The Key To A Strong Brand: Communicating Consistently
Have you ever been texting with a friend and said something totally sarcastic… and that friend totally took it the wrong way because sometimes it’s just really hard to convey emotion via text message? Managing your brand voice online can sometimes be just like that.
You say one thing. Your dear visitors read something else entirely. The outcome is at best confusion. At worst, controversy.
Communicating with our potential customers and clients digitally poses so many potentially similar opportunities for things to be misconstrued, misunderstood, or just plain missed out on. It doesn’t have to be, though! Understanding a few basics on how we communicate with one another as humans can help you craft more authentic user experiences and (more importantly) a more consistent brand.
Sender-Message-Channel-Receiver Model of Communication
To better understand how to communicate with our website visitors, blog readers, and potential clients/customers, I think it might first be helpful to understand the Sender-Message-Channel-Receiver Model of Communication. Now, way back in the day, I majored in Communication and spent years studying how we can better understand one another as humans, so this topic is my jam. Just being more mindful of this exchange can help build awareness, empathy, and opportunities for a deeper connection - all great things for us as people and as brands!
The SMCR Model is the simplest breakdown of how we communicate and is used as the basis for most other communication models.
Breaking It Down
Think of my scenario with my poor friend I offended earlier via text message. In that scenario, here’s how the communication process between us breaks down. Note that all of this happens almost instantaneously, even though it seems all drawn out here.
Sender: Me
Encode: My intended message (the idea I have in my brain) is translated into words (and probably emojis 🤓) that I hope my friend can understand. As I write my text message, I take all my emotions, past experiences, culture, language, and thoughts about the world into account to try to convey my message. The process of translating my ideas into words and symbols is called encoding.
Transmission (Channel): Text Message
Decode: My friend receives my message and interprets it based on all their emotions, past experiences, culture, language, and thoughts about the world. Their interpretations of my words + emojis result in what they understand the message to be about. The process of translating the sender’s words and symbols into thought is called decoding.
Receiver: My Friend
Other Factors
Noise: In this model, noise is all of the external factors that may influence the encoding, decoding, or transmission of the message. It could be that I wrote my text message in a hurry while trying to get out the door or that my friend read it in the middle of a busy workday with lots of other emails and texts already stressing her out. Maybe my phone autocorrects a crucial word into something it isn’t supposed to be! Factoring noise into the equation is HUGE.
Feedback: Feedback is what my friend either consciously or unconsciously sends back to me in response to my message. Maybe it is a single tear emoji 😢. Perhaps it’s a long reply or no reply at all. This starts a feedback loop that can either positively or negatively impact our relationship. It’s either an opportunity to ask for clarity and seek deeper understanding or remain divided because we let all the encoding, decoding, and noise get the better of us.
{{ Intermission: Thank you for coming to my TED talk on the importance of communication. }}
What does this mean for our brands?
Well, just like in that childhood game of telephone where you whisper a message into someone’s ear, and they whisper it to someone else, and down the line, the message goes… when we attempt to communicate, we all just hope that everyone is picking up what we’re putting down. The real truth is that we know that the end message in the game of telephone usually only vaguely resembles the original intent. This is true whether via text message like in the example above, or in person, via social media… or even on a website.
Reading up to this point, you may think that the rest of this post is going to be about copywriting, but (surprise!) it’s really about branding. Why? Because it’s your branding that establishes your voice, and all of the visual shorthand (logos, submarks, icons, patterns, fonts, and colors) that help convey intent without needing to say anything at all 🤯
Building a Strong Brand Reputation
The channel that we’re all here to learn about is your website! Noting that this is important because your website is (typically) the most significant asset you own and, therefore, the most potentially important place for you to establish consistency. Consistency is vital because it’s what your reputation is built on.
Your website is vital to your brand because:
You can establish your brand, voice, and messaging on your own turf
You can control the content and message about your business
You can measure and understand how your content is engaged and interacted with
No algorithms are dictating what’s seen or not
There are no ads or other elements to distract users
You can establish yourself as a thought leader and expert in your industry
You can build a strong reputation that can speak for itself
Fringe Benefits
Think about that last point: you can build a strong reputation that can speak for itself. Think about how that affects our communication model from above. If your brand has established a strong brand reputation, think of how this might impact your customers:
They may be more forgiving of a mistake or snafu
They are likely to be more loyal because they feel seen and understood
They may be more willing to refer you to their friends
They may spend more time on your site engaging with content
They are likely to become long-time, repeat customers
If all of these things sound great to you, read on!
Creating a Consistent Brand Experience Online
Ok, down to the nitty-gritty. Hopefully, I’ve made my case for why it’s not just what you say that matters but how and where and why. Here are some ways to put this into action within the framework of the Sender/Receiver model above. Consistency in all of these aspects goes a long way towards improving your overall customer experience.
Establish Brand Guidelines - Establish firm brand guidelines that you use to gauge whether new communications or “on brand” or not. This can be for everything from brand voice to colors, fonts, and even design motifs.
Stay Focused - Just being mindful of your intention and thinking ahead to how it will be interpreted (decoded) can be a great system of checks and balances. This works for both written and visual communication. (It’s too easy to let “light blue” become “baby blue” become “sky blue,” and before you know it, you’ve diluted your brand by being all over the place.)
Think About Your Customer - Consider your user (receiver) in all things; do they come from a different cultural background than you? Are specific colors likely to mean something different to them than to you? Do they understand humor and sarcasm in the same way as you, or are they likely to prefer a more toned-down approach? Avoid internal jargon or industry lingo that they aren’t likely to understand.
Get Organized - Create organized and intuitive navigation and ways to move around your website. This is a subtle way of building trust with your users. If your site is hard to interact with, visitors are likely to become frustrated and disinterested. Examples of how to improve this can be things like keeping your forms short, making clear calls-to-action, tagging your content or organizing it by category, and making sure key content is never more than a click or two deep.
Go the Extra Mile - Make sure that you extend your brand beyond your website to the communications and interactions that happen outside of it. This can be making sure that your customer service emails are visually and linguistically consistent, that your live chat agents are trained in brand voice, and even that your packaging is well branded. You could also pay attention to your other business systems: does your invoice have your logo? Do your payment reminders use your brand voice?
Reducing Noise
It’s difficult to control the environmental situations our website visitors are in when they choose to visit our sites, but being aware of the potential noise surrounding your messaging can be so helpful. Think about your target demographic. Are they mostly single moms? They likely have kids in the background and not much time to research what you’re selling. Depending on what products or services you offer, maybe it means they mostly view your site on their iPad late at night. Knowing this could help you know that you need to design your website to work well displayed on a tablet in dark mode.
If your target demographic is busy professionals in your industry, you could do your best to fight through the noise by offering to send them a once-monthly digest of great articles or tips. The keys here would be to send something consistently (so they can count on you) and to position it as a valuable way for them to save time, not having to search out all that info for themselves. You get the idea.
Be Open to Feedback
Last but not least, one of the most important elements of our communication model is feedback. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to pick up on the feedback that your customers and website visitors are sending you. One easy way to do this is just by monitoring and tracking your site analytics, but you can also just listen to what people are saying. Customers will tell you what they need. Do you regularly get the same questions over and over? Maybe it’s time to add a FAQ page to your site. Have negative reviews increased lately? Maybe time to check in with your customer service team to see what’s going on.
Treat your website as a dynamic resource, updating it as often as you need to. Using feedback from visitors, you can continuously improve how you communicate your unique brand to the world.
