One of the most important things to understand about marketing of any kind is that ultimately, your message is everything. It's more than just language, word choice or tone of voice. It's the core value that your business was founded on and a key part of the user experience you're offering to your clients. If you change that messaging and that user experience from site to site or from collateral to collateral, it WILL put a damper on your marketing results. End of story. Think about things from the perspective of a client who lands on your Facebook page because they were referred to you. This person, at the moment, has no intention of clicking on a link to your website. Does the message on your Facebook page represent your organization in the same way your larger website does? Because it should. The fact of the matter is there's just so much noise on the internet these days that it's easy for clients and prospects to get lost. Building trust and a tight relationship with people, by association, becomes harder and harder. To make matters worse, your unique identifiers -- those colors, logos and messaging choices you're making -- can make your business get lost in a sea of competitors, blending into the abyss along the way. You spend hours upon hours of your time being responsive to clients and helping deliver positive financial outcomes. How do you communicate this professionalism online in an era in which people are making their final judgment of you in a fraction of a second? With consistent branding and messaging, of course. The Power of Consistent Branding With consistent branding, your tax and accounting practice can accomplish a few key things, all at the same time:

• You get a genuine opportunity to establish your unique personality.
• You get to stand out among your competitors.
• You can meaningfully increase trust and client engagement.
• You improve the perceived value of the services you provide (otherwise called "pricing power").

Without consistent branding, you have exactly none of these things. We know that advertising agencies are out of the budget for most small- to medium-sized accounting practices. The good news is that there are a few easy ways to keep your branding and messaging consistent across all your channels, such as the following:

• Establish your brand guideline. Think about the things that your brand represents, what you do and how you do them. These elements make up your thesis statement. Anything that doesn't feed back into this guideline -- this master statement -- is harming your efforts, not helping them. This includes your color scheme, the fonts you use and copy points. They should not be changing from funnel to funnel.

• Speak in a tone that matches your target audience. You would speak very differently to a 20-year-old entrepreneur than you would to a single mother from Cleveland, Ohio. Know your audience and let that audience inform your voice.

• Limit your talking points. Brevity is the soul of wit. Don't let your message get too bogged down in superfluous details. Get in and get out as fast as you can for maximum effect.

• Think outside your website. People discover your brand in a variety of ways -- referrals, social media and even the old-fashioned way: in person. Are all of these channels offering a consistent experience that all feel like they're coming from the same place? Because they should.

• Bring it all together. By focusing on these elements, you bring all of your marketing funnels together to form a more valuable, more cohesive whole. This allows all of them to work together to accomplish things that no single one of them would be able to do on their own.

As an example, take a look at the work we recently did for a client. Starting with their logo, we then designed the color scheme of their website -- from the backgrounds to the icon colors and everything in between.

Once that foundation was created, we then took those same elements across to his social media sites -- allowing both channels to feel like they were a part of the same entity, even though they were two totally separate parts of this client's grand marketing experience.

Essentially, we were able to generate ad agency results without the ad agency expenditure -- just because we focused on consistent branding across all marketing funnels. Changing the messaging and user experience for clients from site to site can put a damper on your marketing results, yes. But the good news is that keeping these things consistent can help in a countless number of ways. They better your message position, your brand and yourself in a meaningful way that clients won't be able to ignore -- in the end, that's the most important thing of all, and it's something you can't afford to overlook. If you have any questions or would like to learn more about how to ramp up your marketing or improve your online presence, contact us today at 1-800-442-2477 x3 or set up some time to speak with one of our digital marketing experts. We're here to help!