The dilemma between trying to go viral and staying consistent with your brand may be one of the most common challenges you’ll face as a small business owner and marketer. While going viral can bring a major boost in visibility, consistency is often what builds lasting recognition, trust and credibility with your audience. So, what is better for a small business: consistency or going viral? The truth is, it depends on your goals, where you see yourself taking your business, and what you can realistically manage.

What is consistency?

Branding consistency is a strategy that helps your business maintain a cohesive look and feel across all of your marketing channels.  Having a consistent brand image can benefit your business in the long run by making your company more recognizable and memorable. This means using consistent colors, design styles, fonts, imagery, and messaging throughout your marketing. Your business should strive to make every piece of content evoke the same overall mood and communicate the same brand personality, no matter the channel.

What is a brand kit?

A brand kit is a helpful tool that lays out all of the guidelines for the presentation of your business. The brand kit dives deeper into what colors you should use to market your brand, giving you HEX, RGB, and CMYK codes to enter when designing. It will lay out fonts you can use while also including a text hierarchy, ensuring that the fonts and text sizes are the same across the board. Include your logo to identify the brand’s visual identity with one singular point. The brand kit will guide the brand’s personality and create message guidelines, providing a tone of voice, communication style, and preferred language for you to use across your channels of marketing.

The importance of staying within your brand kit’s guidelines

Staying within your brand kit’s guidelines is important for building a recognizable brand. Your customers see tens of thousands of advertisements every day from different businesses. Those ads only give you a millisecond to make an impression. In that brief moment, you want your customer to be able to connect your ad back to your business. Whether it’s your logo, the colors that are used within your brand kit, or the tone you used on the design, customers will be more likely to remember you and your brand when you make your “look” more consistent and therefore recognizable. Over time, that familiarity can help build trust and keep your business top of mind.

Make marketing easy – invest in a brand kit

Investing in a brand kit is one of the smartest decisions a business can make. A brand kit keeps all of your essential design guidelines in one place, making it easier to maintain consistency across every marketing channel. Instead of starting from scratch with every new piece of content, you have the tools and guidelines you need to create marketing materials that consistently represent your brand.

What is going viral?

Viral is defined as “quickly and widely spread or popularized especially by means of social media”. In short, going viral happens when a piece of content receives thousands or even millions of views and engagement in a short amount of time.

What business should strive to go viral?

The need to go viral is based on where you see your company’s marketing taking you and your goals. A smaller business that wants to reach a large, diverse audience outside their general local area may strive for a goal of going viral. Why? They need to reach a larger crowd and be seen by them.

How influencer marketing can showcase your brand

You don’t need a ton of followers to be considered a successful business. Influencer marketing is a smart strategy to involve social media gurus to aid in the success of your business without having to post religiously. You can create relationships with local influencers in your area who are willing to showcase your brand for either a trade in service or cost. These local influencers already have a following behind them, giving you access to a trusting, prepackaged audience.

What analytics should a small business be looking at?

A small business should be looking at whatever metric their goal is based off of. If their goal is to be viral, they should pay attention to the majority of the analytics: views, engagement, and reach. If a business wants to gain more customers, they would need to focus on paying attention to the amount of link clicks they get to their website in terms of engagement and where in location-wise they are reaching people. The type of analytical tracking is truly goal-based oriented.

The 80/20 Approach to Social Media

The 80/20 approach to social media is to have your content be 80% consistent with your brand and about 20% of the content be purely experimentation. The 80% of the content will fully align with your brand kit that you have created for your business. With 20% of the content, you can play around with ongoing trends to boost your chances of your content being noticed by a larger audience. This balance gives you freedom to have fun while creating but also lays down a method to create content aligned with your brand to have consistency across all your marketing channels.

What is better for a small business – going viral or having consistency while posting?

What is better for a small business in terms of the guidance on what to post for on social media is entirely based on what outcome they want to carry their business towards. Each small business has to answer that question themselves. However, something to remember is that going viral can get people to notice you, but consistency gives them a reason to remember you – know the difference.

Social media management for small businesses

Are you struggling to post on your small business social media? Take your content to the next level with TLC Marketing & Creative Services, your full-service partner for marketing in Southwest Florida, social media management, web design, and event planning. Our experienced team creates strategies that drive engagement, build visibility, and deliver measurable results, allowing you to focus on running your business while we handle the rest. Whether you need a refreshed social media campaign, a new website, or a standout event, TLC provides tailored solutions that make an impact. Contact us today at 239-405-8115 to start elevating your brand.