Every day, your customers see thousands of marketing messages, so your business needs to work hard just to stand out from the crowd. Brand consistency is key if you want to set yourself apart.

Being consistent, but not boring or repetitive, in how you show up creates brand recognition. It reinforces people’s understanding of what your brand stands for and is the foundation for creating a connection with your ideal customer.

For people to connect, they need to feel a sense of ease and familiarity with everything to do online. You need to present a coherent image, tone, and values across all of your different marketing channels and communications if you want to build a persuasive online presence that people trust.

However, keeping the machine running involves a lot of moving parts. Marketing teams are juggling multiple channels. They are churning out content for the website, landing pages, social media and email marketing. Increasingly, teams are working from remote locations, across time zones, and include external contractors and agency partners.

Creating consistency amid all this can be a big ask.

Luckily, marketing automation tools can help.

Executing Your Brand Guidelines

Consistency is rooted in clarity. Without a clear definition of what your brand stands for and how you want to tell your story, your team cannot execute a unified marketing strategy.

Documented and accessible brand guidelines are the first step in making sure everyone in your company is on the same page when it comes to building your brand identity online. 

These define everything. From how your logo should be used in different situations, to your brand’s colour values and fonts. From its personality traits, to how you use images and copy to communicate them. After reading your brand guidelines, every member of your marketing team should have clear parameters for how and where your brand presents itself, what subjects it does and doesn’t talk about, the language it uses.

A marketing automation solution builds on this basic alignment to create a central repository of on-brand templates, messaging and assets that ensures consistency in the look and feel of your communications. Well designed templates and a thoughtfully implemented brand asset management system should make it almost impossible not to create content that follows brand guidelines.

Control Content Creation

Knowing what your brand guidelines are is only part of the battle. Building a content creation workflow that minimises deviation from your brand and ensures quality control is another. This is especially the case when you’re onboarding new team members or working with external suppliers.

A central platform helps to streamline the content creation and sign off process. It provides space for your team to collaborate on and refine content before passing it up for approval. In this way, marketing automation’s scheduling tools become a way for you to catch off-brand messaging before it goes live.

You’re also able to see an overview of your marketing activities so you can  manage the content workflow, allocate resources and make sure you hit approaching deadlines.

No matter how many people are involved in executing your marketing strategy, your team will have an easier time aligning their communications with your brand when they have a library of examples to guide new content creation. 

Having all of your assets in one place can save your marketing team time and money. Being able to reference and repurpose from a centralised library of approved assets will stop them reinventing the wheel or duplicating effort.

Brand guidelines are often thought of as merely static assets and simple rules for people to follow. But it is more productive in a digital context to think of your brand guidelines as parameters. Digital technology does not have to just store assets and rules, it can apply them algorithmically to generate content that fits within the parameters of your brand.

Regular, Scheduled and Done

In addition to wanting to know what to expect from your brand, potential customers also like to get a feeling for when they can expect to hear from you.

When you create guidelines for your marketing strategy, you will also determine how often and in what way you should communicate with leads and customers. However, think about how hard you find it to consistently build up positive habits in your life. The same applies to your marketing strategy: life has a habit of getting in the way.

In an average business, there is simply too much room for human error and delays due to unforeseen circumstances to achieve a regular posting schedule manually. 

The main purpose of marketing automation software is to make your life simpler. By using software to facilitate communications with your customers you ensure your brand is able to deliver relevant content at consistent intervals.

Scheduling email newsletters and social campaigns in advance means you no longer have to worry about doing everything in the moment. You can also create workflows using dynamic templates for regular customer interactions, building a consistent yet personalised customer experience.

No matter what else your business throws at you, your software is there to publish posts and automated emails. And it can do it at just the right frequency and respond in a timely manner, ensuring that the customer receives relevant communication at the right time.

The data gathered in the marketing automation platform from your campaigns can also help you to identify whether you need to adjust the frequency of your communications. If you’re over- or under-communicating you may be overwhelming potential customers, prompting them to unsubscribe, or losing business to more eager competitors.

More Time for Creativity

Of course, there’s no point sending out regular communications if they’re not going to have the desired impact. Therefore, one of the most important guidelines for your team should be related to the quality of their campaigns. 

If you want to stand out, you can’t just aim to have a uniform look and tone of voice. You need to hit a consistently high-quality standard. Customers who know they can rely on your brand to provide them with new insights, or to educate or entertain them, are much more likely to look out for and interact with your content. 

That means making sure your team has time to be strategic, creative and add value. If your team is busy dealing with various social media accounts or are bogged down in dealing with routine enquiries, they won't have time to come up with ideas that add value. Harried, creatively stifled people have a much harder time being engaging, funny, or informative.

As a result, you'll have to either spend more on hiring to expand your team or accept lower-quality communications. By automating repetitive tasks, you can allow your team to function optimally and with more job satisfaction. With more time and mental space to spare, they can focus all their efforts on creating consistent value for your customers.

Consistently Relevant

Finally, while it's crucial you communicate regularly and according to your brand guidelines, B2B audiences also expect individualised attention. You can no longer deliver the same message to everyone and expect them to deliver quality customer relationships that drive sales. Instead, you have to target your communications to the individual in front of you. 

The data collected by marketing automation across all channels enables powerful advanced segmentation. This, combined with dynamic content and behavioural workflows, allows you tailor your customer’s journey, personalise your communications and nurture leads at scale.

Whether it's landing pages for sales or lead generation, or a welcoming email sequence, you can use automation to make sure your messages are consistently relevant and match the individual consumer's needs.

From the seamless sharing of digital assets and creative collaboration, to scheduling your communications across all of your digital channels, and creating consistently relevant interactions for your customers, marketing automation can help you to build a powerful brand online.

If you would like to find out more, get in touch and tell us more about your individual marketing needs.