You haven’t heard from a brand in months and then, boom, suddenly you get three emails from them in a week. Chances are, you don’t feel charmed to hear from them again, and you’re probably annoyed at the sudden influx of content clogging your inbox from a brand you’d forgotten about. This may cause you to roll your eyes and maybe even click that “Unsubscribe” button. Had those same emails been consistently sent out from the time you first engaged, you’d feel differently.
Consistently is the key word there. Consistency matters in marketing. It influences how people view your brand and, as a result, it can affect how they respond to your messaging.
Why Consistency Matters
Creating (and sticking to) a go-to-market (GTM) strategy involves a lot of different tasks, departments, and moving parts. In that context, consistency won’t happen unless you’re intentional about it. With so many other things on your mind, you have to believe consistency is important if you’re going to make it a priority. Here’s why it’s worth valuing:
1. Consistency helps you avoid confusion.
Marketing is spread over a number of different channels. Your business probably has different people helming each one. If your brand’s messaging and visuals vary in each place your audience encounters you, that creates confusion. They’ll find it harder to connect the varying pieces into one understandable whole.
Developing a clear, consistent brand strategy that gets everyone in your organization on the same page makes it easier for your audience to understand what your brand is. That way you don’t risk giving out mixed messaging.
2. You demonstrate credibility.
If you want any chance at gaining loyalty from your customers, you’ll need to earn their trust. Trust comes from knowing they can count on your brand, and while product quality and customer service are big parts of that, consistency plays a role as well. If you’ve ever had a friend or colleague whose story always seemed to change, you quickly learn not to put much trust into what they tell you. If your business can’t keep your brand messaging straight, it makes you less reliable.
3. People know what to expect from you.
Consistency also breeds familiarity. If your marketing presents your brand in a consistent way, people will start to know what to expect from you. They’ll recognize what type of tone, content, and visuals to associate with your brand. If you’re successful enough in this, consumers could come to recognize your marketing as representing your brand even before they spot the logo.
4. You’ll get better results.
Good marketing isn’t just about patting yourself on the back. It also has to produce results. If your marketing is scattershot and disconnected, it’s far less likely to be successful. Since it helps you build your reputation and gain trust, consistency will also help you gain sales. And just as importantly, it will help you gain the kind of loyalty that leads to customers continuing to do business with you over time.
5. You can better measure results.
Trying to figure out what’s working is a lot harder if your marketing is inconsistent. You can’t spot trends in the data if you’re collecting data on campaigns that are detached from each other. When your marketing underperforms, you won’t know if the cause is due to something particular about a campaign, or if the failure is due to the inconsistency itself. For effective measurement, you need a marketing strategy in which all the different pieces are connected and consistent.
6 Keys to Achieve Consistency in Your GTM Strategy
Consistency doesn’t happen by accident. You have to prioritize and plan for it. A few main steps will help you achieve a more consistent GTM strategy:
1. Have a central strategy.
In order to achieve consistency across your organization, you need one central plan that everyone sticks to. For large and growing organizations, this can be particularly challenging. Multiple people doing work in different departments need some central guiding force to ensure that the various deliverables they produce all represent the brand in a clear and consistent way.
Having one holistic strategy is how you ensure that all the different pieces of your company’s brand connect in ways that make each one stronger. Your sales team will have more success if their pitches match the marketing materials your company puts out, and if they know how to build off of the messaging that the prospects have already encountered.
2. Create consistent brand messaging.
The first step to getting everyone in your organization on the same page is to clarify your brand messaging. This is one area where the product marketing department can really shine. Use what you’ve learned in your audience, product, and competitor research to create a clear messaging and positioning framework. In order to teach everyone in your organization how to talk about your brand in a way that’s consistent and fits with how you want your customers to see it, you need to first clearly document what that looks like.
3. Share your messaging throughout the company.
With your brand messaging complete, get to work on distributing it throughout your organization. Think about the best content formats to use for each relevant department and position in the company. If you want people to use the messaging, you need to put it in a form that works for them.
You want everyone working for your organization to understand where your products fit into the competitive landscape, the kind of tone and style to use for the brand, and the right messaging to use when communicating about the products. Achieve that, and your customers will encounter a consistent brand identity across channels and touch points.
4. Create—and commit to—a marketing calendar.
Another key factor in consistency is frequency. If prospects feel like they’re being hit over the head with constant mentions of your brand, it will turn them off. However, if they encounter radio silence for weeks or months, they’ll forget about you completely. Finding the right frequency of communication is a big part of proper branding, and one where establishing consistency is key.
A marketing calendar helps you spread out how often your marketing materials are released, so you stay in control of that frequency. Plus, it helps your team stay incentivized to get work done in a timely manner by having clear deadlines in place. Having a clear timeline for when each campaign launches also makes it easier to collaborate across teams and departments, so everyone’s doing work that supports everyone else’s.
5. Benchmark and Measure.
Understanding your current state is critical to understanding your opportunity to improve. Benchmarking where you are will help identify the right metrics to follow and measure your progress on driving consistent results across your organization. Focusing on 3-5 key metrics in a consistent cadence rather than “boiling the ocean” will provide guide posts to track trends and feed insights to understand what’s working and what isn’t.
6. Adapt and Evolve.
Prioritizing consistency doesn’t necessarily mean you do things the same way forever. You still want to take measure of how your materials and messaging are landing, and look for opportunities to improve. The best companies use metrics data and market insights to tweak and optimize strategies as market dynamics require, rather than following one rigid path. Pay attention to your analytics and look for trends and insights in the data that point to ways you can tweak your strategy for better results.
On the other hand, the things you learn shouldn’t make you drop your previous strategy entirely and go off in an all new direction. Instead, use the insights to make updates to your current strategy to make it stronger. Keep up with the calendar and collaborative techniques you’ve put into place, just making alterations to the parts of it that will benefit most from change.
Consistency is Key
Consistency doesn’t just improve results, it also makes the work easier. Tying everything together in a clear strategy enables different departments to work together. That collaboration keeps people from replicating work. It ensures each task they complete goes further, since it fits into a larger strategy. When everyone can pull from a clear brand messaging framework, they’re never starting from scratch in figuring out how to talk about the brand. That means you improve efficiency at the same time that you build a more effective, clear brand identity.
