Why is consistency so important in medical device marketing?
Are you looking to bring more consistency into your brand? Is your marketing looking a bit messy?
Consistency in marketing is often underrated. It can easily get pushed to the side or fall off the radar in favour of trends and new ideas, which can leave your audience confused and neglected.
This is why having consistency is especially important when it comes to new brands. This article will walk you through why you should be consistent in your marketing and how it can be put into practice.
Here we’ll look at:
- What does it mean to be consistent in your marketing?
- How does consistency help establish yourself as a brand?
- What is the trouble with trends?
- What does consistency look like in your marketing campaigns?
What does consistency look like in your marketing campaigns?
Consistency in your marketing is all about maintaining a constant brand identity and message across your marketing channels.
But this is more than just making sure you’re using the same colours and fonts. You need to be consistent in your brand’s personality, values, visual elements, and messaging if you want to achieve consistency in your marketing.
But why?
The aim of this game is to gain your audience’s trust and recognition. By ensuring all your marketing platforms have the same brand voice, colours, and logos, you’ll begin to build this recognition, which over time can lead to trust.
Audiences are less willing to trust companies with a mixed brand presence as it can look disorganised and unprofessional. What does this say about the quality of the products or services they manufacture and supply?
If you feel like your brand is not really reflecting what your company stands for these days and you’re looking for a way to change this, head over to our guide on medical device branding.
How does consistency help you establish yourself as a brand?
Establishing your brand is one of the most important things you can do when launching a company or product. It can be an evolving journey, but it must be based on sound principles and guidelines so your audience is not confused at any point.
That being said, you don’t want your brand to evolve too fast or too frequently. The whole point of a brand is that it’s something your audience recognises you by, and changing it too quickly can lose the connection with your audience.
What is the trouble with trends?
Trends can be very tricky and can cause problems when it comes to creating a consistent brand. When done right, trends can help with your brand awareness and bring in a bigger audience.
However, the main problem with trends is that they can pull brands away from their original message and leave the audience feeling tricked and unhappy. If you post about an issue or topic on your channels, then it should represent who you are. It can’t just be a one-off.
An example of this is Earth Day, the day of the year when everyone’s social media is filled with environmental posts and links to environmental charities. While this is an excellent cause that needs more awareness, if a person follows that post to your brand and sees that you don’t post about the environment regularly, then they will click away.
Working with trends is great, but make sure they are aligned with your company values and add value to your marketing.
What does consistency look like in your marketing campaigns?
Now down to the practicalities. This section of the article will walk you through how you can be consistent across all your marketing channels.
We’ll break it down by different platforms—social media, email, and websites—and look at what consistency means for those channels. Remember that these platforms need to be consistent with each other as well as within themselves.
All your campaigns should be roughly based on the same rulebook, which includes:
- Colours
- Logo
- Font
- Pictures and graphics
- Tone of voice
- Artistic style
- Messaging
These form the basis of a brand and communication guide for you to follow—a master document that contains all your medical branding to make sure that everything stays consistent. Building brand and communication guidelines is your first step towards consistent marketing.
If branding is something that you’re interested in, read our guide on the archetypes in medical device branding to help you figure out what works best for your company.
How can you be consistent in your social media?
Social media is exciting—it’s a constantly changing platform, which can make it hard to stay consistent. The best way to stay consistent on social media is to plan out your topics.
What we mean by planning out your topics is to decide what the core values and areas of your company are that you would like to talk about, or more importantly, what your audience wants to hear. These could be anything from mental health, environment, medical advocacy, etc.
Ideally, you would want to pick at least 6-10 topics to post about and then create your social media plan from these topics. While it’s okay for some topics to be more popular than others, make sure that you post on every topic at least once a month.
Secondly, setting up a social media brand guide with templates can really help to ensure your social media stays true to your brand identity.
How can you be consistent in your email marketing?
The best way to stay consistent in your email marketing is by setting up a template in your preferred email marketing platform. This template should not only include your approved email design but also sections for set media. You can do this on platforms such as Campaign Monitor.
This will allow space for regular content such as news & events, new content releases, product launches, and social media outreach. By having this set space for different types of content, you can always be sure that your email will have a consistent format and brand appearance.
How can you be consistent on your website?
Much like with social media and email marketing, website consistency is no different. Creating page templates that align with your brand guidelines is the best way to ensure your website stays consistent.
Having different templates for your landing pages, product pages, and blogs helps allow for layout variety on your website, while you can still remain consistent in terms of your branding.
The next steps to getting consistency in your medical device marketing
Hopefully, this article has been helpful in talking you through why consistency across your marketing platforms is important when it comes to building a brand.