How Financial Services Can Strengthen Brand Consistency
- Define & Align Your Brand Identity: Create consistent messaging, tone, visuals, and logos so clients recognize and trust your firm across every touchpoint.
- Build Recognition & Authority: Consistency helps you stand out in a crowded financial marketplace, fostering loyalty and positioning your firm as an industry leader.
- Use Tools for Organization & Growth: Digital asset management and marketing automation streamline brand management and ensure your message stays unified.
As a financial service company, such as a CPA, financial planner, or estate planner, your brand is what defines your success. Financial service companies must be trustworthy and respectable. They also have to be able to communicate confidence and success. When a consumer needs your services, they need to instantly understand why your firm is the best for their investment. Branding consistency is at the heart of that process.
Branding for financial service companies communicates the value your firm offers. When that message is clearly defined and communicated across all of your channels, people get to know you, build a relationship with your brand, and, over time, remember your financial firm when they need your services.
What Is Brand Consistency for Financial Service Companies?
As a financial service business, brand consistency can be the single most important tool for communicating with your clients about why they should choose you. Consistency means:
- Your language and wording are similar across all platforms
- Your company’s logo and graphics are the same across all platforms
- A customer can easily recognize your brand, no matter if they are on social media, see an ad on TV, or read a review of your company
- The tone and slogans for your company must be the same across all channels so that there is no question about who is behind the company
- Your image and message are unified, no matter where customers learn about or engage with your company.
Brand consistency is the process of making this possible. It’s one of the best ways to help customers remember and want to engage with your company.
The Value of Brand Consistency to Financial Service Companies
Why does it really matter? What if you want to have a different persona on your social media pages than on your website? Brand consistency creates a recognizable element within your messaging that directly communicates with your audience who you are at any given time, no matter where they encounter your company. There are several benefits to having consistent branding in financial services:
- Customers learn of your company and trust it. This builds loyalty simply because they recognize your company. They want to work with you over the competition.
- Stand out from the competition, especially in a crowded marketplace. Branding allows you to build an element that helps your business stand out from the others in your industry.
- It builds brand authority. Think about the big players in your industry right now. You know them for various reasons, but big brands are nearly always linked to being industry leaders.
As you work to create a brand and then use it, know that you want your prospective customers to always have a positive impression of your business and what it offers. Consumers who recognize your brand are more likely to work with you when they need your service.
Strategies for Building Your Brand Consistency in the Financial Service Industry
How can you create a brand? That seems like an overwhelming process in itself. However, with a few strategies, you will be able to create a brand that is clearly defined and easily recognized. No matter what people think of your company right now, focus on the following areas:
Define Your Target Audience
Your target audience is the ideal person who will see your ads and make a purchase. In the financial service industry, it is critical to define your target audience so you are attracting the right types of clients to your brand.
For example, as an estate planning provider, you need to target an older audience of customers who are thinking about what would happen in the event of their deaths. If you are a tax professional, you may be targeting clients who are in a specific area of business.
You should define your target audience by all factors that impact them, such as:
- Their age
- Location, including all metro areas you service (and if you offer online services, that information as well)
- Income of your clients
- Types of employment and careers
- Financial health and wellbeing
You may work with people who are outside your target audience. However, by refining these components now, you can create a clear way to ensure your investment in marketing and brand building is going towards the clients that are going to make you the most profit and build your business.
Create Visual Elements
The next component of a successful brand development strategy is to create visual elements. Consumers remember things based on visuals, not just words. Build your brand around specific elements that define it from a visual standpoint. Some examples of the visual components that you need include:
- A clearly defined color palette. Branding is about psychological impact. Color plays a role in that. What colors – including what hues of those colors – are going to define your brand? You will use the same color palette across all of your customer touchpoints, creating that brand consistency you need.
- Logos. Your financial service business’s logo is another valuable resource. It allows you to instantly be recognized by anyone who engages in your industry. Choose a logo that is easy to understand and instantly recognizable. Complexity is not necessary. What is important is having a logo that people can respond to well.
- People are a critical visual element. Most financial service companies are built on the services and individuals that work for them. If you are a CPA, your photos and image are likely a core component of your brand. Ensure you have professional images created that help to capture the feel you want people to have when they see your business.
You also need to consider other images and even the font that is used within your business. For example, brand consistency means using the same style or tone in your photos. It means using the same font on all of the marketing materials you have. This aids in consistency.
Define Your Style
The net component to building brand consistency is to incorporate language that is on point, or on brand. The language and communication elements that make up a part of your business should seem like they are coming from the same person. You can build brand consistency with language in several ways.
- Voice and tone. What is your brand’s personality? Positive and motivating? Engaging? Aggressive? Your tone should be based on how consumers will respond to you and take action. Supportive, exciting, protective…define what your personality will be.
- Word choice. Even the words you use can be a component of your branding. Choose words not based on your knowledge of financial law, but rather on the terms and content you are creating for your audience. You want them to respond to it. Overly complicated information that’s hard to understand pushes them towards others.
- Frequency of communication. Brand consistency is also influenced by how frequently you interact with your customers. Some companies are known for sending out messages only when there is a strong opinion. Other times, you need to be consistent with day-to-day communication on social sites.
Create A Brand Guide
With some clearly defined objectives like these, you can now start to make some rules. As a business owner in the financial industry, it cannot be made too clear that consistency does not come from just producing a profit. It comes from being dependable in the ups and downs.
As you move towards building consistency, you need some rules. Every person who is on your marketing accounts should be a core component of following those rules. You want to be sure your content is always incorporating the same brand styling and communication.
How to Stay Organized with Brand Consistency in Financial Services
Having a clearly defined brand is definitely a big step, but now you need to build some level of communication. To do that, you need a digital asset management tool, or some type of strategy that allows you to:
- Follow the conversations about your brand across all platforms and sizes
- Create and manage posts on social media and your blog on a consistent and steady basis
- Warn and flag situations where the content is not missing its target
Tools can also do a lot of the analytics for you. Once you have a brand that’s defined and clear, you will still need to market that brand, engage with the audience, and monitor when they take action. Using tools, you can do that more effectively and streamline your operation as a result.
How Surefire Local Can Help You
For brand consistency in financial services, focus on saying what you want to stay. However, every message across every platform needs to be similar and true to your brand. Managing that can be a challenge.
Turn to Surefire Local to learn more about the strategies we offer to help financial service companies build success. Request a Surefire Local demo now to learn more.