Does your brand have a cohesive message?
Overcome challenges in creating brand connectivity through design and content and create more unified messaging between your design and copy.
Marketing teams have their work cut out for them. Not only do they have to constantly think of new and interesting ways to reach their audience and grow brand awareness, they have to track campaigns, keep challenging deadlines, and make sure their messaging, storytelling, and design are all consistent.
Brands can become known for certain things – a tagline, a logo, a specific color scheme – and it’s important to incorporate these elements of your brand voice and styling to make sure that your marketing materials are always identifiable as yours. Here are some ways to address challenges in creating brand connectivity through design and content, as well as some examples of cohesive branding.
How to Create Consistency
Create a brand guide: This reference would include the color palette that’s used in advertising, as well as examples of visual styles and copy that reflect your brand personality and personality. Some brand guidelines include everything from how telephone numbers are formatted to the way numbers are written out to the kind of fonts that can be used in communications. These small details matter and help give your brand a consistent and distinct look. With a brand guide, everyone from your internal creative teams to agencies can all be on the same page about the expectations.
Make sure you match: It’s important to look at the visual elements of your assets – whether its web pages, case studies, print ads, or something else – and make sure they match your brand voice and identify. Using Comic Sans font might not be a good idea for a buttoned up downtown law firm. If your photography features a serious businesswoman at her desk, you might want to make sure your ad copy isn’t irreverent.
Have a multi-brand strategy: Connected and cohesive product branding can be tricky when your business has several products or brands all marketed separately but housed under the umbrella of one organization. One of the best ways to make sure that all the pieces fit together and still feel like they belong to the same parent company even if they’re very different products is to establish and follow brand guidelines. Use a brand strategy template that can allow you to use similar features for different brands – the same fonts, comparable voice and tone, similar colors, etc.
Product Branding Examples
One brand that does a great job of creating consistent messaging across all channels and with both their design and content is Denny’s. Their social media accounts all post content that’s similar in tone and their design is consistent, always using the same font and colors whether it’s on signs, ads, or their webpage.
Another notable example is Tasty. They’ve branched out to several international markets now and expanded their brand, but their brand videos are always done the same way no matter where it appears. Their photography is always clean and consistent, which pairs well with their minimalist copy.
When developing your brand development strategy, it’s important to consider cohesion and consistency. Making sure the elements of your design and copy work together in style and tone can go a long way towards creating effective marketing assets, and making sure that assorted brands share similar elements can give consumers a comforting sense of continuity that can garner your business more awareness and appreciation. While there are certainly challenges in creating brand connectivity through design and content, having a solid starting plan and paying attention to details along the way can help you create your best materials.