Being a small business owner comes with many, many challenges (as I’m sure you’re well aware).

While there are plenty of offline challenges that a small business can encounter, there are equally as many in the digital world, as well.

I’ve already discussed the different digital layers small businesses need to get a handle on, as well as some ways of shielding yourself from disruption when those different layers encounter changes or user behavior changes (moving from different platforms or layers).

All in all, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and lost at times.

While we can’t control a lot of what happens outside of our small businesses, what we can control is what we do inside our businesses.

In times when there’s an endless amount of noise in the world, there’s one thing that you can always work on within your business: consistency.

As mentioned in a previous post here, I discussed how consistency helps you build – and maintain – momentum; something critical for both growth and long-term sustainability.

But what areas, specifically, should you focus on when it comes to consistency in the marketing world?

Branding, as I’m sure you’re well aware, is a broad reaching topic – one deserving of it’s own post at some point — but one of the more important areas you want to stay consistent with is with the visual side of your branding: logos, color palette, typography, and other visual elements.

The very heart of branding is differentiation – what you do differently than other small businesses with the same alignment (solving similar problems for similar customers/clients), and visual branding is how your business looks different from others in the same space.

Again, this is a topic that can be quite deep, but the essence is that if your small business isn’t consistent with the way it looks across different digital interfaces, it’s likely to cause confusion for your customers/clients.

Imagine yourself online and come across a particular company and notice their logo, their colors and other visuals.

Then you jump to another platform and spot the same company, but this time their logo is different and perhaps the colors are a bit off from your initial interaction.

You might ask yourself – is this the same company? Or, do they not update this platform often?

These are questions that will likely create noise and be a distraction from what you really want them to be paying attention to: your content.

Consistent Content Rhythm & Timing

Being consistent with your content can offer many benefits, but one of the biggest is in building trust.

If you establish a consistent rhythm for producing content and timing for posting, it allows your customers/audience to know when to expect to hear from you.

While your content may change over time – different types, formats and other ways content can change – being consistent with content production and posting can help you cut through the noise, building trust along the way.

Consistency builds trust and trust builds relationships.

Consistent Measurement

Data and measurement is an important part of improvement – without it, you’re kind of flying blind (see more on improvement below).

Measuring things is likely one of the areas I see most small businesses fall behind on, whether its website traffic & other digital metrics and the resulting leads/opportunities, conversion rates, completed projects and reviews — it can be a challenge to measure all of these key areas in your small business.

However, without these measurements it’s almost impossible to understand if you’re improving (or going the other direction).

Being consistent with your measurements – whether that’s weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually, will help you fully understand how your digital marketing activities are affecting the downstream goals of your small business.

Consistent Improvement

Going along with being consistent with measurement, being consistent with improvement is vital for long-term sustainability, in my opinion.

Even if you want more modest, sustained growth and development for your small business, improvement is a necessity – no single person or no single business is perfect.

Perfection is the direction, not the goal; while no one business is “perfect” in the strictest sense, it can be used as a guiding light for improvement.

No matter how far you may be along in business, not being perfect means there are areas that can improve.

Being consistent with your improvement mechanisms is a great way to ensure you’re always improving, in one way or another.

Consistency Matters: Getting In Your Reps

As you can imagine, the repetition of consistency can feel boring, but repetition is how one gets stronger.

A good analogy is that of lifting weights (or any exercise for that matter): you don’t get strong lifting a weight once.

It’s the repetition of lifting that weight over and over again that allows you to get stronger, over time.

The same can be said in digital marketing (or any kind of marketing), really.

If you look different across different platforms (different logos, colors, etc.), it’s hard for your customers to have a consistent, strong memory of how your small business looks (causing confusion).

If you’re inconsistent with your content rhythm and timing, it’s hard to strengthen the existing connection you have with your followers (especially these days, when there’s so much content to consume).

If you’re inconsistent with your measurement, it’s hard to strengthen your view of what’s happening in your business (leaving you feeling lost at times).

If you’re inconsistent with improvement, it’s really difficult to strengthen your positioning with your services and products (allowing others to get stronger positioning).

However, if you do stay consistent with your digital marketing efforts – and get your reps in over time – it can become easier and easier to strengthen the core areas you need for sustainable, long-term growth.