Consistency is key, especially when it comes to marketing and customer relations. Done correctly, it will help you hit your stride with your content marketing strategies, building brand awareness, promoting trust, and ultimately helping you retain more customers.
This isn’t the sort of thing you can will into existence at the snap of a finger, though. Building consistency takes time, but these tips will help you get started on the right foot.
What Is Consistency and Why Is It Important?
In the marketing context, consistency refers not only to releasing content on a regular and predictable basis. It also means that the level of quality across everything you do is held to a minimum standard that customers can rely upon. The tone of voice, design details, specific brand touches — all of it should remain identifiable so that your brand does as well.
In maintaining consistency, your business will benefit in several ways:
- Your brand will become more recognizable: Never underestimate the power of repetition. When you’re steadily pumping out cohesive, quality content, customers take notice, and link that back to your brand. In time, just a glimpse of something will be more than enough for them to start making the connection to your brand.
- Your audience will come to trust you: The more people know, the more they’re likely to trust. This philosophy suitably applies when it’s something they know they can depend on. Maintaining a steady level with your content makes it easy for customers to develop that personal connection with your brand that makes you feel more reliable.
- You’ll get a better idea of what customers like: When you’re consistent, you’ll have more data to pull from for marketing research and analytics. You’ll be able to learn how your audience responds to different marketing efforts. This, in turn, provides you with more precise insights on what’s working, what isn’t, and what you need to change to achieve success.
- Your SEO will improve: Fresh content is often given priority by search engines. By keeping things consistent (and original), you’ll help increase your search engine rankings and should be able to get more leads.
- You’ll boost your conversions: Simply having more leads gives you more chances for conversions, but consistency will also help you out by making your brand one that customers prefer (because they feel that you’re trustworthy).
You’ll only be able to develop consistency with careful strategic planning, however, particularly when your team is forced into a remote working situation. This is because it’s typically harder for your team to communicate regularly, which makes it easier for them to inadvertently work at cross purposes.
With a proper plan in place, however, and a clear delineation of specific actions your team should be taking to achieve consistency, everyone can stay on the same page and work toward your ultimate goal.
Building Consistency With Your Content and Marketing
Reaching this goal of consistency can only be achieved as long as you promote a standard level of quality for all of your marketing content. Consistency of quality will require you to follow some basic writing tips, such as keeping your language simple, breaking content into sections, and including graphics to boost appeal. It will also require that you make your content creation process a habitual action instead of an occasional one.
Content scheduling is the other side of this coin that you cannot ignore. You’ll be more likely to release content regularly when you have an editorial calendar planned, as it will make it easy for you to hold yourself accountable for deadlines.
Since you’re probably going to be managing a lot from the content side and will need to push out your marketing materials across channels, you’ll benefit greatly from incorporating automation technology into your consistency strategy.
Automation will allow you to schedule content drops well in advance, then concentrate on other parts of your marketing game since you won’t have to manually post everything that you’re creating. Additional tips for consistency in content include:
- Utilize an outline for all written content
- Adapt your content to the specific medium you’re releasing it on
- Maintain a recognizable tone across all channels
- Craft content to fit your audience
- Keep it personable
- Edit everything that you do
Of course, maintaining consistency isn’t a static thing. Your content should be ready to adapt based on how your customers are receiving your content. For that, you’ll also need to prioritize audience research and business analytics to help you learn about the effects your marketing efforts are having over time. Here’s how it works, in a nutshell:
- You create marketing campaigns that you believe speaks to your intended customers
- You record vital metrics of success, like traffic, new visitors, page views, etc.
- You analyze those metrics to judge the strength of your marketing content, then make changes to your content and measure how they affect performance.
- By repeating this process, you’ll discover what kind of content strikes the biggest chord with your audience, so you can maintain that level of quality until shifts in the market (or your consumers) necessitate you to change again.
Bottom line, your push for consistency will benefit if it’s driven by facts and you allow for change based upon new data. Analytics will play a significant role in helping you learn more about your audience, and in turn, how to create content that consistently resonates with them.
Keep Consistency as a Primary Goal
You won’t be able to make the most out of your marketing efforts unless you maintain consistency in what you’re doing. This means producing content regularly, but also holding your content to a reliable standard in terms of quality, tone, aesthetic, etc.
Be sure to build consistency through your content, but remember that what works today may not necessarily be as effective in the future. You’ll need to weave in data and analytics to ascertain the performance of your consistency efforts, which will also allow you to adapt when you notice that your strategy is faltering.