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Why global brand consistency will help you build a loyal customer following

Introduction

How do you make customers fall in love with your brand? By telling a story, evoking feelings, and creating brand familiarity. This is what makes life-long customer connections.

But how do you make this happen?

The answer is brand consistency: delivering a unified customer experience across all user touchpoints.

In today’s highly competitive world, where customers have endless options, having brand consistency is the glue to building connections, allowing customers to recognize, know, and trust your brand.

So, let’s dive into global brand consistency, its growing importance, and why it has such a huge impact on customer loyalty.

What is Global Brand Consistency?

Global brand consistency is ensuring your company is presented the same way across all marketing channels. It encompasses various elements, including visual identity, brand voice, messaging, and customer service.

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Why is Global Brand Consistency important for your brand?

Here are the top three reasons why consistency is absolutely essential for your brand:

Strong Brand Recognition:

Consistent branding across all touchpoints helps your brand stand out from competitors. It creates instant recognition, helping customers spot your brand’s tone of voice, visuals, and messaging.

Cross-border Communication:

Brand consistency reflects an image of reliability and quality, with your messages being able to communicate with cross-cultural audiences.

Emotional Connection:

When a brand looks and feels the same anywhere, customers are likely to trust brands more due to a sense of familiarity, especially if they have positive brand connotations.

By delivering a consistent experience across various touchpoints, you’ll help customers recognize and recall your label easily. Consistency also guides every interaction, building familiarity and trust, and ensuring your brand’s voice cuts through a busy market. That stability creates loyalty, turning customers into fans who actively choose you over competitors.

Ultimately, brand consistency is the foundation for building and maintaining long-term customer relationships, driving repeat purchases, and generating positive word-of-mouth marketing.

What happens if your global branding is inconsistent?

Here are some of the top things to watch out for if your branding misses the mark.

Brand Confusion

Inconsistent branding elements like logos, messaging, and visuals across different regions can confuse customers. They may struggle to recognize the brand or understand its core values, leading to a weaker brand image.

This confusion will hinder your marketing efforts, making it difficult to build a strong brand identity that resonates with a global audience.

Lack of Trust and Credibility

Inconsistency will send mixed signals to customers, raising doubts about the brand’s values, quality, and reliability. This can erode trust and damage the brand’s credibility, especially if customers encounter conflicting information in different regions.

Costly Operational Activities

Maintaining multiple versions of branding materials, marketing campaigns, and product offerings for different regions will be expensive and inefficient. It requires duplicating resources and efforts, impacting the brand’s bottom line.

Our final thoughts

Building brand consistency on an international scale is essential. With unified branding, you’ll easily connect with customers worldwide, strengthen brand trust, and create long-term loyalty. This will help you create a passionate band of advocates who will spread the word about your brand, propelling you to new heights.

Outsourcing Marketing: How To Make Sure Your Brand Gets It Right

Introduction

Technology is driving change at an unprecedented speed, and the knock-on effect is higher customer expectations and ever-changing demands. In the last two decades, touchpoints have expanded beyond the physical store, with customers now being within a moment’s reach through devices like smartphones, tablets and laptops. If brands are unable to market on the proper channels at the right time, they’ll miss out on growth opportunities and lose customers to competitors.

But imagine having those brand needs taken care of by marketing specialists. That’s precisely what outsourcing offers. By developing tailored market solutions, outsourcing helps brands scale and handle customer demands without sacrificing quality, allowing your brand to focus on critical company areas and future success.

In this blog, we’ll discuss marketing outsourcing, the benefits it brings to your company, and some tips on how to outsource for maximum market results.

What is outsourcing marketing?

Outsourcing marketing is where a third-party agency handles your marketing tasks, from content creation to advertising analysis. While some agencies specialize in certain areas like SEO development or graphic design production, others provide a broad range of services to manage all of your marketing needs.

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Advantages of outsourcing your marketing

Here are some ways outsourcing helps your brand move towards greater success:

Access to expertise

By outsourcing, you’re tapping into expert knowledge across a wide range of specialities, from digital imaging to project management. These professionals are hired collectively for less cost than hiring in-house, and with their expertise, you’ll be able to reach your business goals faster.

New perspectives, fresh ideas

With outsourcing, you’ll have a team of experts approaching your problems with a fresh perspective. Through their experience, they’ll help deliver solutions that will drive positive change, whether building more meaningful customer connections, a stronger brand image or domestic and regional growth.

Save costs

When hiring in-house for your brand, there is a cost associated with training, compensation and other employee benefits. Outsourcing is often a cheaper alternative that still delivers high-quality results, helping you boost your marketing efficiency and drive higher returns on investment.

More time to spend on critical business areas

Collaborating with third-party marketing agencies frees up brands to focus on other important company areas, from marketing strategy to campaign creation. This will help you produce high-quality assets at a high volume while ensuring consistent brand messaging and timely execution.

Improve your return on investment

Third-party agencies are armed with the most advanced marketing technology. By introducing these tools into your brand, they’ll monitor your digital performance and make timely modifications to your campaigns, preventing major errors and enhancing your results.

Finding the best marketing agency for your business

Here are some tips for you to make the right outsourcing decisions.

Define a goal

With a clear, detailed and measurable objective, you’ll be able to track the results of your vendor’s performance. This will help you determine the cost-effectiveness of your partnership and, therefore, make reasonable adjustments for future projects.

Determine a budget

A budget plan is pivotal in determining the scale of your project, the size of the vendor, and your project expectations. When agencies are given insights into your budget, it empowers them to allocate resources effectively to meet your requirements, ultimately, ensuring you receive a solution that facilitates the achievement of your goals in a more cost-effective manner.

The agency’s expertise

Make sure that you’re collaborating with a marketing agency that has a proven track record of success. Have a look at their websites, case studies and client testimonials to gain a full understanding of their unique service offerings.

Communication and cultural differences

It’s important to choose marketing agencies that share a similar communication style to your organization. This will ensure a productive working relationship and bring about positive results for your brand.

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Our final thoughts

Outsourcing your marketing activities can be a game-changing move for your brand. It can lead to cost savings, heightened efficiency, and enhanced business performance. Marketing agencies often bring innovative and unique ideas to the table, which can make your campaigns pop and connect more deeply with your customers. If you’re looking for more guidance on how to select the most suitable marketing agency to partner with, feel free to download our handy cheat sheet.

Influencer & Content Marketing: take advantage of new ways to connect with your customers

Introduction

In a recovering global market, how do you connect with new and existing customers whilst building brand trust? -Take advantage of Influencer and Content Marketing.

Influencer and content marketing strategies present great opportunities to connect with your customers, spark brand interest and create a loyal following. Both options are affordable and help brand your company in imaginative ways, allowing you to connect with customers worldwide.

Next, we’ll discuss these two strategies, their benefits, what to watch out for, and our final thoughts on what might work best for your company.

What is Content Marketing?

With Content Marketing, companies create branded material to either directly or indirectly sell products or services. One way to use content marketing is to develop a blog, publish an ebook, write case studies, or send newsletters.

Also, social media posts, podcasts, videos, customer reviews, and brand campaigns can fall under Content Marketing. When used effectively, this strategy can educate, entertain, engage, and fix your customers’ pain points to increase key conversions. 

For instance, on international women’s day, Linkedin created a viral video documenting real-life stories of women overcoming difficulties caused by the pandemic. The campaign was named #WeCanDoIt and brought attention to women’s issues during the pandemic, generating public discussion and raising the profile of LinkedIn.

What is Influencer Marketing? 

Influencer marketing is when a company calls on individuals with a dedicated internet following to promote their products or services. When social media started to take off, the marketing game completely changed, and brands began to use social media as a direct advertising channel. By collaborating with influencers to reach potentially millions of followers, companies can connect with new customers, improve website traffic, and increase revenue.

For example, the world-renowned skincare brand Olay used influencer marketing for a 28-day campaign. During this time, the  ‘Fearless 9’, a collection of influential models and athletes, exchanged normal beauty regimes for Olay’s skincare products in preparation for a makeup-free event. By creating the  ‘Fearless 9’ and using the #FaceAnything hashtag, Olay sparked a women’s movement to embrace natural beauty, bringing authenticity to its marketing and helping the brand connect with a wider audience.

Key differences between Influencer and Content Marketing 

Content Marketing

  • High-quality info-rich content;
  • Clearly defined & targeted audience;
  • Company-created content;
  • Create customer action & generate leads;
  • Full control of content & type; 
  • Helps drive SEO & organic results; 
  • Low-cost and affordable for any size business. 

Content-Marketing

Influencer Marketing

  • Social media marketing;
  • Less control over influencer’s content creation;
  • Increases brand awareness & promotes products;
  • Focuses on content distribution, sharing, tagging, viral videos etc.;
  • Costs vary depending on the influencer’s followers;
  • Instantly build trust, especially with new customers.
  • Results depend on the influencer’s impact.

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Benefits of Content Marketing to your company  

For most companies, an instant way to help drive traffic and develop SEO is through content marketing. It’s cheap, accessible and a proven way to build brand awareness.

Let’s have a look at the main advantages of Content Marketing for your business:

Improve your brand’s credibility

If your company creates high-quality, unique, and valuable content, you’ll stand out from the crowd and build credibility in a competitive market. One way to do this would be to share positive reviews and testimonials to create trust in your brand.

Stronger customer relationships

By creating great content consistently, customers will feel they can turn to your brand for up-to-date information and product queries, helping build strong and long-lasting customer relationships.

Create a voice for your brand 

You can build an expert, trusted and reliable voice in your market by creating content. Whether your company is in retail or finance, content allows you to regularly reach out, engage and share your knowledge with customers.

If someone searches for your products and finds a wealth of quality information, it will help build trust and increase the chances of conversion.

Improve website traffic 

The main benefit of Content Marketing is that it will increase website traffic through online search results. According to Hubspot, companies that post 16 blogs per month can generate 4.5 times more traffic: hit those SEO keywords and see traffic improve.

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What to keep in mind with Content Marketing 

When using Content Marketing as a strategy, keep in mind the following:

High level of consistency

You must publish content regularly but consistently at a high quality, and depending on company resources, this could lead to employee burnout or having to turn to expensive writing agencies.

Competitive market  

Markets are extremely competitive, and when it comes to content creation, sometimes it’s hard to hit high-level SEO results and compete, especially with bigger companies. That’s why you must consider all your products and services to help spark content creation, highlighting your USPs and niche factors to help push those SEO results.

Benefits of Influencer Marketing to your company 

Influencer marketing now dominates social media -take a scroll through Instagram, and you’ll find someone advertising a product. So, let’s find out why brands turn to influencer marketing:

Build trust & brand awareness 

By advertising with influencers, brands can create a human connection, helping build more meaningful relationships with customers worldwide.

Improve your reach 

By working with several influencers, or an influencer with a large following, you’ll improve your brand’s reach and connect with global customers.

Go Viral 

Many brands have had campaigns that go viral through influencers generating conversations, retweeting or posting fun content. This helps drive organic traffic and SEO results -creating an incredibly high impact ceiling for influencer marketing.

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What to keep in mind with Influencer Marketing 

Influencer marketing comes with its challenges. Let’s have a look at what to watch out for:

Advertising transparency 

For a long time, brands could use influencers without their followers knowing, but the demands for customer transparency now mean influencers have to state that it is a paid ad. This negatively impacts building customer trust, as many will question whether the ad is a genuine recommendation.

Do followers really mean engagement?

Brands want to build meaningful relationships with customers, but choosing a Kardashian-level following sometimes isn’t the best option to generate product interest: Likes don’t always mean sales.

Recently, brands have been moving to micro-influencers who are more engaged with their followers, as there tends to be a greater level of engagement and trust, leading to a higher chance of sales.

Money, money, money

Influencer marketing is now a multi-billion dollar industry, and those with large followings can demand large amounts of money. This means that small companies might not have the financial resources to adopt this strategy.

However, micro-influencers are becoming more valued as they tend to have greater follower engagement, allowing any sized company to take advantage of influencer marketing.

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Content Marketing fuels Influencer Marketing

Our final thoughts on Content & Influencer Marketing 

Each marketing strategy provides a creative way to engage with customers. If your company has the resources, the best way to take advantage of Influencer and Content marketing is to invest in both. This will help build trust, develop brand awareness and increase your chances of sales. Ultimately, each strategy will help bridge the connection between your company and customer for stronger, more meaningful relationships.

How to design a logo that builds trust, captures your values and draws attention

Introduction

We say never judge a book by its cover, but we definitely judge a brand by its logo. With 60% of customers telling us they’d avoid a company based on a logo’s appearance, brands need to create memorable logos that represent their values and, most importantly, are attractive to their audience.

Take Apple, for example. The apple logo is simple, powerful and timeless, only undergoing subtle changes since its creation in 1977. This Apple with a bite removed has provided the company with an instantly recognizable identity, allowing Apple’s fortunes to grow to  $2504 billion. 

In this article, we’ll give you a primer on how to create a great logo, from logo design principles and tips, to an introduction to Canva, a free web-based design app you can use to create your own memorable, business-building logo.

To avoid staring at a blank canvas when beginning your design process, consider our 5 design principles. These are often considered building blocks of many logos.

Aim for Balance

A cluttered logo with messages will lose meaning and confuse the viewer. By concentrating on alignment, spacing and symmetry, a well-balanced design can be achieved with a clean aesthetic.

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Aim for balance

See Repetition

Repetition can help lift a logo and lead the viewer to important information. However, one key thing to remember when using repetition is to have small changes in each pattern. The best example of this is Mastercard:

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See repetition

Try a Hierarchy

If you want to highlight key information in your logo – follow a visual hierarchy. This essentially means you guide the viewer through the information in a clear, well-considered and strong visual way.

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Try a hierarchy

Use Contrast

Try putting two different elements together for an effect that will catch attention – colors, lines, patterns -anything that creates a visual impact.

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Use contrast

Go Bold

Make one of your visual elements the most recognisable element of the logo – normally your name. This grabs the viewer’s attention and focuses on a specific aspect of your company.

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Go bold

 

Our 7 design tips to help your logo stand out

Here are 7 design tips to help you understand why certain logo designs work better than others.

Choose your color scheme wisely

There are basically two color palettes logos can be chosen from:

Analogous Color Palette

Two colors are used that are side by side or close to each other on the color wheel. This presents a peaceful, calm and relaxing image.

Complementary Colors 

These are colors chosen on the opposite side of the color wheel to create an image that contrasts, attracts, and stands out.

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The color wheel

Try white space in your logo

Rather than add to your logo, why not take away? Negative or blank space can provide an artistic balance.

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White space in a logo

Use readable typography

Make it easy for the viewer to understand any text in your logo – don’t create something messy and hard to understand. Check out this great article by Adobe to find out more about the best fonts.

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New Balance

Pay attention to measurements & symmetry

Balance your logo by ensuring the text is equally spaced and that all visual elements are symmetrical. This will help your logo look more professional and provide a sense of harmony.

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The North Face

Create contrast with shapes and lines

Create visual interest by layering shapes, colors, and lines, drawing the viewer’s attention to different parts of the logo.

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Patagonia

Icons must be memorable

If a company uses a symbol in their branding, it needs to be instantly recognizable. Apple has the apple, Nike has its swoosh, and Starbucks has a two-tailed mermaid. Each icon presents identifiable imagery, and the image reflects the company’s values.

 

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The symbol of Nike

Surprise your audience

Use an element of surprise or a rule break in your designs to catch your audience’s attention and have your logo design stand out, but try not to go overboard with the rule breaks.

What is Canva?

Canva is a free graphics design software that helps users create professional-looking designs without any prior experience. The program can make posters, flyers, social media posts and more – all while easily adding text or images.

 

Our step-by-step guide to designing your logo on Canva

Step 1: Open Canva 

Open up Canva and search ‘logo’ to begin building on the right format.

Step 2: Choose your template 

Canva has a huge free library of templates for you to choose from and for any industry.

Step 3: Begin to customize your logo 

Use the advice in this article and start trying out different ideas.

Step 4: Take advantage of the design features 

Search through the many additional design features to create a more imaginative logo.

Step 5: Download and build your brand identity 

When you’re happy with the final design, download and start to build your brand identity.

Our word of advice with Canva

Although Canva is an excellent piece of free design software, we highly recommend you consider professional advice when designing your company logo.

At The Color Club, we offer companies a special design package. Our marketing experts will guide you through the design process as part of your corporate visual identity – understanding your market, customers, and future aspirations – before designing your logo and helping you build your global brand identity.

 

Our final thoughts on logo design

Logos are the most recognizable brand identifier: if a company has a great logo, the chances of market success are higher. With this kind of impact, companies should work with a marketing specialist to design a memorable logo that reflects a company’s core values – done rightand there’s a chance your logo could be part of our culture forever.

Correct Colors Improve Sales

Introduction

Looking for ways to improve your sales? Have you considered the role of colors in your branding and marketing strategies? “How Correct Colors Can Improve Your Sales” is an insightful blog post that explores the impact of colors on customer behavior and perception. From the psychology of colors to color combinations and trends, this article provides practical tips and advice for businesses looking to leverage the power of colors to drive sales. Whether you’re a marketer, business owner, or simply interested in the influence of colors, this blog post is a valuable resource that can help you create effective branding strategies that resonate with your target audience.

Why do we see different colors on different browsers?

Google Chrome browser, Microsoft Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple´s Safari dominate the browser market on both desktops and mobile devices. However, they can not agree on how to implement image color management with or without the use of ICC of profiles. Officially they all agree on the W3C standards, but in reality, they implement them differently.

The result is that many companies using images in online communication experience that the clients see the same image with different colors, depending on their browser and or platform.

Why is this a problem?

Let us imagine that a fashion design company has designed a series of styles in beautiful pale orange tones matching the trends of the times. The marketing team has then produced a series of photographs and with their photographers and post-production team. They have spent a lot of resources on getting the images perfect with all the right colors. Now the images are being implemented in various websites, email campaigns, online PDF viewers, digital signage systems. But because of incorrect color management, the clients are seeing all the images as bright red instead of pale orange – and the result is that the clients decide to purchase from a competitor instead.

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Another example could be that a corporate communication department releases the newly photographed CEO in all the online corporate communications channels. The images were taken by a professional photographer to ensure the quality and sincere appearance of the new CEO. The images were retouched and color graded to look perfect, with a nice and healthy-looking skin tone. But bad color management will change the perfect photograph and make the CEO looks too saturated and reddish, which gives the appearance of an alcoholic in a suit. A horrible result!

I am sure my company does not have this problem!

In 2016 The Color Club performed an unscientific spot test of 30 large intl. companies websites within the fashion, automotive, publishing, and financing industries. 29 out of 30 websites did not use prober color management, and the result is that their visuals appear all different in different browsers. And as we began to investigate deeper into this issue, we discovered that many times the culprit was not the designer uploading an image that had not been color-managed, but instead, it was the corporate CMS system or their supplier of online PDF viewers, and even very popular image optimization plug-ins that are used on many platforms.

But how can we ensure correct colors?

Traditionally color management has been used to ensure correct color printing in various print media, such as on coated or uncoated paper and newspaper ads. But today more and more marketing channels are not physical reproduction, but digital visuals in websites, banners, emails, PDF viewers, digital signage systems, and more.

For many years there was little to do about the different visual appearance of your images on various platforms, but now we can make sure that the images appear very similar regardless of where they are shown, like on a PC, Mac, Mobile device, TV monitor and regardless of which browser is used. We simply apply color management to all images and the result is close to a perfect harmony of all colors between all platforms.

The recipe!

Convert all images to the sRGB ICC profile and ensure that the images are saved with the profile included. This way all the various browsers can interpret the colors correctly, and even browsers on mobile devices, that actually do not support color management, will presume that the image shown is in sRGB color spectrum.

The practical challenges

When images are uploaded to the website content management systems (CMS), email campaign portals, online PDF viewers, and other online tools, often these systems will rescale and convert the images to fit the platform. And here is a challenge. For years, it has been common practice among production departments and developers to discard the ICC profile in all images to save a few bytes per image. And that is why many of these systems per default will remove all ICC profiles in the images. So you must contact your IT department, developers, or external application providers to ensure that they change the default system configurations to keep the ICC profiles in all images.

The techies do not believe me!

In case your designers, retouchers, programmers, developers, and even IT team do not believe you, please send them a copy of The Color Club R&D Color Management Report with complete documentation and practical instructions of ICC profile conversion in Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, etc. You can order the report for free by filling in the form below.

Now you know how to get the colors right in your digital marketing channels.

Why Visual Communication Is Essential To Your Business

We see visuals everywhere in marketing such as images, videos, infographics, presentations, or even typography. Think about a brand as a person. Using visuals helps your brand stand out, communicate more efficiently and be memorable to the right target audiences.

When a customer visits your website, the color theme you choose, the font and size of the text, and how you design, can evoke a lot of feelings and perceptions about your brand. Is your brand professional, playful, creative, or authoritative? -And does your brand match with what they are looking for? Through well-thought-out visuals, customers will find the answer immediately.

For clients to recognize the brand easily, the visual style should be used consistently on marketing touchpoints such as websites, brochures, catalogs, packaging, marketing content, and other visual materials.

Check out some examples of good visual communication:

Oreo

Oreo is popular when introducing the typical “twist, lick, and dunk” ritual used by American consumers to enjoy their Oreos. They have used a lot of video ads and images to promote the way of eating these cookies.

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Besides, Oreo encourages customers to try Oreo for different purposes such as making a cake with it. And they use ads and visuals to intrigue the joy of tasting these products.

Starbucks

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They are constantly showing their products, however, they manage to do it in a unique way that truly expresses their values and evokes customer’s interests.

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If you are looking for visuals communication inspiration, check it out.

If you are looking for a consultation to help your company to have better visual communication. Feel free to contact us, we always have delicious coffee in our office!