Building a successful online presence does not rely solely on your web marketing efforts, but in how consistent both online and in-person interactions with your business are. Creating authenticity in your brand messaging means your clients see the same business across your marketing channels, including your face-to-face interactions. However, it can be much easier to be authentic in-person than online where you speak to your clients through various media—media that has its own rules, quirks, strengths and weaknesses. Trying to find the right spot for your business online does not necessarily mean finding the most popular areas of the World Wide Web. Rather, you want to be where your clients are, using the tools to create a consistent, distinct voice that stays true to your company’s personality.
Sound Like Yourself
The people behind your business make up your overall business personality. What you as a company have decided is your working philosophy, your core values, and the expertise each team member offers creates a unique persona your customers experience when they work with you. The online marketer’s job is to capture the company voice through knowing its people, down to each person’s vocabulary, interests, passions, and sense of humor, so that social media, web pages, and blogs sound like the individuals your clients work with.
Look Like Yourself
Brand consistency is vital to making every platform and every bit of content you produce recognizable as your business. But more importantly, during developing your brand image, you want to choose a design that best reflects your company’s personality. Creating the visual aspect of a business is very similar to crafting its written voice—not just any words or catchy phrases will do. How you write will evoke different responses from your readers—trust, laughter, empathy, surprise—and colors, fonts, images and layout will do that too. What your clients see in your brand image should reflect their experience when they work with your business, whether they are reading a print ad in a magazine or scrolling your Pinterest board.
Do What Works for You
Being true to your brand’s personality is applicable to your marketing channel choices as well. Especially with blogging and social media content, you want to find your sweet spot, and not spend lots of time following what’s trending at the moment. Not to say that you should always do what you’ve always done—that can turn your online content stale—but you shouldn’t worry about falling behind. Whatever is most popular at the time, you don’t need to jump on its bandwagon in order to get good online interaction. Do what works for you. New content mediums and platforms are great to try, but don’t scramble to integrate because you feel pressured. Tackle something new because you have a great idea, are looking to challenge yourself and grow, or because the content you want to share works perfectly for that medium.
Making sure your voice is consistent across online media and face-to-face interactions means no matter where your clients meet you, they always experience you. Let that be your goal, whether you are blogging, talking with a client, or creating a new web page for one of your services.
Fresh Figs Marketing helps businesses through their entire branding and content strategies, finding the best ways to market them online, in print, and in their communities. We invest in companies’ unique personalities and services, providing strategy, content, and design that gets their message to their clients. Call us at (860) 670-6595 or contact us to learn more about how we can help you achieve your business goals.
