Accelerate content production without sacrificing brand consistency

In a world where consumers are bombarded with marketing messages from all sides, it's more important than ever for brands to be consistent in their messaging. Your brand is how you stand out in a crowded marketplace: having a consistent brand means that your copy, design, and style are all aligned with the singular image that you want your brand to project to the world.

In order to deliver a consistent brand experience, marketers need to ensure that all of their content is on-brand, regardless of who creates it or where it gets published. However, keeping multiple content creators all on the same page can be very challenging. Contentful recently partnered with Writer, the AI writing platform for teams, to help marketers scale their content production and deliver consistent, on-brand experiences across every digital channel. 

Writer supports users throughout the entire writing process. During the ideation and drafting stages, customers can use CoWrite — AI custom-trained on their best content — to produce on-brand first drafts that accelerate content production.

During the writing and editing stages, Writer provides a single source for terminology management and corrects off-brand writing in real time through in-line suggestions. And by partnering with Contentful, Writer can support brand alignment during the publication and distribution stages of the writing process. 

With the Writer app for the Contentful Marketplace, Contentful users can get writing suggestions for style, clarity, readability, delivery, and inclusivity right in the Contentful editor. The Writer app also automatically brings your team's style guide and unique brand terminology directly into Contentful, so that every piece of content you create is on-brand, and consistently aligned with the words that make your brand stand out.

Three ways brand consistency can benefit your business

Brand consistency is essential for any company that wants to build a strong, lasting relationship with its customers. Here are three good reasons why you need to prioritize brand consistency.

1. A consistent brand is more recognizable and trustworthy

The average person sees around 10,000 online ads per day. For your brand to cut through the noise and connect with consumers, you need to make every impression count.

The human brain is wired to identify and process patterns, and when you have consistent patterns in the ways you present and package your content, you're making it easier for customers to recognize and remember your brand. A survey from Edelman showed that only 35% of respondents trusted a brand message after a single exposure to it, but that number rose to 97% after seven exposures. If you're consistent in how you talk about your company, brand, products, and features, your users will be able to understand and connect with your message much quicker.

When people can count on your brand to be the same every time they interact with it, they'll be more likely to remain loyal. A 2022 study by Salsify showed that 46% of U.S. consumers were willing to select a higher-priced item if it came from a brand name they trusted. According to Contentful's own research, 80% of survey respondents say a consistent experience from brands is important.

In contrast, inconsistent branding makes it harder for customers to differentiate your content from all the other content they're exposed to every day — and if they do recognize that inconsistency, it makes it that much more difficult for them to understand your message. Essentially, you're forcing customers to do the extra work of keeping track of what you're talking about and trying to figure out how it relates to what you were talking about before.

Even worse, inconsistent branding can give customers a negative impression of you! Contentful's research found that 50% of respondents feel frustrated or confused when an online shopping experience differs from the mobile app to the store's website. When customers identify discrepancies in your brand experience, it can signal to them that you're not committed to your brand, undermining your brand promise.

2. A consistent brand increases revenue

A consistent brand isn't just a nice-to-have perk — it ultimately affects your bottom line. According to research from Lucidpress in partnership with Demand Metric, the average revenue increase attributed to brand consistency is 23%. According to McKinsey, companies with strong brands consistently outperform the market average.

People who know and trust a brand are more likely to buy that brand's products or use their services — and they're more likely to recommend that product to others. Social media posts and Yelp reviews can increase traffic to your website and ultimately generate more leads and revenue. With a consistent brand, every new lead who comes in through a friend's recommendation gets the same brand experience that led their friend to recommend your product in the first place.

Ultimately, consistent branding can help brands build trust with their audience, and this trust can translate into increased revenue.

3. Having a system in place for brand consistency saves time

Brand consistency doesn't just mean that your customers know what your product stands for — it also means that your team members know what your product stands for. If everyone internally is aligned on the nuances of your brand experience, that means you don't have to start from scratch every time you want to make new content.

Codifying brand guidelines in a style guide allows you to scale your branding decisions as your team grows — rather than wasting time relitigating the nuances of which words get used where and in what contexts, you can use the style guide to answer those questions, and move on to more important topics. Having a well-implemented system of brand guidelines means that you can rely on team members to produce consistent, high-quality content, without having to micromanage them.

Unfortunately, many teams struggle to use their brand guidelines effectively. Research from Shutterstock shows that even though 95% of organizations have brand guidelines, only 25% consistently enforce those guidelines. Even when a team has brand guidelines, manually enforcing those brand guidelines can create more bottlenecks in the content creation process. When faced with tight deadlines and overwhelming content requirements, marketers might choose to sacrifice brand consistency for the sake of expediency — to their own detriment.

The good news is that the Writer app for Contentful can help you automate and scale the enforcement of your brand guidelines, so that everyone can write with the confidence that their words are not only grammatically and stylistically correct, but also consistent with the brand.

By automatically bringing your custom brand guidelines into Contentful, the Writer and Contentful integration frees up your team's time. Rather than spending extra time editing posts or updating your websites, you can focus on what's really important: creating high-quality content that serves your customers.

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