With so many online platforms and properties to manage, it can be tricky for a marketing team to maintain consistent branding straight across the board, especially if your website (or websites) has a large group of contributors spread out in different locations.

A lack of brand consistency can ultimately be confusing for your audience. However, your content management system can help combat the challenge of keeping branding consistent.

Marketing teams can use a CMS to set and store brand rules and standards. By using your CMS as a hub for branding guidelines, you can make it easy for your users (old and new) to reference rules and standards as they churn out content for your brand.

Create A Writing Guide

Every brand has its own established voice and its own personality. By creating a writing guide, all of your contributors can adhere to your brand's editorial style across all online platforms.

Save the writing guide as a document within your CMS, and make it easily accessible for your content team to reference when they get stuck during the creative process.

Your writing guide can include:

• Vocabulary that your brand uses

• The tone of your brand's voice (casual versus formal, for example)

• To get more technical, you can also include guidelines for how titles should be written (length and best practices)

• Ideal word count

• Metadata entry

• SEO best practices that you adhere to

Create an Image/Graphical Guide

It's equally important to maintain brand consistency with online visuals as it is to maintain consistency with written content. And just like written content, a guide can be created and stored within your CMS for easy reference.

Your visual guide can include:

• Proper usage of logos (sizes, colors, etc.)

• Fonts and typography styles that should be used

• Image formats and sizes

• Types of images that fit your brand (stock photography, illustrations, etc.)

• Common themes that should be carried across all images

• Brand colors that should be used

Implement A Workflow

A great way to maintain website's content for consistent branding is to design and implement a publishing workflow that is managed by your CMS. A publishing workflow will ensure that content gets seen by the right people and edited for branding consistency before being published to the live site. Check out our best practices for designing and implementing a CMS workflow.