When you do your spring cleaning this month, do not forget to include your brand’s visual identity!
Even if you already have a good online presence, it is important to always maintain and keep it updated. Every impression you make will be someone’s first impression, and that person might eventually become a customer based off that impression. You want to make sure that each one is consistent and in line with your established guidelines.
We have compiled some tips to keep your profiles up to date without doing anything revolutionary or making any drastic changes.
1) Make small adjustments in your messaging.
The slightest shift in your tone or appearance is noticeable when communicating on social media or to a passive audience. That might sound intimidating, but you can use that to your advantage to catch the eye of your audience by making subtle but distinct changes in your messaging. The longer you can grab their attention, the more time they will devote to engaging with you.
For example, at Octagon Media we use a rotating color palate on all our social media posts that changes each month. That allows us to maintain brand identity while also delivering content that is not monotonous and subject to blind scrolls from our followers.
2) Keep your optics up to date.
In today’s age, your website sees more traffic than your physical office. That was the case before the COVD-19 pandemic and it is especially the case after it. No matter what product or service you provide, your customer base is more likely to research you online before they ever make an in-person visit.
As such, it is important that any change you make must be reflected online, and vice-versa. If you run a business, you likely are constantly adjusting your pricing or the services you provide to account for any market changes or internal decisions. The information you provide on your website must be constantly updated to reflect any of those real-world adjustments. This relates to everything from pricing to inventory and services provided to your brand identity and even your office space.
3) Utilize any avenue of communication.
This might seem like a no-brainer, but it is something that is always worth actively double-checking. The goal of advertising is to reach people where they are, and you must constantly assess your approach and where you are attempting to engage your audience at. Most physical advertisements are more ubiquitous than digital, which means you can tailor your digital advertising to be more specific to the audience that you have actively sought out.
If your target audience are Millennials, you can customize your message to Twitter or Instagram Facebook, LinkedIn for Generation X and TikTok for Zoomers. You can’t lose by meeting your audience where they already are.
4) You can always simplify and unify.
One of the hallmarks of a good brand is consistency. You were probably very wary of your new standards when you rebranded, but with time we tend to let our guard down and let more slip through the cracks. The only way to stop this from happening is to constantly stay vigilant for any lapses in brand consistency. Look out for any contradictory statements or communications, visual or verbal, that do not fall in line with your past messaging.
A good way to ensure there are not any lapses in brand unity is to apply your external communications standards internally. If your employees are always practicing your standards, there is less likely of a chance that you will make an error in your outward communication. Here at Octagon Media our default font is Open Sans, and since we use it for our external communication, we also use it internally to ensure our standards are always being upheld.
5) Listen to customers and clients.
This is probably the biggest piece of advice, and often the hardest to follow. There will always be an urge to update and evolve, but you cannot lose focus of what your customers and clients think about your current presence. Change is often good, but when you are changing for the sake of changing you can often lose favor with your clients. Your clients likely have grown familiar to your current presence, and ideally you don’t have to make them adjust to a change if you don’t have to.
If nobody is providing feedback on how you can change your presence, then at some level they are content and comfortable with your branding. But if your clients are vocal about changes that they would like to see made, take their words to heart. If it is worth their time to bring it to your attention, it is worth yours to make the changes.
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