Today, prospects can take many routes online to become paying customers.
While this gives you numerous opportunities to reach and engage your target audience, it also means your brand must be accessible on various digital platforms.
What this requires is a cohesive branding strategy to deliver a smooth, familiar experience no matter where prospects interact with your brand.
Unfortunately, many marketers rush to put their businesses on different online channels without a well-planned brand marketing strategy. This can create an unpredictable, disconnected brand presence in the digital space, ultimately confusing consumers and driving them away.
Effective digital marketing requires consistency. To achieve maximum impact, you need to unlock how to develop a brand strategy that delivers a consistent experience across your channels, from your website to your social media accounts.
As you build your brand strategy framework and work toward cohesive branding, this guide offers practical advice to help you start on the right track. We cover these topics:
• The Value of Cohesive Branding Across Digital Touchpoints
• 7 Tips on How To Develop a Cohesive Brand Strategy
○ Assess Your Current Brand Performance
○ Develop Your Brand Identity
○ Develop a Unified Brand Message
○ Map Your Customer Journey
○ Keep Your Social Media Feeds Consistent
○ Implement Brand Awareness Strategy Across Digital Touchpoints
○ Measure and Adapt Your Branding Efforts
The Value of Cohesive Branding Throughout Digital Channels and Touchpoints
A touchpoint is any point or situation wherein a consumer interacts with your brand.
In today’s digital age, touchpoints have dramatically multiplied. In addition to physical storefronts, prospects can engage with your business through your website, social media pages and online ads, among many others. With this, consistency has become more crucial — and challenging.
What Is Cohesive Branding?
Cohesive branding is the practice of delivering consistent messaging, visuals and brand values across all customer interactions and touchpoints. It ensures that every encounter with the brand reflects its identity and creates a unified and recognizable presence.
But why pay attention to brand cohesion?
Building a unified brand strategy framework does more than make your business look good online. It ensures you deliver the same message and maintain a consistent image across your platforms, preventing confusion and fostering customer trust.
Ultimately, it helps you deliver a compelling narrative that your target audience can recognize and relate to, allowing you to distinguish your brand in a market full of rivals competing for their attention.
7 Tips on How To Develop a Cohesive Brand Strategy
Designing a unified brand experience demands meticulous strategy and implementation.
Here are seven practical tips on how to develop a brand strategy that consistently reflects your identity and values:
1. Assess Your Current Brand Performance
Before developing your brand marketing strategy, it’s best to take a step back and evaluate any current efforts.
Conduct a thorough examination of your brand’s market standing, public perception and competitive edge through a comprehensive brand audit. A brand audit can help you:
• Understand your brand’s strengths and areas for improvement
• Spot challenges and opportunities
• Work toward cohesion across all brand touchpoints
• Align your brand strategy with your overall business objectives and values.
2. Develop Your Brand Identity
Your brand identity comprises components like visual design, tone of voice and brand values. It sets the stage for cohesive and effective brand marketing. With a thoughtfully considered brand identity, you can resonate with your target audience and instill familiarity and trust with every interaction.
Certain key brand elements need to be consistent across your digital platforms to strengthen brand awareness and establish a strong emotional connection with clients.
Here are those components:
Visual Elements
Colors
As humans interpret colors differently, you want to choose hues that accurately capture your brand and its personality. A good starting point would be to consider whether you want your brand to convey elegance or appear playful or inventive.
Fonts
Your choice of typography can significantly influence people’s perception of your business. For example, elegant serif fonts can reflect an antique shop’s reliability and long-standing culture. On the other hand, sleek and modern sans-serif fonts give off a fresh, contemporary feel, making them ideal for startups.
Logo, Imagery and Icons:
Logos, imagery and icons are crucial elements of your visual identity and cohesive brand strategy.
Your logo serves as the face of your brand, so you want one that’s recognizable and memorable. If you wish to use illustration or photography, it’s also crucial that you decide on the style of imagery appropriate for your desired image and use it across all platforms for a unified look. This consistency helps improve brand awareness and recall.
Voice
Are your communications reflecting your brand’s personality? Whether your prospects are engaging with a blog post, opening an email or searching for you on social media, your language and tone should make them feel they’re truly interacting with the same brand.
Brand Values
Most importantly, building your cohesive brand strategy framework is an excellent time to assess or reassess the core principles and beliefs that guide your brand.
What does it stand for? Is it all about sustainability and prioritizing eco-friendly practices? Does it value honesty and transparency? Or is it focused on creativity, innovation and improvement?
As you reflect on these questions, here are some more helpful tips:
• Identify your core beliefs. Clearly define the principles that your brand truly stands for.
• Communicate those core beliefs transparently. Share your values with your audience openly and authentically.
• Involve the team. Engage employees in embracing and promoting brand values to create a unified internal culture.
Focusing on these aspects lets you develop a brand awareness strategy that ensures consistent visibility for your company across ads, social media posts and other online platforms.
3. Develop a Unified Brand Message
Developing a unified brand message is crucial in creating a cohesive brand strategy across all digital channels and touchpoints. A brand message is a concise statement that encapsulates your mission, expertise and the unique value you offer your customers.
Think of it as an elevator pitch — it should not only define what your brand does but also convey why it matters.
Pondering over these questions can help you craft your core message:
• What issue does your brand address?
• What advantages do your products or services offer?
• What makes your brand stand out from the rest?
• Why should potential customers choose you over your competitors?
4. Map Your Customer Journey
A deep understanding of the client journey through customer mapping is another key to crafting unified brand experiences.
Illustrating every step of a customer’s interaction, from initial awareness to post-sale, gives you valuable insights into consumer wants and expectations at each touchpoint. This thorough examination consequently lets you identify where your customers connect with you and in which touchpoints the brand experience can be enhanced.
5. Keep Your Social Media Feeds Consistent
With the myriad of social platforms today and the constant introduction of new features, staying on top of your social media marketing efforts and maintaining a consistent presence can be challenging.
Whether you’re on Facebook, X (previously Twitter), Instagram, YouTube or another platform, it’s crucial to focus on developing a brand marketing strategy that’s both cohesive and tailored to the unique nature of each site. Here are some practical tips to help you get started:
Tip #1: Make Your Brand’s Voice and Personality Shine Through in Every Social Media Post
Regardless of who handles your business’s social media and crafts your posts, they must use a uniform tone and voice on all channels. This makes it easier for your audience to recognize you from your posts and gives them a familiar experience.
Tip #2: Develop a Visual Asset Library
If you don’t have one, consider building a visual asset library accessible to all your social media content creators. This resource gathers all approved logos, icons, images, videos and other assets in one place, allowing your team to craft on-brand posts more effortlessly.
Tip #3: Use Templates for Efficient and On-Brand Content Creation
As social media is fast-paced, you want to create content quickly to keep your followers updated and engaged. However, this urgency can sometimes lead to inconsistencies, especially when crafting copy and visuals on the fly.
A practical solution is to use templates. Like with your visual asset library, pre-designed templates give your team one less thing to think about when developing social media content. As long as these guides or templates are well-made, they should help anyone on your team keep your branding intact.
Tip #4: Develop and Stick to a Regular Posting Schedule
Post at similar times and consider creating a series to build anticipation. A consistent, predictable schedule helps your audience know what to expect, fostering brand trust and recognition.
Tip #5: Set Up a Content Approval Workflow
Designate a knowledgeable team member to review all content before it goes live. This step ensures that every content aligns with your brand’s standards, maintaining a cohesive and professional brand presence across all platforms.
6. Implement Brand Awareness Strategy Across Digital Touchpoints
What does implementing your brand strategy framework across your digital touchpoints actually look like? Here are some actionable tips for auditing and refining your touchpoints to ensure an impactful brand experience.
• Inventory your touchpoints for brand alignment. Document every digital material or platform your prospects get to interact with and evaluate how each is currently aligned with your brand identity. This doesn’t have to happen all at once; this can be done in batches until you’ve accounted for every touchpoint.
• Look for gaps in customer interactions. Sometimes, you may miss a touchpoint for a customer at a specific stage in the customer journey. For instance, you might capture leads with an enticing resource or trial subscription but lose contact with them until the sales call. Whether email marketing efforts or retargeting ads, include these missing touchpoints in your inventory to ensure they align with your brand as your team implements them.
• Establish a workflow. Multiple people will be involved in creating and delivering on your brand touchpoints, so a clear workflow is crucial. For example, when your sales team wants to make a presentation, the brand team must provide them with a branded template — and do a final review of the material before it’s shown to clients. Such workflows empower your team to maintain brand consistency without overcomplicating the process.
7. Measure and Adapt Your Branding Efforts
Most importantly, monitor brand performance across your channels to evaluate your efforts more accurately.
Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and track metrics like brand awareness, customer perception and loyalty. It also helps to analyze customer feedback from reviews, social media and surveys to gain insights into your brand’s effectiveness. Then, use all the insights you gather to make data-driven tweaks to your ongoing efforts.
Continuous evaluation and adaptation can help your brand remain consistent and relevant in today’s ever-changing market.
Unleash Your Brand’s Full Potential With Thrive
Ensuring brand cohesion across all digital channels and touchpoints is no small feat, yet it’s essential in today’s fragmented digital landscape.
It requires a well-thought-out plan aligned with your business objectives, a deep understanding of your target audience and meticulous execution. After all, cohesive branding isn’t a one-time project but a dynamic, ongoing process. When done correctly, it can set you apart in a crowded marketplace.
If you want to elevate your brand’s presence and create a lasting impression across all digital platforms, partnering with Thrive could be your next best step. As a full-service agency following a strategy-first approach, we know how to develop a brand strategy that captivates and engages your audience at every touchpoint.
Ready to embark on a journey to a more cohesive, powerful brand strategy? Talk to a branding specialist at Thrive today.
