“We are what we repeatedly do, therefore, excellence is not an act, but a habit”
― Will Durant (typically misattributed to Aristotle)
Here at Collecting Heads Operations, life is complicated. Our company has six verticals (plus a couple more in the pipeline), and dozens of clients, employees, projects, and deadlines doing a ballet in-and-around our schedules at all times. We quickly learned that, when business is complicated, problem solving needs to be dead simple..
Consequently, at Collecting Heads Operations (CHOps to our friends) we spend most of our time figuring out the fundamentals and sticking to them.
We didn’t really want to, but Life beat it into us eventually. The fundamentals are everything and, if you do them correctly and consistently, excellence is the inevitable result.
With that in mind, let’s start this from the ground up. We’ll hit some big principles first and then move on to specific strategies. Keep in mind that the details will be fairly self-contained, but most of our principles are going to cut both ways.
Keep an eye out for the split and think about what the best balance is for you and your company.
“Consistency is the true foundation of trust. Either keep your promises or do not make them.”
― Roy T. Bennett
The most meaningful communication will always be behavior ― “what we repeatedly do” as Mr. Durant put it for us at the top. As businesses, our language is always anchored to our behavior, whether or not we realize it.
Our success or failure will be ultimately measured not just by whether our words match our behavior, but whether or not our customers understand it to match. Talk is cheap… but it can cost you mightily.
Communicate Our Value to Customers in Their Language
In How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie instructs us to “always frame things in terms of the other person’s interests”. Thus, our first mandatory step is not just to know who we are talking to, but to understand them.
Together, these pieces give us Fundamental 1: Explain what we are doing for our customers in language our customers understand.
Everyone’s Efforts Must Be Aligned & Unified
It’s worth mentioning that, while the bulk of this article is focused on outward communication, inward communication is just as important.
If Sales doesn’t understand what Production is doing and Leadership has blurry platitudes instead of a clear vision, your company’s behavior is going to get disconnected from your company’s messaging pretty quickly.
Fundamental 2: Everybody is steering; you’d better make sure they’re all going the same direction.
“Time moves in one direction, memory in another.”
― William Gibson
Prioritize Consistency, but Relentlessly Pursue Brand-Aligned Opportunities
Depending on the circumstance, time can act as either Friend or Enemy, but we should avoid thinking of it in this way. In truth, time is both a constraint and a tool, so how does this affect our decisions in messaging? Time as a constraint needs little explanation, being the central struggle of mortality and all, so let’s examine time as a tool.
For messaging, our primary time challenge is Longevity vs. Opportunity.
If we become slavishly devoted to Opportunity, we will never establish consistency. We will chase hashtags, fads, temporary markets, and soon nobody inside or outside the company will remember exactly what we were trying to do in the first place. Of the two errors, this is certainly the worse one.
What if we become slavishly devoted to Longevity? We will certainly achieve consistency, but we will also become stagnant and gradually alienate ourselves from customers. People and markets are going to change and, even if our message stays consistent, we must adapt the way we communicate it. Worse than that, we will fail to seek and recognize major opportunities to expand to new markets and customers.
Thus, the proper balance is Fundamental 3: Consistency is everything, but be vigilant for opportunities that align with your brand and pursue them relentlessly.
Now that we have the broad principles established, let’s drill down into the details: Why is consistency in marketing messages important?
“A brand is a voice and a product is a souvenir.”
― Lisa Gansky
Messaging Consistency
Brand Identity
Honestly, this is pretty simple. An identity crisis is confusing for everybody including, most impactfully, your customers. Your brand can’t be memorable if no one recognizes it, and nobody’s going to recognize it if it isn’t consistent.
Now, finding your voice, niche, identity, etc. will naturally take some time but, once you find it, stick to it. Who you are, what you say, and what you do all have to align and be firmly etched into a customer’s mind for your company to find success.
Customer Loyalty & Trust
Apple is one of the most recognizable brands on the planet but if they launch a new line of chainsaws tomorrow, they’re not getting any of our money.
We don’t trust Apple for hard-use landscaping and forestry tools, we trust them for sleek, secure, and well-integrated product and software solutions. We trust them for the things they have shown the market they excel at. This is what reliability looks like in practice.
Everything that Apple does feels like Apple. This is what every brand should pursue in principle.
Regularly, clearly, and consistently communicate with your customers about who you are, what you do, and why you do it. If you do this consistently, customers will rely on you not just for products and services, but for information and values. But you have to earn it.
“Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
― Jeff Bezos
Audience Engagement & Growth
Here we are going to deviate slightly from consistency in messaging to consistency in behavior. Do you post regularly on social media in addition to running ads? Have you figured out what your customers respond to?
Are you interacting with them? Finding ways to engage them that work? Making them feel heard?
It may take some time to build brand awareness, but it’s incredibly dynamic and will increase customer acquisition when you do.
This kind of engagement is so valuable that some legacy companies have even decided to abandon traditional concerns about respectable optics and fully embrace the Wild West of social media.
If this isn’t on your radar, Google “Wendy’s Twitter Roasts” and brace yourself. It’s probably not the right move for most companies, but it’s a great example of what’s possible when we let go of limiting assumptions. Limits are incredibly important in life and in business, but you should know what they are and choose them intentionally.
Social Media Impact & Effectiveness
This is implied in the point above, but it’s so important we’re going to call it out anyway. Regular and consistent social media activity is absolutely essential. It is the only way to teach the algorithms that your brand is providing relevant and valuable content to customers.
“Your brand is a story unfolding across all customer touch points.”
― Jonah Sachs
SEO and Search Rankings
Speaking of Google, let’s take a moment to pay our dues to the Alphabet Overlords. With a zillion new pieces of content being uploaded every day, showing up when people are looking for what you offer can be tricky. Success here requires consistency in both messaging and behavior.
Where you place in search results depends on your “reputation” with those engines. The main ingredients of that reputation, broadly, are relevance, activity, and currency, and search engines are constantly checking and rechecking for each of them. Post fresh, on-brand content consistently and you’ll be moving in the right direction.
In addition to improving SEO and search rankings, regular posts educating and inspiring your audience will also drive conversions and sales by keeping the brand top-of-mind, especially when that new content is integrated and pushed out through other channels and platforms as well.
For the record, there is a much more exact and powerful science to SEO. You can get a glimpse of it here at [LINK TO SEO BLOG] and you can get full access to it by hitting the contact link at [LOCATION ON WEBSITE] and hiring us.
Messaging Consistency is the Key to Clear Brand Guidelines & Cohesive Marketing Strategy
Like many critical things, this one is pretty straightforward. Your brand and story has to be adapted to different products, services, media, and platforms… but it also has to feel the same. It can bend, but you can never let it break. All messaging efforts ― visuals, copy, tone, etc. ― across all the channels and touchpoints must be harmonious.
There is no objective guide for this; you have to know and understand your brand, your customers, and what the most important factors are for each medium and channel. If you don’t regularly check your different outputs side-by-side, you should.
Trust your gut. If things don’t feel cohesive, they probably aren’t and you’ve got some work to do.
Apple is, again, a great example here. We have some spirited disagreements about their products, but nobody would argue that everything Apple does feels like Apple.
Companies may have strategy, guidelines, and case studies, but for customers that’s all going to boil down to their fleeting impression and the “vibes”, so don’t forget to step back and make sure the vibes are right.
“Great brands are built with consistent messaging and a relentless focus on their core values.”
― Jay Baer
Messaging Adaptability
Let’s flesh out what we discussed above in Longevity vs. Opportunity.
While clinging too tightly to messaging that is too rigid can make a company stagnant, a consistent and balanced messaging strategy can actually make you more flexible! Done correctly, consistent messaging establishes a clear framework that will allow a brand to stay responsive and relevant when the market shifts.
If a company gets too attached to the way they express a message, they can become brittle and stale very quickly.
When a company carefully and clearly establishes and understands their core message, they can adapt the way they express it for new audiences and customers the moment the right opportunity arises.
Empower Messaging Consistency with Tools and Schedules
With the digital age in full effect, companies have more places they need to be seen than ever before and it gets very complicated very quickly—trust us, we understand.
There are a million native and third-party scheduling and project tracking tools out there and we recommend that you find some that work and use the heck out of them. Messaging and marketing can very easily turn into a logistical nightmare; confusion is one of the biggest enemies of consistency.
Here at Collecting Heads, we use these tools every day to keep our promise of excellent and timely work to all our clients.
And don’t forget that internal clarity is just as important as external scheduling. It can be very easy for small and large teams to lose track of all the moving parts. Scheduling the work is just as important as scheduling your posts.
Speaking of schedules, we’re about to be late for a meeting, so that’s all for today. Get out there, get consistent, and get messaging!
