Multichannel marketing is an essential consideration for brands intent on improving user experience through customised marketing strategies as it will allow them to better connect with their audience. How can a business ensure brand consistency across these multiple channels? Here, we will outline how to go about creating a strategy to ensure consistency, streamlining content creation, brand architecture, and finally how to monitor and measure your brand activity.

Step 1: Evaluating the Current Brand

The first step to brand consistency is a content audit. How does your brand internally communicate your company’s culture and values? How does it appear externally across all advertising and marketing materials? And finally, how is the consumer experience when interacting with your sales and customer support processes?

The degree of alignment between marketing communication and content, as well as identifying content quality strengths and weaknesses, are detailed. By measuring your customer satisfaction and how your audience sees your brand over time, a brand audit benchmarks your success against that of your competitors.

Step 2 Creating a strategy for brand consistency

Once an audit has been performed and the brand has been evaluated, a strategy needs to be created for ensuring brand consistency which is done mainly through streamlining content creation. However, this is easier said than done, as creating quality content requires a deep understanding of your audiences, budgets, efforts, and time. Growing brands need content - fresh, appropriate, and immediate content. 

Why should a business worry about consistency in the first place? Brand consistency is crucial to obtaining consumer trust, enhancing connectivity, and allowing consumers to recognise and remember it more distinctively. Consistency helps portray the brand more clearly, allowing consumers to develop associations with products, services, and the company. 

Step 3: Streamline consistent content creation

Let’s now look into what’s required to streamline content creation. First, get a deep understanding of the type of content your audience is interested in. What are their pain points? Who are they? What affiliations do they have that may influence them? From here a brand manager should begin creating and testing different types of content on a variety of platforms. To ensure consistency, a brand guideline should be used which dictates the parameters and characteristics of various marketing materials. 

Step 4: Active brand presence

Recent years have brought more complex marketing necessitating a custom approach across multi-media platforms, therefore, winning new clients has become more challenging, especially for small businesses. With the Great Resignation, combined with the pandemic and current financial downturn, firms are having difficulty sourcing and retaining professional skilled in-house marketers. One solution to maintaining an active brand presence is marketing outsourcing. 

Step 5: Monitor and measure your brand activity

With a strategy for ensuring consistency created, and a method of streamlining content implemented, the last step is monitoring and measuring your brand activity: click through rates, traffic, and conversions all the way through social shares, mentions, and backlinks. Keeping track of brand activity is important and will provide insight into how well your brand is performing. 

The consistency required to build a brand is not always easy for small businesses to maintain. Branding requires a lot of research, planning, many long hours and, most importantly, the right expertise. Achieving successful branding as a small business is therefore most easily achieved through marketing outsourcing. Marketing outsourcing is a form of business outsourcing that assigns the marketing function of a business to an external marketing agency for management. Many marketing agencies operate with a focus on small business branding and provide small businesses with a cost-effective, efficient solution for their marketing needs.