If you want to truly make a difference in the world with your business and its services and products, answer this honestly: are you consistent in everything you do?
A question that is hard to quantify by all countable measures is what is being consistent?
The consistency rate comes from what we do at our businesses every day to keep it afloat, seek growth, and further greatness.
For example, when we examine brands, the best brands are uniform by most measures, their products are consistent, and the way the business manages itself is relatively consistent.
Consistency isn’t the same thing as not experimenting or innovating.
It’s all about keeping your standards high in everything we do and everything we are about to do.
How To Be Consistent?
Consistency is a state of mind to grind in sync. And what makes it all happen? A singular goal, a vision.
Create a goal for your business, something tangible and not far-fetched, something you can almost touch. But not something mundane, daily, easily achievable.
A goal, by definition, is an emotion that marks the end of a journey.
When such a journey meets its end, we tend to slow down, lose the grip of what made us grow in the first place.
So create a goal that is realistic but hard.
Then let’s get deeper by making the steps for our goals. These steps help us be more consistent every day more easily.
Steps vs. leaps of faith: steps help build consistency, and leaps of faith, on the other hand, create randomness and opportunities.
In business, both are good. Sometimes a leap of faith isn’t going to destroy your progress as it helps you develop your field of vision to see more ideas and opportunities.
Brand Consistency
Brand consistency in business is crucial. Every dollar we spend on advertising builds upon the campaigns we made earlier.
We start with brand consistency as it’s the core mechanic of consistency in business as everything else builds stronger brands altogether.
Every social media marketing campaign, google ad campaign, or marketing in some of the many available channels builds our brands.
If we were to change our brands between campaigns drastically, all the benefits of previous advertising lose impact as people would have to learn to recognize your brand again.
Sometimes even the slightest changes in branding can have unexpected results.
For example, you have a winning campaign with YouTube Ads, but you decide that your brand could be more robust. After changing the ad content to match the new branding, you might find yourself having worse performance.
But if our brand isn’t performing well, we will need to change. It’s better to lose in the short-term to gain in the long-term.
The key is to understand how crucial maintaining consistency in branding is and realize its effects against earlier built brand awareness.
It’s about maintaining sustainable risk-reward levels.
Product and Service Consistency
The quality of services and products needs to be the same every time your business deals with a customer.
A successful and sustainable business achieves a high-level of consistency in their products and services they sell and provide.
If you want to build a sustainable business for the future, your offering’s quality must be the same every time or even better.
You will get more repeat customers, increase word-of-mouth (and referrals), and cheaper marketing overall. Especially crucial in B2B marketing. Only by ensuring that you’re providing high-quality products and services every time.
Bad customer experiences tend to go beyond the initial customer, and these bad experiences will be public, hurting your brand.
But is it realistic to always have the best of the best on offer with the greatest experience?
Of course, no. The key is how we maintain the product quality when something eventually goes wrong.
- Do we have stable customer support channels?
- Do we compensate for bad experiences?
- How quickly we address the problems shown to us
- And culturally, do we care enough to fix these problems
Our goal is always to ensure that we provide the very best product quality out there compared to our competitors.
And if your competitors set the bar low, you have an excellent opportunity to grow beyond them.
Consistent and Sustainable Growth
A company should strive for growth. And what is the best kind of growth? Consistent growth.
Consistent growth is different regarding the businesses themselves. For someone, beating the stock index every year is sustainable, and for others, they might need to grow much faster, for example, to reach profitability.
The idea is to achieve consistent growth regardless of personal business goals.
Achieve the growth rate that suits the business model, industry, products, and customers.
For example, when you reach a certain level of consistency in your business, it’s time to take it further if you want to grow. And when you reach it again, rinse and repeat.
Growing too fast or too slowly can break even the most innovative of ideas. We need to reach a level of consistency that we can manage without sacrificing any elements that made our business great in the first place.
Consistency in Management
And finally, let’s talk about management, which in the end will be the core function driving consistency in business.
A business’s culture derives from the way we manage it. And only, if we are consistent within the way we manage our businesses, easier it is for others
- To understand our business
- Create valuable relationships
- Become our customers
- Listen to what we say and do
If, as managers, we stick to the goals we set and see them through, we build a culture of consistency that others (our partners, our employees, our customers) can easily follow.
And when others rely on our businesses, we tend to find more success around us and in the things we do.
But as we manage our businesses, how do we know whether we are consistent or not? By measuring, for starters, let’s talk more about that next.
Measuring Consistency
Consistency itself won’t be easy to quantify, but let’s try anyway.
To measure, start with the goals and steps you set earlier, and as you go forward, reflect on your goals and the required steps often enough.
If we meet our goals and do the steps we wanted, we are consistent; otherwise, we are not.
For example, if your goals rely on analytics, use them to understand how you’re doing realistically. If you don’t rely on analytics, consider it to make it easier to see progress in a new light.
You can read more about how vital is analytics in marketing here to take the main takeaway of understanding our surroundings to achieve growth.
Conclusion
Consistency in business creates many benefits that entrepreneurs can use to their advantage, but only after realizing it.
Everything we do should reflect the things we did in the past when building something long-lasting. Having a strategy where you understand the power of consistency within your business greatly increases your chances of success.
We need to realize the impact of small changes on the larger picture. Is it worth it or not.
While stagnation is not an option for a growing business, constantly changing the formula won’t help you.
The goal is to create a plan, stick to it, analyze if it worked, and if not, start again.