Are your marketing efforts not working?
Several business leaders have told me something along the lines of… “we have a great product, and our customers love what we sell. But we’re not growing. We’ve tried everything it seems - email marketing, influencer marketing, events/tradeshows, social media marketing, advertising, content creation, you name it.” What if I told you there is probably one thing you are greatly overlooking? That one thing is consistency.
In a 2024 report from Forbes, 34% of small business owners report that marketing more effectively is an area of opportunity.* Often marketing teams are doing lots and lots of great work, and when you look at the singular piece of marketing, such as a product campaign, an influencer program, or even a caption on a post, it looks great, but when you look at your marketing holistically, your company is missing the consistency in the messaging and branding.
Consistency is important because it’s the connectivity of your brand across all of your platforms. It tells the customer one story, and that is a story they can remember and connect to. Loyal customers have strong trust with a brand. And consistency is the foundation to building trust.
The good news? Creating consistencies across your marketing strategy is not difficult, but it does require focus, and it definitely requires a clear brand. Here’s what you need to do:
Strengthen your Brand. Make sure your brand is clear, straightforward and “non cluttered”. You should have a strong brand with defined messaging, logos, colors, fonts, imagery, and feelings your brand wants to evoke. This is extremely important. Without a clear brand, nothing else will fall into its proper place - at least not in the long term.
Quick story: One of my clients is admittedly, not a marketer. This CEO is (rightfully) focused on the company strategy and the key problems that need to be solved. This leader wasn’t sure how important branding really was, but needed to reach new audiences quickly. We worked together to create a clear, purposeful brand. As a result, any asset that was distributed, such as a company video, podcast, or sales event has felt like a natural extension of the brand. The consistent imagery, colors and purpose filled verbiage and stories led to exponential reach across the industry. This can be you, too. Your brand should jazz you up, even if you, like my client, have no interest in delving into the world of marketing.Inventory of Marketing Assets. Pull together a list of marketing assets that are live or to be distributed at a future time. You are creating an inventory of each asset, reach, and effort to align to your brand. For example, if you have a video on your website, that you also feature as a pinned video on your instagram account, you can determine the reach to be the total number of visitors on your website plus your instagram followers. The goal here is to get a sense of which marketing assets are getting the highest reach, so you can prioritize what needs to be urgently refined to meet your strong brand guidelines. On the flip side, if you have an asset with a low reach that takes a lot of effort to update, you are better off archiving and can recycle that asset for a future need.
Quick help: download the marketing assets spreadsheet to get started!Marketing Updates. The non glamorous, but very important and very rewarding work. You should be able to put any singular asset (email, post, picture) in front of your favorite customer, and it should scream your brand! Think of YOUR favorite brands - chances are you can pick out from a selection of 10 photos which one your brand would post. In addition to photos, this is also true of a caption, a story, a color choice, fonts and more.
Quick story: one of my favorite brands is known for making even the simplest item, like a pair of socks, very aesthetically pleasing. On September 11th, they posted a photo to their instagram of a beautiful sunset over NYC’s twin towers in memory of 9/11. One comment read “why do you have to make 9/11 aesthetic, jeez”. The answer? Because that is their brand. Every single image they share, will be gorgeous, no matter the reason. And that is what keeps customers coming back (and remembering) to shop with this brand.
When it’s all said and done, you can enjoy seeing how a consistent marketing strategy yields real results! Your customers, existing and new, are on a path to build more trust with your brand, and over time, loyalty.
Now you are positioned to execute your marketing strategy.
Written by: Caroline McKenzie
Last Updated: September 2024