Why Your Brand Should Have Consistency in Everything
Why do people follow certain celebrities on social media? Why do people regularly interact with their favorite brands? Friends? Family? Because of consistency and the ever-important sense of trust. Like in everyday interactions, consistency is a rather important concept for brands as well. A consistent brand is one that has the same voice and transfers the same message and values across all its channels. You can’t promote your ice cream and then discredit it the next day. People will think you’re not entirely sure about the quality of your product. And if you’re not certain in your product, who else should be?
Say2B works with a plethora of different businesses — but our values and tone of voice remain the same everywhere — in our services, website texts, app experience, our support team, even our blog: we work to help businesses connect with their customers in the most optimal and enjoyable way. Now the question is, do you?
Consistency is way more than just posting regularly on your social media. Although mind you, that is indeed important yet underrated. But as much as social media is where a brand connects with its audience, simply posting is not going to help your business much if what they see on social and what they encounter when they enter your store do not speak the same language.
Keep reading if you want to understand where your brand is failing in customer retention and acquisition because of underestimating consistency.
Why consistency matters
Imagine a customer loves your brand, is a lifelong loyal customer and shops there regularly. Somehow, one day you mess up their order, service, anything. They forgive you. They believe it was a mistake and will never happen again. But it does. And this time they won’t be as forgiving.
Another case scenario. Your social media posts are light and funny with cohesive, beautiful visuals and themes on Instagram and so forth. But your support team is cold and humorless. Your website is messy, to say the least. Your customers can’t seem to find any connection between the funny captions under pretty photos and the terribly generic answers given by your community manager under those posts.
This type of lacking in brand voice consistency brings several issues on the table. First and foremost, distrust. If you change your mind or your messages don’t correspond to each other, people won’t know which voice to follow and which version of your brand can be trusted. As a result, they just won’t trust either of them. Don’t go hot and cold on your brand voice.
Secondly, lack of trust because of inconsistency brings to low expectations and hurts the company business. 1 unhappy customer will tell on average 9 more people about their complaint and bad experience. And if you remember from our neuroscientific article, our memory tends to rewrite our past experiences based on the influence of our current experiences. So if you give a reason for your customer to doubt your brand, your hard-earned trust will dissipate and also spread among your brand community worse than a virus.
Thirdly, your loyalty program is one of the aspects prone to suffering the most damage. Why? Because it’s already hard enough to gain trust to promote your loyalty program without losing authenticity and sounding like you’re in desperate need of people’s email addresses. You might be, of course, but that’s not the point. Loyalty programs are amazing for customer retention, but the second you give the customer doubts about your credibility as a brand because you’re not consistent in your operations, the first thing they’ll abandon, delete or put away is your loyalty program. So watch out.
Ways to improve consistency
Now that we’ve identified the problem and the negative impact it will leave behind, it’s time to do damage control and figure out how to avoid the problem in the first place.
Step N1: follow the same tone and theme everywhere
Instagram and Twitter are more fun; Facebook is a little more serious, your website is… well, whatever you decide it to be. Of course, every platform has its differences and specifications.
However, your brand tone and voice should never stutter because of that. Keep the consistency by creating the same content for all platforms but adapting it to each one’s requirements. Don’t go all bubbly on Twitter and send boring email newsletters to your customers the next day.
People take everything personally. There’s not much in this world humans don’t get attached to emotionally. If you’re hoping to have customers be dedicated to you and yet you keep giving them mixed signals, that will end like all relationships with similar issues — break up.
Design your newsletter in the same style you do your social media content. Design all your content, accordingly, in the same tone of your website. Use the same language. Instruct your support team to speak the same language
Your voice should match your message. Everywhere.
Step N2: optimize your loyalty program with the above step
Think of your loyalty program as one of your platforms to communicate your message since you’re indeed interacting with your customers using Say2B.
You can easily, and we mean very easily, personalize and adapt everything to your brand and your mission, your values, and beliefs. Create reward options that are closer to your brand’s voice and tone. Directly speak to your customers and see if you need to adjust something. Don’t shoot for generic rewards everyone else is giving. Choose and adapt perks in harmony with your brand.
Consistency for brands is like oxygen to the brain. More or less. Surveys show that the average revenue increase as a result of brand consistently is 23%. It’s official: inconsistency is the number one reason killing customer trust toward a brand, but luckily, you can easily avoid it.
