Keeping on top of the customer journey has become more difficult than ever in recent years, due in no small part to the vast and seemingly endless collection of ways that customers can find and navigate towards your website and sales page.

With social media, marketing campaigns, word of mouth, traditional advertising, SEO, and inbound links all striving to attract customers and bring them towards your business premises and/or website, ensuring consistency in messaging across all of these platforms is perhaps one of the most important roles held by a digital team.

Which is why this post is all about brand coherence, and the importance of ensuring that every platform is sharing the same messaging, communicating the same vision, and nurturing the same kind of customer responses.

What exactly is brand coherence?

Brand coherence refers to the consistency in tone, messaging, and the connection you have with your followers and customers across different channels. In the simplest terms, it ensures that no matter where a customer comes across your brand, the experience they have in terms of the tone and style of communication is always the same.

Crucially, brand coherence is only really effectively achieved once you have a brand personality in place – with our biggest piece of advice for clients being to work on personality before coherence. Knowing how you want to be portrayed and received by customers will help to inform the way you post, communicate, and respond across all platforms.

The importance of brand coherence to your customers

Imagine you find a discount for a brand you like on Facebook, offering 10% off your next purchase.

Now imagine that you later find that same brand on Instagram and see that they are offering 20% off.

This is a very simple (and hopefully unlikely) scenario, but the concept is clear. When you brand fails to be coherent across different platforms, it can cause upset among customers who report very different experiences. And while once upon a time, customers might not have been aware of such inconsistencies, for example in print advertising in different locations, the multichannel focus of modern marketing means that any small inconsistencies will be noted and reported.

Brand coherence is what makes your brand or business a reliable authority in the eyes of your customers. It shows them that you are being 100% transparent around what you offer and provide and is more likely to lead to a higher rate of conversion among customers who trust you.

The importance of brand coherence to you as a business

So, why is brand coherence important to you as a business?

In short, when your brand is coherent in its messaging and personality, customers know what to expect and are less likely to be confronted with inconsistencies. This means greater loyalty among customers which means greater returns, fewer complaints and issues, and could even mean a higher rate of word of mouth marketing and recommendations among existing customers.

In addition, for businesses who invest in their brand coherence, they tend to find that their marketing channels are much easier to manage with each individual team operating on the same page.

Of course, brand coherence is not without its challenges. With every social now playing such a big role in marketing strategies across every sector, it seems that businesses have a different team for every platform. And while this no doubt makes regular posting and efficient responding easier to manage, it does make consistency in tone, language, and style more difficult – as the teams operate independently rather than as one.

With that said, how can you enhance your brand coherence and ensure that those different platform managers and team members are working under the same, coherent brand personality?

How to enhance your brand coherence

1. Keep your teams connected

There is definitely an argument for having different teams focussing on different areas of your online and digital marketing strategy – however, for the sake of brand coherence it is crucial that these teams work together, especially in the run up to major events or launches.

2. Create a working brand coherence document

This could essentially act as a checklist, where any and every release is run through the list to ensure it ticks as many boxes as possible in terms of its brand coherence. Not only will this document give you a quick and effective way of measuring each piece of content against your brand “traits”, but it will also help to immerse new recruits and individuals across the business in your brand personality.

3. Find out what works with your customers

This one is more about ensuring that the brand personality you opt for is working. Assess and monitor the success rate of different pieces of content that you release – both in terms of visual creative and messaging. After all, you don’t want to build an entire brand personality on concepts which aren’t that attractive to your end customer!

4. Outsource and seek the help of a professional agency

Nobody knows your brand better than you and your team – but what a professional agency can bring is a new perspective, and fresh ideas around how to take your brand personality and give it the wow factor which will be worth repeating.

If you decide to work with a digital design agency on a number of campaigns and launches, they will soon get to know your brand personality as well as you do and will help to ensure what they create and what you release is always coherent.

Here at Social Loop, we support businesses across all sectors, creating and delivering coherent strategies every single day. Find out how we could help you to fine tune your brand personality and transform your vision into a coherent marketing plan, by getting in touch today.