When a company visits your website, do they get the same brand experience as they would across your other digital channels? What about offline – is the branding of your brochure or print campaign consistent with your online branding? Brands never want to be predictable but when it comes to marketing strategy, consistency really is essential.

It raises brand awareness giving your company a personality and identity. It reinforces your position in the marketplace, therefore driving authority. It helps attract new customers. An inconsistent message can create confusion and could be seen as a sign a company cannot be trusted. Companies are often time short so how can you ensure brand consistency internally and externally across all touch points all of the time?

The building blocks of a consistent brand identity include messaging, tone of voice and design guidelines. While these must be specific to your company, these are the main elements that should be considered.

Logotype and brand message

A brand message should clearly define your positioning. Think about your logo and rules for using it with or without a tagline too. Consider how it will be applied and if you need different versions (ie; a logo with a transparent background might be a requirement). If your branding agency is designing a new brand identity, consider how it will translate across all touch points. Will one logo suffice or does it need to be scalable?

Design guidelines

Brand design is not just about a logo, design guidelines are a fundamental part of the mix. Typically these should include a colour palette, font type and weight, photography and illustration styles as well as other visual elements. Consider how the colour palette will work online and offline, checking colour matches in programmes such as PowerPoint. It’s worthwhile including guidelines for your website (ie; banners, buttons, web fonts) and print (ie; specifications for the most used collateral). Your brand design agency can help with this.

Tone of voice

As well as the look and feel, tonal values are just as important. Consider how your tone of voice will be applied on your website and in print but also across your social media channels. Think about the personality of your company, what kind of impression you want to give and how should you communicate. Cover off best practices like grammar, punctuation and spelling with your branding agency as well.

Once your brand guidelines have been finalised by your brand design agency, it’s worthwhile considering a cheat sheet featuring the most used elements too. It’s a great way to have a quick point of reference while ensuring brand consistency. Clear brand guidelines should provide everyone internally with a framework to implement activity across all channels.

If you require help with your brand identity or brand guidelines, feel free to contact us on 020 3146 4341 today.

It is great when a marketing campaign generates a sizeable pot of new business leads and warm contacts. This achievement though presents the immediate challenge of converting that interest into sales.

And yet customer interest is notorious for waning, which is why it’s important to remember that one ‘touch-point’ alone with your company rarely persuades a potential customer to buy from you. It can often take several interactions to convert their interest into a sale.

Over the years we’ve helped many businesses, not only generate leads, but also convert them. Here are 3 key factors that often make the difference between success and failure.

1. Coherence and consistency across the buying journey

For many products and services, the buying process is far from instant. The more expensive the purchase, the more attention a customer will allocate to it. For example, they may embark on information gathering, discussing a specification with a sales representative, seeking out recommendations and testing or trialling a sample of the product or service before they reach their final decision.

To reassure potential customers that your business is the one to buy from, it really helps to deliver a consistent, clear and pleasant experience at each stage of the buying journey. In particular, try and avoid the customer:

• receiving conflicting or confusing information
• witnessing branding inconsistencies across your marketing and sales collateral
• encountering a poor or unresponsive experience from your sales team.

So keep in mind your brand consistency across the user journey.

2. Keeping the sales process personal

Customers hate to feel they’re just a number to you and love it when you tailor messages to them. So take advantage of marketing personalisation technology for your printed or digital communications. Ensure your digital marketing can cope with the different environments your customers may be interacting with it (mobile, tablet, desktop etc). Identify any common stage(s) where customers stall in their decision to buy your products and services. Also consider communications, offers or sales team contact which can help move them on to the next phase.

3. Standing at the ready

When marketing and sales teams work closely together on a lead generation campaign, the results can be breathtaking. This means having sales personnel at the ready to respond to interest the minute a lead engages with your company’s marketing. Advances in marketing technology mean that online pop-ups, video, virtual presenters, dedicated emails or ‘click to dial’ phone numbers are easy to set up. These help to move potential customers into dialogue with a sales representative and enable businesses to respond quickly to interest the minute it arrives.

For this approach to work well, it’s essential to fully brief the sales team on the marketing promotion’s content and timings. There’s nothing worse than trying to enquire about a service and experiencing a lengthy delay, or a salesperson who is unfamiliar with the promotion you’ve seen.

If you’d like additional ideas about how to speed up the buying process and converting leads into sales, do get in touch with us at Clever Marketing.