If your current brand elements don’t accurately convey the great things your customers say about working with you, represent the positive experiences your employees share with their friends or generate leads and revenue for your organization, it’s possible that you’re creating brand confusion through misalignment of your sales and marketing messages.

As your business, products, services, and customers evolve, it’s vital to review essential elements in your marketing toolkit. In some cases, this means revisiting all aspects of an organization’s brand, including the logo and other graphic elements, to achieve the business goals and objectives. However, in our experience, organizations typically find more success in revamping the non-visual aspects of their brands to move their businesses forward. With the economy improving and the labor market tightening, it’s critical to ensure that your brand is aligned with who and what you are, and what you stand for. As a result, we recommend looking at the following elements as your brand evolves, so you don’t miss anything:

1. Brand Messaging –

If you’ve never articulated your brand message and key messaging platforms, or your current messaging has fallen behind the evolution of your business, industry or customers, consider either developing or refreshing this essential brand element.

Building a more compelling brand story and message platforms for your organization can help you strengthen competitive positioning and position your business as a thought leader. Also, brand story and message platforms provide the foundation from which every member of your team will be able to tell your stakeholders not just what you do, but why and how you do it

2. Website Content –

As the online front door to your organization, the impression that your website leaves with visitors has a lasting impact on your ability to win and retain customers, as well as high-quality employees. Of course, developing new or updated brand story and messaging automatically suggests a website refresh, but periodically reviewing all of the content on your website to confirm that it meets the needs of all of your target audiences is also important, as this tends to lessen as your website ages.

If the traffic to your website home page is steady but doesn’t translate to secondary page views, consider developing landing pages to drive visitors to content that will meet their needs and into your sales funnel.

Finally, make sure that your site is mobile-friendly, fully optimized for leading search engines and that your site is constructed to help visitors find the information they need quickly

3. Thought Leadership –

If your products and services change, you don’t need to throw out all of your blog posts, white papers, infographics, FAQs and other elements that may be outdated. Instead, review these materials carefully and figure out how to adjust them to make them align with your current product or service offering. You may even discover the need to combine content from different areas to create entirely new pieces to engage visitors, drive leads and convert prospects.

4. Sales, Marketing and Recruitment Tools –

One of the best ways to determine brand alignment is to carefully examine how your salespeople are engaging with customers and prospects. If they’re not using current sales materials, or they have created their own tools to facilitate their success, it’s essential to prioritize the review and adjustment of these items.

Another often overlooked area of review includes employment and employer branding sites, such as Glassdoor, Indeed, Monster and others. If your organization isn’t large enough to have a dedicated human resources department, schedule reminders to visit these sites periodically to keep an eye on what current and past employees are saying about your organization and develop and implement a plan to address negative remarks on these sites.

5. Social Media –

Having an outdated or non-existent presence on a social media platform is almost always viewed as worse than not having a presence at all. That’s why we recommend carefully evaluating and allocating the appropriate resources to maintain a compelling and engaging presence – devoting time and effort to consistently updating your social media content – before you commit to a platform.

In addition to developing a consistent flow of appealing and relevant content, it’s essential to carefully build your audience on your chosen social channels, so that they will engage meaningfully with your posts, share them with their fans and followers and serve as an advocate for your brand.

Your organization’s brand and the experience all of your stakeholders have with it is the cornerstone to your success, making it critical to give it the attention it deserves so you can effectively compete and win in today’s marketplace. If you’re wondering which of your brand elements could benefit from a refresh, or if you need some help revamping the current tools in your marketing kit, we’re happy to help.