Effective branding is crucial for a business’s success. When your company has a distinct brand, customers can easily recognize your products and services, making you stand out from your competitors.
However, it can be very easy for a brand to weaken and lose its potency. This is where brand alignment comes into play.
What Is Brand Alignment?
Brand alignment keeps your branding in check, as it measures how well you are delivering your brand promise. This can be in terms of sales and marketing efforts, employee behavior, and product development.
When you have achieved brand alignment, you are presenting your brand as authentic. Inconsistent branding and unfulfilled promises can be a turn-off for customers as they can be a display of unprofessionalism and carelessness on your part.
Why Is Brand Alignment Important?
Brand alignment is crucial because you want to ensure consistency in your brand. The strength of your brand can affect the way customers perceive your brand. When you deliver consistently and fulfill your brand promises, customers will be more likely to trust your brand and stay loyal.
On the downside, if there is no brand alignment, your business may have difficulty differentiating itself from your competitors. It can even reach the point where your own employees don’t know what to say about your brand. There can be inconsistencies in what they tell customers, making them confused. This can instill a lack of confidence in your brand and affect your sales.
How to Achieve Brand Alignment
If you’re having trouble with your company’s brand alignment, here are three tips that can help you out.
Focus on Internal Branding
We’re all familiar with external branding, as this is typically how a company decides to differentiate itself in the marketplace. While many choose to focus on this, they may neglect their internal branding. But a company’s internal branding is just as crucial in achieving brand alignment.
Internal branding refers to how the company positions itself with its employees. It aims to bring the business’s identity, core values, and culture to its employees. This is crucial in brand alignment, as internal branding can turn employees into perfect representatives of the brand. You can improve your internal branding by ensuring your employees understand the company’s mission and core values, engaging with your people, and effectively communicating your internal branding strategy.
Create Branding Guidelines
To ensure consistency in branding, it is crucial to set some branding guidelines for your team. Start by clearly defining your brand’s visual identity. Create a brand book to help align your brand across different platforms.
You shouldn’t also stop with the visual aspects of branding. It’s best to also create branding guidelines on how your team members should communicate and interact with customers.
Outline Your Brand Voice
When producing different content for your brand, you have to ensure that you’re using a consistent voice. Writers tend to bring in their own style when they write content. And as people read on, the writer’s voice may start to become more distinct and recognizable.
If you have a consistent voice, it can help your audience recognize your brand through your content. But if different voices are showing up across your blog posts, it can be challenging to achieve this. So, it’s best to develop a singular brand voice and orient your writers so they can use this voice when creating content for your brand.
Final Thoughts
Brand alignment is essential as it tells customers you are serious about fulfilling your brand promises. With consistent branding, you can instill confidence in your brand and gain customer loyalty. On the other hand, if brand alignment is weak, your company may have trouble differentiating itself in the marketplace.
Build an impactful brand for your business with the help of C/C/G. We are a full-service creative agency in California that is strategically focused and creatively driven. We unlock innovative solutions that connect our clients to their customers. Schedule a call now!