what their audience is most interested in. Seeing audience interaction with competitor posts can give you even more insight about the interests of their followers. As it is likely that both your audiences overlap, you can know how to adapt your content better to retain your audience’s interest. Holidays, events, and trends in the news are just some examples of things you may be able to incorporate into your own content strategy to make your brand more visible.

Responding to Customer Needs

A critical challenge for business decision-makers is how to meet customer expectations in a world that values agility and flexibility. Market needs are prone to change, with shifting customer preferences inviting brands to rethink their positioning, messaging, and product offerings. Responsiveness is a crucial competitive edge and many brands err on the side of being too cautious, too slow to respond. Moreover, once a brand starts addressing one specific need that temporarily appears big for a specific group of customers, it needs to remain focused and also deliver it well, as having many different irritants may lead to inconsistencies. Risk-averse brand managers need to change their perspective on risk in order to benefit from the new paradigm of making bold choices.

At the same time, adopting a responsive customer needs strategy is risky, given how quickly and dynamically social media messages can pivot. A key tactical question for brand strategists is whether to latch onto a developing narrative and, if so, how to make it consistent with their brand equity. Additionally, experts insist that brands with a more traditional image showing up in trending, culturally relevant moments may get called out for opportunism. The brand risk is real; as one expert says, “Do it poorly, and you’re just another hashtag with a lot of angry people around you. Do it well, and your brand gets to own that hashtag and show that you actually care.”

Case Studies of Successful Brand Strategies

Successful digital brand strategies are not just aspirational goals. Increasingly, companies are able to implement proven best practices to optimize their brands on digital channels like social and mobile. We review several, from which we derive some lessons learned.

Brand A: A Cohesive Approach Many companies are expanding with the building blocks of a cohesive digital brand. Consider the recent activities of a company to use multiple forms of social media to enhance Buzz. With both corporate banking brands and degree focused, lightly edited user-centric blogs, the company has begun to make a more active investment in improving marketplace discourse around both their industry and brand. Rather than just a command-and-control effort on their corporate sites, the company has leveraged various social tools including social bookmarking, customer reviews, tech sharing, wikis, and fsms, to expand their voice in a way that is less promotional and more authentically interactive. The degree blogs in particular have helped provide a simple way to provide expert insights into their services while actively engaging in conversation with potential customers. By also lifting the entry barriers to comments, more casual non-customer onlookers are able to share their opinions about industry issues and concerns.

The result has been impressive. Both the corporate blogs have elfed, and the corporate messages are now amplified by their blogger constituents. By combining their customer communities from multiple media both into and out of their core website, the company has improved the personal connections that customers, potential customers, and employees can make. From a service standby, they have shortened the time it takes for someone to establish trust in their customer service while adding some “friends” in the process, and simultaneously improved their Seriouscy score through the social proofing of their blog interface. What’s more, they have begun to aggregate the external public conversations about their blog content, allowing them to respond in real time to marketplace issues. These feeds provide a simple, cohesive interface into the external conversations about their primary digital platforms.

Brand A: A Cohesive Approach

Rather than approach each platform independently, Brand A took a cohesive approach to their brand strategy, ensuring the same brand messaging, tone of voice, and visual branding were apparent across both. First, the same tagline, “Because we like nice things,” was used in all advertisements and posts on both the website and Instagram. This was highly effective as the tagline was a play on a famous designer’s “Because we like nice things,” tagline, cementing Brand A’s ribald aesthetic. Whenever any photos were uploaded to Instagram showing entirely orthodox interiors common to the plant’s customers, Brand A took the approach of turning the expectation on its head. This approach was well accepted on Instagram, a platform with a long-established tradition of humor and silliness. Though followers may have wondered why an “off-topic” photo was shared on an atypical day, it was in keeping with the deliberate disruption that Brand A regularly employed. With content so often curated to be “perfect,” it set the account apart from so many others. The humor and contrast worked well and was also the desired unique selling proposition behind the plant design’s three different collections: Antipole, Amplis, and Esquisse.

Cohesion was achieved in many other ways. The tagline was clearly stated on both the website and Instagram bio, phone and email contact details were listed in both, and so was an allusion to the “curated” purpose of the Instagram feed hinting at the humor apparent in most of the posts. Products were tagged on Instagram whenever posted, similar photos across channels were consistently captioned, and promotional sales and events were announced in both places. Likewise, conversational copy, “fun” emojis, attractive photos and graphics all with consistent filters were regularly used. Items or collections were featured on a regular basis. Instagram was used both as advertising tool and in directing followers to the site for purchases.

Brand B: Lessons Learned

Aside from the concrete metrics measured from the campaign successes (and the losses), brands can also learn from the content strategy decisions made in those campaigns. These five lessons listed below are real-world changes and actions taken by brands that make a lasting impact on how well a new piece of content is received online by their audience. Oftentimes, misconceptions about digital channels can lead brands to produce less-than-stellar results. These five lessons answer the questions “What are some patterns behind the success of these campaigns?,” “What changes could these brands have made before and during the campaigns?,” and “What can the brand community learn from these campaigns?”

Shorten Your Learning Cycle: Sending out less than a full brand message at a time can help you tweak your strategy as your audience starts to engage with the new content. It can be quite challenging to predict how the brand’s audience will respond to a new campaign. For example, while Brand B had a theme that asked them to Go Natural, at first there was a lot of content that was counter-productive to that theme, like the Go Natural commercial with Snoop Dogg. Because Brand B had a mix of theme messages coming out, they received many comments that supported the more amusing commercials, and so it signaled to them that contrary to the increased focus on the Go Natural theme, the audience still preferred funnier commercials. This engagement with the commercials was consistent up until the longer Go Natural commercial was itself released, which inadvertently signaled the end of the humorous era of Brand B.

Challenges in Implementing Brand Strategy

Building and maintaining a great brand is certainly a challenge, but helping teams embrace the brand strategy in their daily work is a bigger task. Companies face two main implementation challenges: resource allocation and maintaining team alignment. Overcoming these two issues is essential should you want to succeed and make your branding efforts both efficient and effective. You will need to prepare teams from different areas of the company to follow the brand strategy in their daily work, as they are responsible for carrying the brand’s promise into action, chiefly in areas where the impact of branding is most keenly felt.

Resource Allocation

The development of a cohesive cross-channel brand strategy requires careful consideration of and investment in your brand vision. Uniting dollar volume and priority to truly match the brand strategy – making the whole greater than the sum of the parts – should drive appropriate resource allocation across business functions and across channels within the marketing function itself. Moreover, doing a good job of managing the process will allow you to avoid common pitfalls, such as page-and-click-throughs that offer lots of timely data but aren’t pertinent to optimizing brand results, or coordinating measurement for accountability for initiatives that don’t seem to be under the control of any single function.

Resource allocation decisions tend to focus on financial and personnel distribution, and the success of a brand marketing function clearly requires a substantiation of the budget to motivate allocations toward the brand vision as well as sufficient staff, where long-standing efficiencies have caused some companies in the industry to cut back in recent years. The company must also create incentives for all stakeholders to invest the hours in crafting their specialty around the brand. The real benefit of integrated brand strategy is that the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts; that is, success depends on being able to coordinate strategic direction and decision-making into consistent and mutually supportive activities, not just putting in a lot of hours building documents to keep everyone informed.

Maintaining Team Alignment

One of the biggest challenges in maintaining team alignment across an organization is that a brand strategy touches nearly every part of the company. No single team owns the brand, meaning that there are contributions and dependencies that exist between several groups. The brand is “owned” by the customers. It is shaped and influenced by all the company employees who have any touchpoint with the customer. Hires and training programs. Product roadmaps. Technology stacks. Platforms used for customer interactions. Marketing programs designed to reach, attract, and convert prospects. Service and sharing strategies that impact pre- and post-sale customer experiences. All these can strengthen or weaken brand position, customer perceptions, and team alignment with that outside-in view of brand importance.

To keep teams collectively focused on a brand strategy requires formal and informal communications, defined roles, and priorities. Creating an internal brief enables teams from different disciplines to engage in the same conversation, one that outlines shared objectives and functional roles. Weekly check-ins help people see how their everyday work ties into what a brand establishes as bigger-picture priorities. Weekly alignment meetings involving higher-level stakeholders across functions help ensure that each discipline is sufficiently briefed and their efforts are coordinated. Recipients need to validate progress, confirm what they expect, and approve plans that tie into overarching priorities. Use behavior metrics and other measures of success to keep executives and teams that drive execution accountable for delivering marketing results that positively link to brand equity objectives.

Future Trends in Brand Strategy

The digital marketing landscape is ever-changing with new technologies, strategies, and social platforms announced on a weekly basis. However, brand needs will largely remain the same. Current brand needs include community, accessibility, and transparency. In this section, we explore a few trends that will shape brand marketing strategies and tactics over the next decade. The growing amount of research and investment in privacy of personal data and preventing its misuse will shape the focus of new companies, as well as existing product and service offerings. Companies will focus significantly on how to use programs, algorithms, and interfaces to optimize for the brand’s bottom line, but also invest heavily in what will maximize effective customer relationships and engagement.

Emerging Digital Platforms

A more fragmented digital ecosystem is developing in which older established digital platforms are being challenged by newer, often niche platforms. For brands, this is both a risk and an opportunity. The proliferation of lesser-known digital platforms allows for the creation of more targeted and specific customer touchpoints than more massified channels, broadly used by millions of online users. On the negative side, brands may struggle to find their audiences on specific and niche platforms, as well as deal with fragmented content strategies across different digital platforms.

There are several reasons for the current fragmentation of the digital landscape. A far-reaching democratization of marketing is taking place, with fewer technological barriers for the creation of new digital platforms or apps. Furthermore, many emerging platforms cater to younger generations who are seeking alternatives to mainstream and often overly-massified platforms. Emerging platforms are often built on audience demand for fun, engagement, and entertainment, as well as for a more authentic presence of brands online.

Several emerging platforms have carved a niche for themselves, from video-sharing platforms to social platforms for younger generations. These platforms have exempted themselves from the trend for mainstream platforms to monetize their target audiences by bombarding users with invasive ads. For content marketing teams, it creates a greater opportunity for experimentation with brand strategies to develop a more cohesive content marketing strategy that places the consumer at its center.

Personalization and Customer Engagement

Today’s increasing pressures on attention call for a new, deeper and more meaningful relationship between brands and potential customers. The most successful are the ones that manage to deliver more relevant messaging to an audience that is no longer able to process mass corporate buzz. Moreover, today’s online audiences do not want to engage for the sake of it. They want an experience that adds value to their lives: fun, entertainment, enjoyment of sharing and participating in the things they love. The content that drives the most engagement, shares and word-of-mouth is judged to be either too funny or too useful; that is, messages that surprise, please and/or help drive the engagement process. The Internet has been a significant catalyst of this evolution. Since its inception, the Internet has evolved from a transactional model that enabled the execution of tasks more efficiently and faster than other means to a dynamic relationship-oriented model allowing individuals to connect freely and informally.

Four significant trends can be identified in the evolution of the Digital Brand Strategy: ongoing evolution of online customer-on-customer interactions; constant push for the development of technology-assisted customer-to-brand interactions; shift in the interactive model towards entertainment; and increased demand for authentic, spontaneous communication from brands. Thus, marketers are between a rock and a hard place. With limited resources, they must deliver more content to become more relevant and trigger more interaction, while customers have less and less attention to spare. The more brands push and the less time, patience and awareness they show; the less their audiences will consecrate their time and attention to them. The challenges for marketers will consist in developing real two-way relationships with their audiences rather than monologues filled with brand-inspired tales and glossy advertising content. They will need to build authenticity and relevance into their Digital Brand Strategies if they are to reap the rewards of increasing consumer attention.

Conclusion

In summary, a cohesive digital strategy is crucial for brand success in today’s digital world. A defined single-purpose and cohesive brand strategy moving forward will ensure relevance, visibility, and connection with consumers. Brands should also use the digital landscape for listening and observing consumers while blurring the lines between corporate and digital branding. This essay has suggested a three-part model for creating and maintaining a cohesive digital strategy. Brands must begin with a proper internal alignment that shares consistency and commitment to brand values across the organization. Only then will these values pass through the employees who interact with consumers throughout the experience journey. After determining the internal and external bridges, corporations must also connect the dots between the various digital touchpoints to ensure the same message is being communicated. These digital touchpoints must also act as assets that are capable of being leveraged to echo brand values and messages. However, brands must ensure these touchpoints are connected while encouraging creative expression along the way.

Cohesive strategies won’t be easy. Internal resistance, technological constraints, and unique touchpoints with limited capabilities will pose challenges. This ongoing effort will take time, resources, and management buy-in. However, consumers are thirsty for connectedness. Both in their own lives and in the brands they connect with. Brands currently leveraging and nurturing both is a joy to experience, and will pay dividends in brand resonance and loyalty down the road. A cohesive strategy should become a part of your brand. To create a cohesive brand strategy requires clear guidelines that spell out how to use the tools available to us in a way that resonates deeply. And when brands and consumers meet at this deeper level for the first time, it is a beautiful moment. There’s a reason we often describe alignment or resonance as a “magic” moment. And as a brand and a consumer, when you’re able to experience these moments together it’s truly a magical experience.