If you've successfully built a brand, you know firsthand it's no small feat. From its initial positioning and strategy to the creation of all its print and digital assets, it takes hard work to develop a brand that has the potential to rival even the most recognizable names in your industry.
But cultivating a truly unforgettable brand isn't a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. Instead, you must take intentional steps to continue developing and reinforcing your brand's identity over time through a coordinated brand management strategy—and the key to that strategy is training your team to stay on-brand.
Read on to learn why staying on-brand is so crucial to your success, the role your team plays in your brand management, and our top tips for ensuring your team accurately represents your brand to your target audience at all times.
What Does it Mean to Stay On-Brand?
Staying on-brand, means maintaining a consistent presence for your audience. It's about providing a predictable and reliable experience, no matter how or where someone interacts with your brand. This means that every element of your brand—from your logo to your color palette to your messaging—must be authentic and consistent across every touchpoint.
There are a variety of reasons why maintaining a consistent identity is important to your success as a brand:
- Boost brand recognition. A lack of consistency creates confusion for your audience, but staying on-brand increases the likelihood that your audience will recognize and remember you.
- Build customer loyalty. When your audience is familiar with your brand, they’re more likely to continue engaging with—and buying from—you.
- Promote trust among employees. A consistent and authentic brand identity—including a strong set of core values—gives your team something to rally behind, increasing their commitment and motivation.
Increase profitability. Data demonstrates that brand consistency increases revenue, in some cases by more than 20%.
The Role of Your Team in Brand Management
Your team is a vital part of maintaining your brand's image. As the people with the most direct and frequent contact with your audience, they have a huge impact on how your brand is perceived. If they don't have a clear understanding of who you are and why you do what you do, your audience won't either.
That's why your team is key to maintaining a consistent brand identity. When they believe in your mission and vision and are fully aligned with your core values, they bring the passion, creativity, effort, and focus needed to represent your brand reliably and authentically at all touchpoints. Plus, when they're fully informed on your brand guidelines—including important information about how to create and store brand assets—they have the tools and resources necessary to work efficiently and effectively toward your brand management strategy.
Tips for Training Your Team to Stay On-Brand
If your team plays a crucial role in cultivating a consistent brand identity, it pays to develop an intentional strategy around training them to stay on-brand. These are Miss Details’ top tips for ensuring your team accurately represents your brand to your target audience—no matter how or where they interact with them.
1. Create a Detailed Brand Handbook
A brand handbook is an excellent tool for maintaining a consistent brand. Also called other names like "brand standards" or "brand guidelines," a brand handbook is the core document you use to outline the foundational elements and visual standards of your brand.
It's the perfect place to store both the tangible and intangible components that make your brand your brand, from your vision and values to your logo and color palettes. It's also where you can create and store templates for frequently used assets like social media graphics. Plus, by organizing your brand in one place, you can easily share it with your team, make updates when necessary, and refer back to it again and again.
If you have yet to create a brand handbook, Miss Details can help! Our Brand Snapshot™ service gives small businesses a jumpstart on developing a succinct guide to help you visually communicate your brand to your audience.
2. Conduct Regular Training
Consistency requires frequent practice and reminders, so conducting regular training with your team is a must. While revisiting your brand handbook is a good place to start, aim to go beyond the text with engaging exercises and team-building activities that promote collaboration and an emotional connection with your brand. Remember: the more excited your team is to get behind your mission, the better they can stay on-brand when interacting with your audience.
3. Keep Your Team in the Loop
In addition to regular training, making an active effort to keep your team in the loop about developments to your brand makes carrying out a cohesive brand management strategy easier. In addition to efforts like weekly email communication and monthly online all-hands meetings, going the extra mile with in-person gatherings and office hours can make a big difference in keeping your team fully informed and engaged.
4. Repeat Your Vision and Values in All Team Communications
Speaking of team communications, they're a great opportunity to reinforce your brand's vision and values. While it may seem redundant, keeping the core aspects of your brand top of mind for your team is crucial to ensuring they stay on-brand at all times. Think of it like that advertising jingle you always see on TV—repeat it enough times and it becomes difficult to forget!
5. Create an Easy-to-Follow Guide for Onboarding Team Members
Maintaining brand consistency requires that your entire team is on board, meaning that getting new team members up to speed is crucial. You can make this process easier by developing an easy-to-follow guide—almost like a mini version of your brand handbook—that new members receive as part of their onboarding. Internalizing all of the style guidelines and standard processes and procedures for your brand will take time, but you can speed up the process by providing an easy resource that new team members can refer to as they learn the ropes.
Having an easy-to-follow guide on hand isn't a bad idea for the more experienced team members either. Department leads can keep a copy for easy reference, and it can act as a quick refresher when creating last-minute brand assets or searching for important files in your digital asset management system (DAM).
6. Conduct Periodic Content Audits
As your brand grows, you'll naturally develop more and more content that will need to align with your brand. Therefore, it's a good idea to encourage your team to periodically conduct content audits to ensure everything they're producing and publishing stays on-brand. As a bonus, content audits can also double as a training exercise, since looking out for inconsistencies can help your team internalize your brand standards!
7. Document Changes Over Time
Successful brands evolve with time, and it's important to keep track of those changes! Not only does this help you maintain consistency even as you grow into a new iteration of your brand, but it also helps your team understand your identity on a deeper level and remain aware of any updates that impact their day-to-day work.
8. Measure Brand Consistency
Finally, like any initiative, look for ways to measure how successfully your team is managing to stay on-brand. This has become significantly easier in the digital age with tools like digital asset management and collaborative documents. You can keep tabs on how often certain team members access brand assets, templates, and even your brand handbook to ensure all of these resources are being taken advantage of on a regular basis. Plus, this data can help you identify the source of any inconsistencies you notice in your branding, helping you address them as quickly as possible.
Stay On-Brand with Miss Details' Brand Audit
Before you can train your team, you first need to develop a solid brand management strategy—and before you can develop a strategy, you need a clear understanding of your brand's identity, goals, and market positioning. Miss Details can give you a professional perspective on what’s working in your brand—and where there are opportunities for growth—so you can create an effective strategy and get your team on board.
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