“Your Brand is not your Logo
It is everything you are in the eyes of your customers”
@russellmasters
Regardless of where and how you embrace your brand outside of the pages of your website you can be assured that people are likely talking about your business in areas other than your website. Whether it’s a post on someones personal Facebook page, a tweet about your service or a blog about your product then it’s probably going on. The difference is not whether you are on all those platforms and channels all day but how well you understand your brand and the experience your customers have.
There was an old saying that went something like “A happy customer will tell one person, an unhappy customer will tell 10” Now those numbers are increased exponentially with the potential to reach hundreds of thousands of people in a snowball or viral effect. The ratios are still applicable as people often like to shout about bad experiences more than they do about great ones.
“there’s a whole lot of conversation going on about your brand that you have no control over and might not even hear”
So lets review your brand
What should your brand include? There are definitely some status quo elements that should remain the same, both online and offline so that your visitors and customers can have the same experience no matter where, from shop to site.
Design Elements:
- Logo usage
- Colours
- Font Style Guides etc.
Communication and Value Proposition:
- Language and Tone
- Mission and Values
- Your market difference etc.
But where things have changed somewhat over the past years reflect more around the ‘how your brand acts in various online platforms, the micro specific nature of target marketing through personas and ensuring that there is significant effort in maintaing and promoting positive user communication around your brand and knowing what to do when things go a bit pear shaped.
Your brand online
When using your brand online, aside from the fact that nearly everything you do is permanent, it is imperative to be very clear about what language you use and in what platform. Different people often frequent different social platforms, think Facebook vs SnapChat vs LinkedIn, and more often or not and the same person will act differently on these social platforms. See where I am going with this?
Example: If you are a chartered accountant with a polished and slightly more formal brand and you are posting on Facebook for your business you may well have to change your langauge to suit the platform and the way the audience engages with the Facebook brand whereas on LinkedIn you would be as formal and professional as this business platform dictates.
This can sometimes raise some challenges around getting the right mix of how you use various language and communication styles in different platforms online but if you stay true to your values and understand your client and how they want to be communicated with socially on Facebook or professionally on LinkedIn then like any good cook you will get the mix right.
Who’s using your brand:
A really quick way to destroy your brand online is to give control to employees to post on Facebook, Tweet, upload images to Instagram etc… I am a huge advocate in encouraging teams to contribute great content to a businesses social media and online content strategy but am also an advocate of having some accountability and signoff processes to ensure that a seemingly fine post doesn’t turn into a fiasco of innapropriateness that goes viral. At Marketing Fuel we all contribute but we only have one person who actually publishes posts and it works.
Have a look at your brand and who is in control:
So revisit your brand and the platforms it is being used online and give some thought to how the content created fits your brand, the consistency in the language used, the quality of images both in terms of visual quality as well as what it says about your brand. And lastly, review who posts and who publishes and ensure there are some controls around that process.
Have you reviewed your brand recently?
Congratulations! What a lovely how-to post you’ve created.
