Ensuring that you communicate your brand both online and offline in a consistent manner is essential for building trust and recognition in your company. Whilst the two markets require very different approaches, they should both follow the same overall creative direction.
What Is A Brand?
Your brand is an intangible element of your business, it is more than just your logo, tagline and mission statement. Essentially, your brand is how your company is perceived in your customers’ minds.
Ensure Your Brand ‘Voice’ Is Consistent
With this in mind, you can see how important it is to ensure you are communicating the same message or ‘brand voice’ consistently through everything that you do.
The design of your marketing plays a huge role (alongside copywriting, product range, quality and pricing) in how your brand is perceived. Does your brand look and ‘feel’ the same in your printed marketing as it does in your online presence? If the answer is ‘no’ or worse ‘I don’t know’ then you probably need to consider your overall creative approach.
You may be thinking ‘this is obvious’ and ‘there should always be an overall creative direction that all your marketing adheres to.’ However, quite often online and offline marketing is treated very differently within businesses and may have totally different designers responsible for them. You may, for instance, have chosen to outsource one or the other.
How Should I Go About Ensuring Consistency
Someone within your company should be responsible for monitoring your marketing and ensuring it is all patently part of the same brand and this can be challenging to say the least.
Usually it is not simply a case of designing for either online or offline and using the same designs for the other, the two arenas are often worlds apart. Having said that, with enough foresight when designing for one, you should end up with elements that are easily transferable into the other and herein lies the key to making the process as simple as possible.
For example, when designing your printed brochure, design easily transferable graphics which you can use to build your online marketing, or vice-versa. If you are designing for a specific season, come up with a ‘set’ or ‘kit’ of seasonal graphics that with a little adaptation can be used in both offline and online marketing. Don’t forget your printed marketing will usually require a much higher resolution so work in vectors wherever possible to make life easier.
Be Warned!
You still need to keep in mind that your demographic will often be different and will require a unique approach to get them to notice you. So, it’s no use copying and pasting your online adverts into your brochure or trying to use print adverts online. You will need to put some effort into tailoring designs for a specific purpose or target market but such tailoring should be done within an overall creative direction.
Conclusion
The benefits of this should be obvious, a common look and feel throughout all of your marketing will build recognition and trust in your brand and avoid any uncertainty that may be invoked by a disparity. This should manifest itself in the long term in increased repeat custom.
There is a distinct advantage when you consider that your target audience may be seeing your brand through multiple media. Having a consistent look and feel when your potential customer; sees a print advert, has a brochure drop through their door and then sees an advert online means that from those three points of contact, they will link them all to one single brand.
