Brand consistency doesn’t come by accident. Behind every recognizable and trusted brand is a publishing process that enables and empowers teams to collaborate, review, oversee, and publish content in unifying ways. Yes, brand guidelines, visuals, and tone matter. But to achieve and maintain a strong brand presence across multiple platforms, companies need to establish a new level of publishing excellence.

What is brand consistency?

Brand consistency refers to appearing the same throughout multiple customer interactions. Brand image strategy should unify a combination of the following elements:

• Values and message – what you stand for and what you want to say to your clients
• Logo and design – visual appearance
• Voice – what you sound like

Together, those attributes shape a company’s brand and help customers form perceptions and expectations. In other words, brand consistency builds brand equity. At the same time, an inconsistent presence confuses customers, diluting the brand’s value.

The problem is that brand publishing often falls apart when multiple contributors attempt to apply various strategies and rules at different stages. That’s when companies need to establish better publishing practices. Let’s take a closer look at them.

Brand publishing best practices that help you scale your brand presence

Publishing is the beating heart of any brand: every article, marketing campaign, advertisement, message, and any other content published by a company represents this brand. To ensure brand consistency, companies should implement brand publishing best practices and standard operating procedures.

Brand publishing SOPs empower teams, ensuring they can deliver brand messages in a consistent manner while enabling faster production and higher quality of content. Social media scheduling tools can further support these efforts by helping teams plan, organize, and publish content consistently across multiple platforms. Here are the key elements of brand publishing best practices that every company should consider:

Strategy-driven publishing

Every piece of content published on behalf of a brand should be informed by brand strategy, guidelines, and standards. That way, the strategy consistently informs content creators and publishers about what to do and what not to do. Publishing SOPs define brand strategy touchpoints, outlining who does what, when, and how, thereby standardizing and unifying the publishing workflow.

In other words, publishing SOPs unify brand strategy, guidelines, and rules, distributing them to the right people at the right time in a form they can actually use. Such a publishing process ensures consistency and brand publishing excellence.

Balance between speed and control

A brand publishing process should be fast enough to enable agility and fuel continuous publishing while still retaining enough control to be able to maintain the desired level of brand consistency.

Brand publishing excellence fuels business growth

A brand publishing process is a cornerstone of brand building and business growth, delivering multiple benefits to companies that want to increase revenue and influence while minimizing risks. For example, research published by Branding Strategy Insider shows that brand consistency drives dramatically increased revenue, with some companies registering a 23% rise in revenue.

Meanwhile, brand publishing excellence ensures that employees understand the brand and speak the same language, helping to unify the workplace. In addition, a brand’s consistent presence builds a more professional image, increasing customer trust and loyalty.

Finally, brand publishing best practices ensure that the brand is presented in a way that is easily recognizable and memorable. After all, most brands that have been around for a while have distinctive colors and logos that people can quickly identify.

Now that you know why brand publishing best practices are so critically important for your business, let’s discuss how to implement them.

How to build brand publishing best practices

To build brand publishing best practices, companies should start by defining their brand strategy. Your brand strategy, which is informed by your brand guidelines, should state what you want to do and who you want to be. It will serve as the backbone of your brand publishing SOPs, informing every aspect of your publishing process. The key questions to answer when building brand publishing best practices include:

• Who are our target audiences?
• What do we stand for?
• What are our brand personality traits?
• What do we want to look like?
• How do we want to sound?
• How will our brand presentation vary depending on the channel, markets, or products?

Those questions will help you codify your brand strategy, which will subsequently inform your brand publishing SOPs. As a result, you will be able to answer such questions as who can do what, who is responsible for what, and what content can and cannot be published.

Strategy-guided brand guidelines

Brand guidelines detail what you can and cannot do when representing your brand. They should be comprehensive but simple to follow, covering such topics as logo guidelines, color palettes, typography, imagery and photography, layout and design, messaging, and voice. They should also include examples of things you can and cannot do.

At the same time, your brand guidelines should be living documents, available to all brand-facing employees and accessible at all times. When developing brand publishing best practices, make sure that brand guidelines are easy to navigate and that the language is simple. One way to do that is to make brand guidelines available in the brand content library as discussed below.

Use brand publishing templates

Brand publishing templates are essential for brand publishing best practices. They unify brand strategy, guidelines, and consistency while also giving you and your team flexibility and creative freedom. A good template should be easy to use and edit, helping you and your team to create branded content faster, with fewer approvals and revisions. At the same time, brand publishing templates can be localized, helping different markets to create content that appeals to their specific audiences while being consistent with the overarching brand strategy.

When combined with other brand publishing best practices discussed above, brand templates can help you and your team to create beautiful content faster while also saving you time and money.

Conclusion

Behind every great brand is a publishing process that makes brand consistency easy to achieve. Multiple elements contribute to brand publishing excellence, but they all unite to make things easy for your team that creates content for your brand. By implementing brand publishing best practices, you can streamline your publishing workflow, enabling your teams to work faster and more efficiently while delivering brand-consistent content every time.