Brand Alignment 101
Brand alignment is an essential pillar when it comes to creating your brand, and cannot be ignored. Consistency is key when it comes to building trust with your audience. Whether this is consistency in tone, style or values. As a Digital Marketing Agency, we highly recommend aligning your brand. This ensures that you are building trust at every stage.
What is Brand Alignment?
Brand alignment is the process of ensuring that your brand is reflective of its core values. One example would be aligning the visuals of your brand, such as your core branding across different platforms. New leads are going to find your brand and want to justify whether they should purchase from you. This could involve looking at your website, social media, ads and more.
Leads will respond better to brands that convey a cohesive brand look and feel. Especially if it matches what they are looking for. If your website is out of date but your socials are active with a refreshed style, they will notice this. Similarly, ad clicks will likely take you to a website or social page. Therefore the graphic style will need to be in-line too.
Honing your Core Values
Or on a more psychological level, your brand needs to consistently hark back to your brand’s core vision. Leads will be quick to notice if your general brand outlook or tone of messaging changes. To keep a strong brand reputation, it is vital that your brand culture reflects your values.
We recommend sharing regular content around your core brand values and vision amongst your promotional and behind-the-scenes content. This gives a better understanding of who you are as a company and allows the customer to connect more deeply. Read our blog on the ethics of marketing here.
Internal Communications
As previously mentioned, keeping a consistent tone of messaging is an important aspect of brand alignment. For example, your internal communications with customers needs to be transparent and open. Remember, bad service will likely become a public opinion not a private one.
Especially when it comes to sales, your attitude towards your customers is important to reflect equally for sales and returns. If you make your process difficult, customers will leave feeling confused. Then they are less likely to recommend you and come back.
The Importance of Brand Identity
Your brand identity needs to be genuine and transparent across the board. An example would be with your advertising. It is considered bad practice to appear for keywords that aren’t relevant to your brand identity. For example, appearing for a “sustainable fashion brand”, but not reflecting this in your supply chain, social media or website content to back it up.
It is important to ensure that your SEO and PPC strategies are in-line with your brand goals and values. These must be as transparent as your public content. Misguided leads are not going to be loyal leads.
Creating Brand Guidelines
By formulating detailed brand guidelines, you can ensure that all parties involved in the representation of your brand are on track. Brand guidelines allow you to develop a specific brand style, tone, messaging and common iconography. It can be as detailed as you like, suggesting specific tones and phrases, or colour palettes for different products.
Read our blog on the importance of brand guidelines here.
Aligning with your Audience’s Interests
Your audience are going to be looking at your brand to conclude if you are offering something they are interested in. Not only do they want to establish that you are a trustworthy and unique brand, but they want to relate to you. Using test advertising and analysis, you can determine the exact interests, demographics and characteristics of your audience. Off the back of this, you can tailor your content to suit their interests.
The best brands are companies that use their values and their audience’s interests to build an engaged community of leads. By sharing regular and relevant content that aligns with your audience, you can ensure that you are keeping on trend and in their mind’s eye.
Reinforcing your Reputation
When connecting with your audience, it is important to see your brand being talked about in your community. We recommend incorporating influencers and product reviewers into your strategy to make sure your viewers are aligned with your industries. By using feedback, reviews and influencers you can reinforce your positive reputation and appear in popular content where you may find potential leads. Not only does this spread the word and share your values, it also builds trust and credibility organically.
Brand Alignment 101
Hopefully we have given you some food for thought when it comes to ironing out your brand identity. If you are having trouble with conversions, or users dropping off at a particular stage, we recommend analysing your brand consistency. It might be that one area of your business isn’t in-line with the others and is causing leads to bounce.
Feel free to get in touch if you would like to align or re-invent your brand, or want some support with your strategy.
