The Five Aspects of Content Consistency

Content marketing runs through every aspect of a company's external profile, from its website to its advertising and everything in between. This makes it a feature that’s worth getting right.

A concern for many businesses is that content consistency isn’t often given the focus that it requires. This can lead to marketing activities that lack continuity because they are created in isolation. To the marketers in charge, this can become the norm. However, to potential customers, it can appear disjointed at best and confusing at worst.

This can lead to significant and tangible consequences. Marketing budgets increase, while effectiveness decreases. Furthermore, marketing teams can become confused by the activities created in channels they aren’t involved with, while their creativity can be restricted as the value of new ideas becomes difficult to measure.

This prompted us to consider the main aspects required to create content consistency across every marketing channel. In doing so, we identified five aspects can be defined to create consistent content across all marketing channels without limiting the creativity or opportunity that any specific channel provides. By defining them, a business can rapidly increase its marketing effectiveness, while inspiring internal marketing teams at the same time.

1. Tone

Tone of voice refers to the personality of the brand either when written, spoken or in the selection of straplines. When considering the tone of voice, a marketer or copywriter will need to consider the style of the writing, the use of adjectives, the level of formality and the use of punctuation.

2. Complexity

How complicated and complex a piece of content is will determine how it is interpreted by the audience. This applies to written work, as well as visual content pieces. For example, the number of camera angles a videographer or filmmaker uses can change the audience’s interpretation.

3. Relevance

The way a business selects its messages has a major impact on whether they interest the target audience. Taking this further, a business can either guide the conversation or follow it, with each strategy creating a very different impression.

4. Brevity

How succinct a business is can play a major role in its communications. A strapline that is three words long has a very different impact to one that is five words. Equally, a press release that is two paragraphs has a very different impact to one that is two pages or a video that is ten minutes compared to two.

5. Awareness

The level of prior knowledge that an audience has will determine how to explain a detailed topic or how to play with comedy if being used in advertising. This is an aspect that is often overlooked, as it is something that we all do naturally. If we give someone directions, we naturally miss out additional details that we assume they will know already.

Putting them into practice

We hope you can see how these five aspects provide a framework for developing content consistency. The challenge for marketers is putting them into practice. This begins with defining the target market. The better a marketer knows and understands them, the quicker they can build a consistent content strategy and the more effective it will be.

If you would like more information on how we do this, then click below to arrange a call. We look forward to hearing from you.