Consistent branding is essential to maintaining a brand identity, but in the digital age, it’s crucial to ensure that your marketing efforts achieve brand consistency. If your franchise branding uses, say, a logo that doesn’t scale well or reproduces in different fonts or colors when on various search engines or social media platforms, you’re transmitting subconsciously that you can’t be trusted — regardless of your core values.
Franchise marketing should reflect and enhance your brand’s reputation and company culture at all times. Whether you’re a plumbing franchise or a restaurant franchise, your digital marketing encompasses everything about your brand online: your website, search engine optimization (SEO), social media and more. Consider it the curb appeal that transmits your best practices, selling the customer experience inside, along with your goods and services.
Here are some tactics to create effective franchise branding across digital platforms:
Consistent Brand Management Means Recognition and Trust
You’ve heard people say that how you show up in the digital world is how you show up in the real world. Whatever this means in your personal life, it holds true in business, especially when maintaining a consistent brand across franchisors and franchisees.
Remember, branding is a psychological experience. It’s not just how you interact with customers at a national and local level or how you appeal to new customers. The colors, shapes, lines and storytelling behind a logo all form the foundation of a franchise brand, and your social media presence builds on this.
If you use a font that appears pixelated on your website, or if the site’s color schemes don’t match your business cards, you’ll create a feeling of unease among website visitors. Consistency equals trustworthiness.
If you post certain imagery on your website, your social media profiles should have a similar feel. Think about a retail franchise like Plato’s Closet, which features models of different races, ethnicities and body types. Their website and social media presence might change to reflect certain seasons, but the images follow the same inclusive strategies and brand guidelines to resonate with customers emotionally in the same way.
Franchise Branding with Personality
When developing your franchise branding and marketing materials, take a big-picture view of your logo, digital assets and message. Statistics say that the average person sees tens of thousands of images each day, so to stand out from competitors, you need to evoke more than brand recognition. Your brand should encapsulate your values, voice, history and commitment while staying relevant and modern in the digital age and among cultural trends.
To connect with customers, your brand image needs to act – well, a bit human. How did your company start? What’s important as you grow? Establish your mission, vision and value statements to help create a powerful, lasting brand and consistent franchise branding.
Consider Chick-Fil-A’s branding and logo. The brand is well-known for placing a high priority on providing excellent customer service. Chick-Fil-A turns its “C” into a simple drawing of a chicken’s head with warm, folksy red. The name literally is about chicken, while the color and style add a dash of folksy hospitality.
A skilled marketing team can work with you to develop effective campaigns that use consistent templates and assets across multiple platforms so that your brand’s voice and personality don’t get lost in the crowd.
