Be consistent and persistent to get your message across

In order to get your advertising, marketing or PR message heard, you need to be consistent and persistent. This is true for new media as well as traditional media.

Your potential customers are bombarded by messages every minute of every day. The only way to break through is to be consistent and persistent. Here's how.

Be consistent in appearance.

• Have a signature look and stick with it.
• If your company has a logo and corporate color scheme, use it.
• If you haven't developed a logo or color scheme yet, settle on something and use it.

Be consistent in message.

• Identify your key message and stick with it.
• Develop a tag line and use it.

Be consistent in tone.

• Identify how you speak to your audience and stick with it.

You may "get bored" with the same old look but potential clients won't make the connection if one day your logo is pink and the next it's blue. Inconsistent messages are essentially invisible messages that don't get recognized.

Be persistent in print and online advertising.

• Choose your best outlets and run ads regularly.
• Give the audience a chance to find you and connect with you.
• If an outlet isn't working, move on after you've had suffiencent time to evaluate your results.

Be persistent with your website, blog and social media.

• Update your website regularly: a daily update is good, a monthly update is better than looking like you haven't bothered to look at your own site since 2005.
• Blog on a schedule. Be realistic, do you have something interesting or informative to say every day? If not, once a week is a good start.

You may think that you've "already been there, already done that." Maybe you did, 5 years ago or last year or last month. It doesn't mean that your potential audience was there at that moment. Give your potential clients every change to hear your message.

Consistency gives your audience a better chance to recognize you.

Persistency gives them them more opportunities to hear you.

Over time, being consistent and persistent will give the impression that you are everywhere. This is different than actually being everywhere, a very expensive and largely useless endeavor. You just need to be in front of your specific market consistently, again and again and again.

Post by Tracy Datlen, Laser Advertising, Inc., Fort Lauderdale