Consistent Branding: The Key to Building Customer Trust Online

Why brand consistency is crucial for building customer trust online

Consistent branding is essential for building trust, recognition, and credibility with your audience – which all drives sales. Everything from your logo and colours to your tone and messaging needs to be cohesive if you want people to have confidence in your business. Recent statistics show that over one-third of companies attributed a 10%—20% increase in revenue to consistent branding.

The impact of consistent brand messaging on customer perception

It’s human nature to associate consistency and familiarity with feelings of comfort, stability, and trust. Creating a cohesive look, feel, and tone for your brand feeds into this instinct and is a key part of building a loyal and emotionally invested customer base.

Uniform branding also reassures people that they can expect the same experience wherever they interact with your business. Plus, it reinforces brand recall, making you instantly recognisable in a sea of competitors.

When people know and trust you, they are far more likely to buy in (and come back for more). Online consumer studies show that 80% of male and 70% of female customers prefer to buy from a brand they recognise. Similar percentages of people are happy to pay more for a product by a brand they know and trust.

If you haven’t assessed how well your branding hangs together across your digital marketing recently, here are some useful pointers.

Essential brand identity elements for a trustworthy online presence

So, how do you ensure your brand has the required look and feel? Let’s start with the visual elements.

Your brand logo

Placing a well-designed, distinct, eye-catching logo across your marketing channels is a must. Consistent logo placement is important (you don’t want customers hunting around to find it). It also needs to be easily scalable and formatted to fit whatever platforms you use (a blurry, pixelated logo is never a good look.)

Colour palette

There’s more to choosing brand colours than you might think. Certain shades bring up different emotions. So, it’s helpful to understand marketing colour theory if you’re building a new brand or adjusting your existing colour scheme.

Whatever colour palette you choose, keep things consistent and have the proper Hex codes on tap when needed.

Typography

Like colour palettes, the right typography can be super effective at conveying brand tone and style. Select legible fonts that have good contrast and match your business type. It’s also worth researching the most and least popular fonts (looking at you, Comic Sans). You don’t need too many typefaces. Have two or three in the bank and stick to them like glue across your marketing.

Images and design

Use the highest-quality images possible, keeping the feel and content of pictures, graphics, and videos aligned with your brand personality. Clear and simple is the way to go. A healthy dose of white space stops things looking too crowded and overwhelming.

As well as the visual elements, there’s also brand tone and content to consider:

Brand voice

Brand voice can vary a lot. If you sell executive consultancy services, your tone is going to be much more formal than someone running a kids’ play centre. Whatever voice you decide on, academic, casual, etc., you need to keep it unified across every platform.

Consistent content

Your values, mission, and tone should always be at the heart of any marketing content you create for optimal brand consistency. Filter all your messaging through your unique brand lens. Then, use it in the most effective formats for your customers, and you’re onto a winner.

How to maintain a cohesive brand across websites, social media, and ads

1. Make a brand kit

The best way to stay on track is to wrap the above elements up in a nice, neat brand kit. A comprehensive branding pack is a critical reference document for any successful business. It gives every team member the same guidelines for all your content and visuals, keeping your marketing consistent across the board.

A brand guide isn’t set in stone. It will change alongside your business and market trends, so revisit it regularly for a refresh. If you need expert help to put a new branding kit together (or to breathe life into the old one), our Web Adept brand specialists can help.

2. Use templates for your marketing

Templates are great tools for maintaining consistent content branding. Well-designed templates allow you to connect with your customers in a comfortingly familiar format and can also be a real time-saver.

3. Check your channels

A regular brand audit never goes amiss. Periodically review your online marketing channels to check that your branding is looking tidy and tight. If you have strayed off track, it will be easy to identify any inconsistencies that need sorting.

How to measure the success of your online branding strategy

Customer feedback and brand mentions

There are lots of monitoring tools out there that can help you assess brand awareness and measure search activity. And that will give you a clearer idea of whether you have built a memorable brand.

Your customers are a rich source of intel, too. Why not send a survey or conduct an online poll to find out how they feel about your brand? They’re the perfect people to pick up anything missing the mark, allowing you to make more focussed changes.

Engagement metrics

Your metrics will give you a heads-up on how well your brand messaging connects with your audience. So, monitor all the comments, likes, shares, and click-through rates. Once you know where the cracks are, you can fix any inconsistencies.

Conversion and retention rates

Engagement is great, but how many visitors become paying customers? Knowing that consistent branding builds trust (which brings higher conversion and retention rates), closely track your sales and repeat customers. It’s an excellent indicator of whether your branding strategy is cohesive enough.

How Web Adept can help you build trust and boost sales with consistent branding

At Web Adept, we love a branding brief! We have years of experience helping new businesses launch successful brands and also work with established companies wanting a refresh or a complete rebrand.

Wherever you are in your business journey, you can rely on us to ensure consistent branding across your digital marketing, leaving you well placed to cultivate trust, boost brand recognition, and enjoy increased sales.

To create a lasting impression, contact our brand strategists today.