This is a supplemental blog to the webinar Maintaining a Brand Standard While Navigating Omni-Channel Presence. (A joint effort with AO2 Management)
In this article, we'll take a look into the strategies discussed in the webinar, providing you with actionable insights to enhance your brand's omni-channel presence.
Importance of Brand Consistency: The Real Key to Omni-Channel Success
The digital landscape does not stop changing. It is an infinite vista where consumers interact with brands across various platforms; a 2022 Deloitte report suggests that 25% of Gen Z and Millennials use an average of 10 different media platforms, and 90% have at least 5. Maintaining a consistent brand image is essential.
90% of Gen Z and Millennials have at least 5 media platforms they frequent.
Here’s what that could look like:
Brand consistency builds trust, fosters loyalty, and ultimately drives sales and engagement.The customer journey now spans social media, D2C websites, wholesalers, affiliate sites, physical stores, Amazon, and other third party marketplaces - just to name a few. If you don’t think you need a cohesive brand experience across all those different channels, you’re in for a bad time.
The Perils of Brand Inconsistency
Brand inconsistency can have detrimental effects on purchase decisions. Each touchpoint (thousands upon thousands) is an opportunity to gain or lose trust. We discussed the concept of “Social Capital” in the webinar to support this. The perception of a brand may not be tarnished just once, but for that consumer’s lifetime - and that consumer has friends.
A Yotpo survey revealed that 73% of shoppers say inconsistent brand experiences negatively impact their purchase decisions. Read: there are financial consequences of overlooking brand consistency!
Consider this scenario: Imagine a national food chain where the quality and standards drastically vary across different locations. Maybe that chain's price is so variable that it can’t maintain a consistent experience to match the consumer’s expectation. Looking at you Wendy’s.
There are financial consequences of overlooking brand consistency!
Just as one bad experience could deter customers from returning to a restaurant, brand inconsistency across channels can lead to lost sales and diminished customer loyalty.
Building a Foundation for Omni-Channel Success
To achieve this elusive “brand consistency” across channels, it's critical to establish a strong core identity. Understanding your brand's core values, mission, and unique selling proposition forms the lighthouse for crafting consistent messaging and visual elements. Brands with strong internal alignment achieve higher employee engagement, reinforcing the positive impact of internal collaboration on brand consistency.
Crafting consistent messaging requires storytelling. Your story has to resonate with your audience while maintaining a consistent brand voice. Adapting messaging to different channels while staying true to your brand's identity, visual cues, offers, pricing, customer service, and more, aligns consumer expectations across platforms.
Take a brand’s visual identity. Oberlo states that a signature color can increase brand recognition by 80%. By scrupulously adhering to a visual identity through logos, colors, fonts, and imagery, brands can strengthen their recognition. You unlock suppressed previous experiences with the brand. Were all those experiences positive?
How can a brand manage their Social Capital? There are so many revenue channels - not to mention, they all have their own guidelines and specifications you have to follow.
Strategies for Seamless Omni-Channel Experiences
Automation and personalization is the key to delivering consistent messaging and engaging customers across channels. Leveraging automation tools streamlines processes. Through innumerable Saas’s, you can “batch-work” content, while weaving your story to a highly targeted audience. We may expand on this in future entries, but for now a good source to review these is G2 Crowd.
The cherry-on-top is personalized experiences, catered to individual preferences. This is typically implemented during the “Consideration” or “Conversion/Post-Conversion” stage of the customer journey - aka, not the consumer’s first touchpoint. It is best used to drive brand loyalty and engagement, and mostly automated through your CRM data and various marketing tools.
This data-driven optimization enables brands to gather actionable insights and refine strategies, “What’s working? What’s not working?” It gives you room to test, and optimize, always pushing for the most efficient use of resources.
Simply, what’s making us money and what’s not. What are all the metrics telling us is happening along the consumer journey. Your own brand story of performance.
To implement strategy, it is CRITICAL to get collaboration and alignment across marketing, sales, and customer service teams. Establishing standards, ensuring alignment, and implementing practical tools with processes can achieve seamless brand experiences across all touchpoints. Be sure to measure department specific actions and goals that bubble up to the overall mission of the company. This could be call handling metrics in the customer service department, and/or engagement on a particular social media campaign. It’s all part of the ecosystem.
Alas…
We have established The Key to Omni-Channel Success is understanding the importance of brand consistency, establishing a strong foundation, and implementing effective strategies. Through a intentional approach brands can navigate the mind-numbing expanse of the omni-channel landscape with sustained success.
