AMiable Solution #67: The Same Game

What makes your company or organization memorable?  What makes people want to establish or build a relationship with you?

You don’t have to have a Super Bowl ad-sized budget, a celebrity spokesperson, or a national endorsement to gain recognition in your market.  Sure, those things would be great, but they’re just not feasible for most companies or organizations.

The answer is actually not only easier, but it’s also much cheaper.  To help build relationships and establish your organization’s presence in your market place, you need consistency in the way you present your organization.  In everything.

That means you need your writing, design, and formatting to express the same message and image marketing-wide and organization-wide.  In the information you share about your organization.  In the logos you use and the way you refer to your organization.  In the placement and content of your contact information on your marketing materials.  In the location of your order form and the order of information requested.  In the way you format press releases, articles, announcements, and catalogs.

The beauty of consistency?  No surprises.  When a layout looks and feels familiar, your customer, client, member, or prospect instantly recognizes the communication as yours and knows how to navigate through it to quickly find the information needed.  When that happens, you increase your odds of getting the response you want now and down the road.

One of the best ways to ensure that everyone in your organization presents the same image in the same way is through a style guide.  If you haven’t looked at it lately, blow the dust off of it, review it, and encourage others to do the same. 

Don’t have a style guide?  Create one.  Start with a standard style guide (The Chicago Manual of Style, AP Stylebook, or The Gregg Reference Manual) and then make your own adjustments, addressing writing (“web site” or “website,” whether or not to include a common after the second item in a series, em dash or en dash), design (use the black-and-white logo on this but the colored version on that; use the tag line here but not there), and format issues (indent/don’t indent the first line in each paragraph).

But getting your target audience to recognize your brand is just the first step.  See next week’s blog to find out what else you can do to encourage lasting relationships.