Three Reasons to Keep Your Digital Brand Consistent

If you’re a multi-location tire shop, you understand the importance of brand continuity – upholding a standard across all locations. After all, you want your customers to feel like they’re visiting the same store no matter where they shop.

Brand continuity should also extend to your online presence, where your business can be found across multiple channels, including your website, social media pages and online business listings. As more channels are introduced to the internet, some brands make the mistake of trying to be everywhere at once without devising an overall brand strategy. This usually results in a lack of consistency between channels, which undermines the company objectives. While good marketing can draw customers to individual platforms, brand continuity is needed to pull all the channels together and create a cohesive approach to online business.

Continuity is the application of consistency plus improvement – in other words, connecting your digital channels in a way that improves the overall customer experience. It requires a brand standard to be applied to all your digital touchpoints to ensure every online interaction furthers the sales process.

Here are three ways brand continuity supports your business:

Improved Marketing Outcomes

When you first designed your shop’s logo and brand message, no doubt you poured a lot of time and intent into crafting a high-quality brand. Over time, though, it’s easy for good intentions and hard work to be eroded by inconsistent management across digital platforms. To preserve your efforts, it’s important to employ the same keywords, messaging, designs and customer service from your website to your Google listing and your social media profiles. Consistency fosters brand familiarity, which in turn supports brand growth.

Why? Well, it turns out that 95% of purchases are made subconsciously and based on emotion rather than logic¹. Consumers gravitate to brands that offer a sense of familiarity, and familiarity is bred through brand consistency. If your brand delegates online communication and marketing tasks to different team members, the parties involved should be aligned on their strategies. This means the website manager should be meeting regularly with the social media guru to make sure they’re using the same brand guidelines.

Reduced Risk of Identity Crisis

Any time your business undergoes a rebrand or refresh, all online profiles should be updated as well. Otherwise, you risk confusing new prospects who come across your old logo or company name. At best, they may assume your business is not active online, but at worst, they may think they’re interacting with a completely different brand. Neither of these situations are ideal.

Even if your brand is hard to mistake for any other, letting old logos float around the internet can affect your image and cause shoppers to not take your brand seriously. Any time your business changes something about its look or services, all digital channels should be updated to ensure shoppers only find the most accurate information.

Brand Quality Becomes the Standard

Employing brand continuity across your digital outlets supports your business in fostering positive interactions for online shoppers and strengthening your brand’s reputation as a customer-first resource. So, whether you plan to update or just maintain your brand, we encourage you to identify some key identity guidelines and create a plan for how they will be reflected on your digital channels. Be sure to share the guidelines with your team, especially anyone involved in running your online profiles, to keep everyone on the same page.

Through consistency and ongoing team communication, you can transform your brand into one that’s easily recognized by your shoppers. If you would like some external support in creating brand continuity, feel free to connect with the TCS team today!

¹Ignite Sales