Your website says one thing, your Instagram says another, your Google listing has an old address and your quotes go out on a Word template. Customers notice, even when they cannot say why.
Nobody meets your business in one place any more. They find you on Google, click through to the website, then go and have a nose at your Instagram before deciding whether to get in touch. Three stops, minimum, and often more.
Which means the question is not whether each of those looks alright on its own. It is whether they look like the same company. For a lot of businesses, they really do not.
How it happens
Nobody sits down and decides to be inconsistent. It happens the way most business problems happen. The website got built in one year, the Instagram got set up in another, someone made a Facebook page nobody has touched since, and the logo got tweaked somewhere in the middle and never made it back to half of them.
Add a Google listing set up in a hurry, an email signature made on a phone, and quotes going out on a template from the accountant, and you have got six versions of yourself out in the wild.
Why it costs you
- It reads as small. Not small as in local and trusted, small as in unsure. Consistency is one of the few signals of scale a customer can pick up in seconds.
- It creates doubt at the worst moment, right when someone is checking you out before making contact.
- It wastes recognition. Every time the look changes, the customer starts from scratch instead of building familiarity.
- It makes your pricing harder to hold. Presentation sets expectation long before you open your mouth.
The one hour audit
Open every place your business appears, side by side, and look at them like a stranger would. Be honest.
- 1Google your own business name. Check the listing. Right address, right hours, right phone number, recent photos, correct category.
- 2Open your website. Note the exact logo, the colours and the way you describe what you do in one line.
- 3Open each social profile. Same logo file? Same colours? Same one line description, or a different one on each?
- 4Look at your last quote or invoice. Does it look like it came from the same business as the website?
- 5Check your email signature. This one is almost always the odd one out.
- 6Write down every different version of your one-line description you find. Most people find three or four.
What consistent actually means
It does not mean everything looks identical. A social post should not look like a quote document. It means the same handful of ingredients turn up everywhere. One logo, one set of colours, one typeface, one way of describing what you do, one standard of photography.
Get those five settled and everything you produce afterwards holds together without you thinking about it. That is really all a brand is, at the size most businesses operate at. Not a big exercise. A set of decisions you only have to make once.
If you run the audit and do not like what you find, that is worth knowing rather than ignoring. Send us what you have got and we will tell you whether it needs a tidy up or a proper rebrand. Sometimes the answer is a tidy up, and we will say so.
