Brand updates are crucial to keeping your brand relevant to consumers. “Unless you want to embark on a logo refresh every few years, keep the design unencumbered to leverage a timeless. Here are ways you can know when the time is right. Even the best companies change their brand identity. 6 things your company needs to know to rebrand successfully. However, don’t go after the very latest branding trend if that doesn’t speak to your company values and brand identity. The goal here is not to be bleeding-edge (i.e. Taking “leading edge” a step too far), but to keep brand longevity in mind. Make this a collaborative process. Give your internal brand an identity – and align it with the external. Your external brand is defined; it will typically have its own logo, font, set colors, perhaps a determined tone of voice, its own taglines, key statements, look and feel. Why shouldn’t your internal brand have the same? Don’t be afraid to involve them in the discussion. As your customers change, so should your brand identity. If you rebrand, do it right. Rebranding can be a great way to refresh your brand by incorporating modern aesthetics into your existing company’s identity.

• 6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Role
• 6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Theft
• 6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Agent
• 6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Number
• 6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Authentication

Brand consistency is the pattern of expression that affects what people think about your company. The more consistent your messaging, the more consistent your branding — whether via words, design, offerings or perspective. Your brand should build awareness and develop trust and loyalty with customers.

It’s fairly easy to create blog posts, ebooks and other such content assets in the digital age. Quick, too. An idea can go from concept to completed so quickly that it doesn’t get thoroughly vetted for brand consistency. And with an internet connection and standard business software, almost any employee has the opportunity to create content that contains their version of the brand look or message. Many employees will do just that, even with the best of intentions.

Don’t leave your brand open to a variety of interpretations and customizations. Your brand should build awareness and develop trust and loyalty with customers. A constantly changing brand personality just doesn’t do the job. That’s why it’s so important to develop standards for brand consistency, on and offline. Every interaction customers have with your brand should embody the brand promises and values dependably and understandably.

Develop brand guidelines.

Most large corporations (and some small to midsize businesses, too) create brand style and usage guidelines to ensure all messaging and brand asset use is on-point and consistent. These guides not only help the marketing department, but they also serve as guides to other employees and departments. And above all, the guidelines should align with a company’s vision and mission.

Take a look at these examples to get a feel for how in-depth a brand style guide can be:

• Walmart Corporate Brand Guidelines. Walmart has covered every conceivable way to use its corporate brand. This comprehensive guide includes direction on the brand’s editorial voice and how to use their logo in print, online, on promotional merchandise and more. They even cover appropriate fonts and how to use logos, icons and taglines correctly.
• Mozilla Style Guide. Mozilla has an online style guide to help its open source community understand how to use its logos and trademarks for Mozilla, the Firefox browser and their other products. These guidelines help everyone who works with Mozilla protect Mozilla’s brands.

Now, your business may not be the size of Adobe or have the reach of Mozilla. Maybe you’re in the process of establishing your personal brand. These style guides may look overwhelming, but you don’t necessarily have to be as exhaustive with your brand guidelines. However, you should take the time to establish a foundation that guides your messaging, and you should ensure that it aligns with your business goals and the needs of your target personas.

You also can check out ClearVoice’s Editorial Style Guide, complete with a breakdown on how to make a style guide that’s freelancer-friendly.

Pay attention to internal branding and corporate culture.

Brand consistency isn’t just a customer-facing imperative. After you’ve taken time to cultivate a brand voice that will resonate with customers, the brand experience delivery has to match — that requires employee participation. Slapping your logo with a list of brand values on some posters throughout the workplace is not enough. You should attempt to get a marketing leader involved with any existing corporate culture-building initiatives. If there is no formal corporate culture program, you can partner with HR to get executive buy-in for establishing a brand-centric corporate culture initiative.

Sometimes marketing teams get so focused on driving awareness and leads, that they forget about internal customers. Your organization’s employees must buy-in on the brand. Does your company do the following?

• Ensure that onboarding and training programs incorporate brand values.
• Provide branded items (shirts, mugs, business cards, laptop cases) to create internal brand loyalty.
• Empower employees as brand ambassadors who can advocate for the brand on social media using programs like GaggleAMP or Everyone Social. These programs help keep the company and brand messages consistent.
• Develop collateral to explain each department’s role in the fulfillment of your brand promise.

When your internal audience understands and embraces the brand, the more consistent the delivery of brand experience will be to customers.

Approach content with brand consistency in mind.

Once you’ve created your brand style and usage guidelines, refer to them when planning all your content marketing efforts. According to a study from The Verde Group and the Wharton School, two-thirds of all shoppers use more than one channel to make purchases. With all the online and offline opportunities to make an impression, consistency across all channels and touchpoints are more important than ever.

Then, consider these seven fundamental approaches:

1. Use your logo and design elements consistently and provide access to employees.

The only thing worse than seeing a logo stretched out of proportion, pixelated or painted up with new colors is seeing it shared that way with staff and customers. To combat this and similar blunders:

• Create a shared folder on your company network or intranet that provides employees with access to approved visual content and instructions on how to use them both on and offline.
• Develop a branded slide deck theme for your webinars and webcast videos.
• Create social media cover photos for your employees who participate in employee advocacy programs.
• Provide document templates and social sharing templates that help your team present a consistent brand look and feel online.
• Manage orders for print and promotional materials through a single department or person to ensure your logo is always used correctly in print and promotional materials.

Recommended tools for:

• Style guide creation: Frontify
• Image and template file sharing: Google Drive, SharePoint or DropBox Business
• Template creation for social media and marketing collateral: Canva for Work or Visage
• Branded email signatures: WiseStamp for Business
• Branded apparel: consider setting up a branded storefront with a company like Land’s End for easy ordering of branded apparel

2. Select the right topics for your brand’s content calendar.

The topics you write about or produce webinars and videos around should be consistent with your brand’s mission and goals. Look for opportunities to create content that makes sense for your brand. If your business serves a particular industry vertical or niche, for example, it’s entirely appropriate to create or curate blog content around key industry developments that affect your customers — especially when your company has expertise in or unique insight to the issue.

3. Bring offline marketing events into your online branding efforts.

If your company is exhibiting at a trade show, has received an award, or is participating in a community event, let your online audience know. When your business or product is recognized as a leader or taking a leadership role in your industry or community, that’s part of your brand-building efforts. Promote these efforts through blog posts, social media posts, visual social media (Instagram, Snapchat, etc.), and video. Don’t forget to add your brand name or logo to photos or videos that you share.

4. Keep your brand’s tone and personality consistent across channels.

When communicating as the brand offline or via your website, social media profiles, or other online channels, it’s important to keep a consistent tone and personality. If your brand is fun and friendly on Twitter, it should have a similar flavor on Facebook and LinkedIn. Your messaging on LinkedIn may be less casual or more professional, but it shouldn’t sound like it’s coming from a different brand altogether. Think about it this way: There is the “at work” you and the “at home or with friends” you. Your personality is the same, but your mannerisms adjust to the context. The same goes for your brand personality and selected communication channels.

6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Role

Find a Team to Manage Your Content and Grow Your Brand

6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Theft

Never miss a chance to engage with customers. Create better content, faster. With ClearVoice, you can tap into vetted freelance teams who can manage your content plans, start to finish. Major content projects to long-term content needs.

5. Participate in platforms and channels that align with your brand’s identity and your prospects’ and customers’ preferences.

It’s easy to get distracted by each new online marketing trend and platform. It’s easy to be swayed by peer pressure, too: Everybody is on Facebook, my company should be too. Before following the crowd to an existing network or becoming an early adopter of a new platform or trend, evaluate the offering to determine whether or not it makes sense for your business. Ask yourself:

• Would you expect to find a brand like yours on this new platform or executing this type of strategy?
• Would you trust a brand like yours if it were on this particular network or conducted a new kind of campaign effort?
• Do your current or target customers congregate on these social platforms? Are they likely to be the same demographic that a new social media channel targets?

Location, location, location — it’s not just a consideration in real estate.

6. Align your brand with the right influencers.

Influencer marketing is hot right now. So hot that marketers have rushed in too quickly and made some missteps when selecting the right influencer to represent their brands. If you decide to work with influencers, ask yourself these questions:

• Does this influencer appeal to my target audience?
• Does he or she talk about issues directly related to pain points my product or service can address?
• Is his or her personality complementary to my brand’s?
• Will he or she ensure appropriate use of my brand in their content?
• Are the influencers I’ve selected legit?

7. Partner with the sales team on the development of a sales playbook.

A sales playbook is not a sales training manual; it’s a framework that assists sales representatives in closing more deals. A key component of a stellar playbook is stage-specific content. How much of the content created by marketing is the team using? Where is the playbook content off-brand?

If there is a rift between sales and marketing in your business, this next step may be easier said than done. However, you can use this exercise as relationship mender. Review the existing playbook with sales management as a way to offer your help. Don’t go into the conversation on the defense. If the team isn’t using the content that marketing has generated, ask questions to understand why instead of trying to force the issue. The sales team has front-line experience that can provide you insights into why a piece of content doesn’t work. Take their feedback and help create something new— and brand consistent — that will maintain brand consistency and move the prospect closer to a sale.

Are you creating a consistent brand experience?

As our ability to create and send marketing communications increases, it becomes easier to make a few missteps when crafting brand identity. The desire to be immediate can result in immediately confusing, distracting or detrimental communications that detract from the brand you’ve worked so hard to establish.

Read more about honing brand consistency and voice:

Find a Team to Manage Your Content and Grow Your Vision

Each and every year, companies invest millions of dollars into their branding strategy. In a digitalized world dominated by the likes of TripAdvisor and Twitter, where experiences and reviews are a free-for-all and accessible 24/7, a negative review can bring down a brand overnight. Ensuring the right image of your business in the public eye, therefore, has never been more important.

Fact: 47% of consumers around the world trust traditional paid advertising; a huge 92% trust earned promotions such as word-of-mouth recommendations from friends or impartial reviews.

In a saturated market in which those at the face of our organization are the key differentiator to set us apart from competitors, engaging and aligning our employees to the company brand may be the single greatest priority to ensure business success.

14 steps to great internal communications

Yet despite its indisputable value, many organizations have yet to extend the same investment into their internalbranding.

Success in business is all about people, people, people. Whatever industry a company is in, its employees are its biggest competitive advantage. As Virgin Pulse CEO Chris Boyce said recently, “They’re the ones making the magic happen – so long as their needs are being met. – Sir Richard Branson, Founder, Virgin

Our employees form ‘touchpoints’ for our engagement with customers, consumers and potential ‘reviewers’ in a multitude of ways within their roles; whether that be your shop clerk processing a customer transaction or your HR Manager interviewing your next would-be employee. If those employees aren’t invested in your brand or engaged with your business, something as small as a throwaway comment or a lack of feedback could cause long-term damage to your organization.

To build a strong and successful brand, your organization requires an inside-out approach that begins with the embedment of high levels of engagement in your employees.

What is an internal branding strategy?

As the concept of branding has grown and evolved, it has come to mean many things: a unique design, a sign, a symbol or certain words; anything unique, designed to differentiate an organization from its competitors. Fundamentally, it’s this point of ‘individuality’ that will, in time, become associated with a level of credibility, quality, and satisfaction in the eyes of the customer.

But what does that mean to your employees?

Actually, that is precisely the point. Internal branding is about connecting employees with your external brand; showing them what that brand means to them and ensuring they understand and really live the company mission.

Internal branding is a corporate philosophy that focuses on bringing the company’s core culture, identity and premise to its employees as well as its consumers, and usually looks to make workers at all levels “ambassadors” or true representatives of the company and its values.(Source: Wisegeek)

How do you go about creating and embedding an internal brand that will transform workers into true brand ambassadors who contribute to the success of your business?

14 steps to great internal communications

6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Agent

1. Define your values and mission

Without a defined direction, your business will lack an identity or purpose with which your employees can identify. Defining your mission as an organization and stating those philosophies or principles that make you, “YOU” will communicate to your employees exactly what is important. Companies with a higher sense of purpose outperform others by as much as 400% (Jim Stengel).

Having a mission and values gives your employees a sense of purpose to their role, taking the mindset from “I’m doing a job to earn my wage” to “I’m contributing to something bigger”.

Internal brand win: One of the winners of this initiative was professional services giant KPMG, whose ‘Purpose Program’ launched in 2014 with the following challenge put to employees; “what my job means to me”.

Pioneered by leaders who discussed KPMG’s contribution to events of worldwide importance, the company was overwhelmed by an astounding 42,000 entries via its employee intranet, with staff creating posters that included a personal testimonial relaying the “meaning” they derived from their job. From “I advance science” to “I help farms grow”, the responses demonstrated the value individuals derived outside of simply completing the 9 – 5. The company went on to have its most profitable year in its 118-year history.

Want to create values to engage your workforce but unsure where to start? Our blog “How to build company values (that your employees actually like)” outlines to process for defining and rolling out your own sense of purpose.

2. Engage your People

Your internal brand is about your people, defined by your people and driven by your people. So get them involved.

Start by obtaining feedback from your employees on their perception of your brand and get their input in defining and shaping it. Using employee surveys, focus groups, open discussion forums and Q & A sessions, you can provide employees with a sense of ownership that will increase engagement and receptiveness to the concept.

Consider assigning dedicated people to internal change communication and internal branding, picking out those engaged employees who are well-positioned to become ‘brand ambassadors’ for the company. Employees are more likely to buy-in to positivity about their organization from their peers than when receiving the input top-down from management; this breeds a level of belief that individuals are championing the brand because they believe in it – not because they have to.

3. Give your internal brand an identity – and align it with the external

Your external brand is defined; it will typically have its own logo, font, set colors, perhaps a determined tone of voice, its own taglines, key statements, look and feel. Why shouldn’t your internal brand have the same? A memorable identity will help your internal brand stick and translate that ‘meaning’ into the everyday roles of your employees.

When designing, it’s essential to relate your internal brand to the external; that connectivity will help employees understand how the two relate and ensures integrity. If your company is putting out one message to its consumers (e.g., “our number one priority is customer service”) and a very different one to its employees (e.g., “our number one priority is to be the biggest provider in the market by volume of customers”), this mismatch will cause confusion and disillusionment with your company’s purpose and direction. Drawing on the same ‘big ideas’ promoted in external advertising will not only resonate better with employees, but can actually result in more distinctive and authentic external marketing.

However, putting an individual spin on your internal brand will ensure it is distinct and give employees a sense of ownership. For example, take your existing logo and assign a spin-off color or name for internal communications purposes, or create an intranet name or brand associated with your external brand.

14 steps to great internal communications

4. Communicate your internal brand strategy and embed it

So you have your defined “purpose” in the form of a mission and values; you have employee-led input into what your organizational brand is and you’ve created the logos, statements, tone of voice and design bits to make it stand out. Now, it’s time to communicate it.

Creating an emotional connectionbetween employees and the brand is not something that can be achieved via an internal memo and the odd poster on the staff noticeboard. To ensure that connection informs the way your employees approach their roles and that your brand continues to underpin each decision they execute, you need to initiate a proper launch for the brand.

Use a multi-pronged approach to introduce and explain the messages and then reinforce by applying your internal branding to every internal touchpoint. Consider running launch workshops, an internal brand launch ‘party’ or townhall announcement, design a staggered communication plan and ensure more detailed information is easily accessible via your employee intranet.

Consider the day-to-day interactions experienced by your staff and weave your internal brand into the fabric of those experiences; for example, including the internal brand statement or mission and values on your intranet homepage and internal email signatures, on staff posters on-premise, or perhaps as the login screen for their HR or finance logins that they access regularly. Remember that this process is about inspiring, motivating and persuading your employees, not simply informing; so be creative and encourage two-way conversations by providing platforms for feedback and discussion.

Finally, make your internal brand something people talk about. Make it easily defined and communicated (think short, snappy and memorable phrases or straplines, rather than a 10-page book of ‘brand guidelines and principles’) and ensure it resonates.

5. Recognize, reward and incentivize

One common failure of internal branding initiatives is the lapse of focus and motivation after the initial launch. To truly drive a successful internal branding strategy and transform the engagement of employees, it needs continual reinforcement from higher management.

Got an employee, or several, who have demonstrated a true ‘living the brand’ approach to their work? Recognize their efforts and shout about it– use internal communication channels and your employee intranet to share the story and demonstrate how your brand translates into the day-to-day roles of the people.

Go one step further and set incentives or competitions to truly embed the principles and drive performance. At Interact, our peer-to-peer recognition program includes the use of #hashtagging the values of the business when nominating a colleague for recognition. Those who have been tagged as “courageous” “passionate” or for “thinking BIG”, for example, will be entered into a monthly draw to win a reward.When it comes to creating brand ambassadors, remember that money alone is often insufficient;

People think more frequently about noncash tangible incentives (such as merchandise and travel) than cash incentives and as the frequency of thought increases, performance increases
(Professors Scott A. Jeffrey and Gordon K. Adomdza, ‘Human Performance’. Source: Inc.com)

A rewarding investment

Building and embedding an internal brand strategy takes time and investment. However, the rewards can be extensive. Engaged employee brand ambassadors contribute to tangible returns for your business, including:

• – ADVOCACY: 78% of engaged employees would recommend their company’s products and services
• – RETENTION: Highly engaged organisations can reduce staff turnover by as much as 87%
• – CUSTOMER SERVICE: 70% of engaged employees say they have a good understanding of how to meet customer needs
• – REVENUE AND RETURN: During a study, companies with highly engaged employees improved operating income by 19.2% over a 12 month period, according to The ISR Employee Engagement Report (Towers Perrin-ISR (2006) Source: Orchestra Communications)

And many more.

Can you afford not to?

6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Number

14 steps to great internal communications

6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Authentication