Is your marketing messaging as consistent as it should be?
Do your ads, organic social media content, email sequences, and offline efforts fit together and complement each other?
Consistent branding across all your promotional efforts is crucial for long term success. It all comes down to your brain’s neurochemistry. When you experience something like a new place or a new message, a type of neuron known as a place cell, fires to mark the occasion. It’s like an x on your personal experiential pirate map, marking the spot where the experience occurred. Every time you revisit the spot by encountering the same experience, the neurons fire up to strengthen your lasting memory.
You can further increase that impact by leveraging the availability bias. This is the idea that our brains favor the information we’ve been exposed to most recently. When a customer sees the same marketing messaging about you from a variety of sources and can easily recall it, they are more likely to internalize it.
So when your marketing message is consistent, your brand gains stickiness and it’s easier for potential customers to remember you. The more people remember you, the higher the chance they’ll buy from you.
Luckily, technology makes it easy to streamline your marketing message so you can stay top of mind. In this article, I’ll walk you through the exact tech you can use to do that.
Unlock the power of cross-department collaboration
If streamlined marketing messages make it easier for customers to remembers us, then why do so many businesses struggle? The chief culprits are communication silos.
Teams and departments often use their own processes and tools to stay on track. For example, the people in charge of the next social media marketing campaign may not have direct access to the data and processes used by the copywriters putting together the sales and landing pages. This division can lead to messaging inconsistencies.
Project management software like Asana, Basecamp or Monday make it easy to eliminate these information silos. Instead of going it alone, people from various departments can collaborate on projects through a single dashboard.
Executives and team leaders can keep important documentation about voice, branding, and the marketing objectives inside each project board where team members can easily access it.
By keeping all the information in the same place, updating it regularly, and giving all relevant people access to the marketing projects, we can keep messaging consistent across teams and departments.
Save time with project-specific feedback
Using project management software is the first step. The next step toward messaging consistency is using collaboration software to work on projects together.
Tools like Invision make it easy for all the marketing team decision makers to collaborate with designers by adding comments and feedback in real time.
By providing consistent feedback early, before final iteration, marketing briefs can get completed faster. Plus, because these tools keep a record of past conversations, everyone on the team can benefit from catching up on key decisions.
Keep marketing campaigns agile
Imagine you launched a Google AdWords campaign when, two days in, you noticed that the landing page your ads lead to is grossly under performing. You need to make changes fast but you also need to keep the messaging consistent.
You can use customer behavior tracking tools like heat mapping and an analytics tool like Google Analytics to understand where on the page you’re losing the customer’s attention.
Then, you can collaborate on the page in real time with any other decision makers through a live Zoom call. You can then update the team’s project management tool so that everyone is up to date with what’s happening.
Tech has turned a painful editing process into something that can be done fast. Combining these data-based adjustments with consistent team communication means that you can stay agile and keep your messaging consistent across different channels.
Tracking your efforts
How do you keep track of who on your marketing team is responsible for what? And how do you know the correct tasks are getting done and that nothing vital is slipping through the cracks?
Most powerful software tools– from project management to social media marketing and CRMs– let you create profiles for different team members and assign tasks.
For example, if you are managing a LinkedIn ad campaign through your social media marketing dashboard, you can use it to assign specific tasks and track their completion.
This makes it easier to stay efficient and consistent, while still giving team members some freedom in how they complete the tasks.
Stay in control of your message
How can you stay in control of your marketing message when working with third party service providers?
Most companies you’ll collaborate with try to make maintaining messaging consistency as easy for you as possible.
For example, managing your digital display ads is a lot easier than it used to be. Before the widespread tech advances we enjoy today, you’d have to phone whoever owns the ad space and enter a lengthy negotiating process to make the change.
The process was arduous and time consuming. And while you were negotiating the change, your ad stayed up there, throwing your messaging out of sync.
Today, you can just change the ad through a central dashboard that gives your team the ability to update any of your sign display ads at any time from a single dashboard. This makes it easy to keep your brand messaging streamlined, accurate and consistent.
Staying true to your brand
Streamlining your message helps your customers recognize you. By consistently showing up with the same tone and the same underlying values, you build trust and make it easy for people to remember you.
Because it’s not just your processes and strategies that need to be streamlined in order to be more efficient and make more money– your messaging needs to be there too.
How can you use tech to streamline your marketing messages?