Want to build trust that translates to loyal customers? Start with your brand identity.

Digital Commerce 360 spoke with Jeana Garms, vice president of marketing at Arc XP, about the need for brands to create a strong and consistent identity, and the technologies that are helping them do that.

Why is brand identity so important in today’s ecommerce landscape?

JG: While it’s hard to pint down an official figure, it’s estimated that the average person encounters nearly 10,000 marketing messages and advertisements each day. On top of this, with a seemingly endless stream of new consumer brand entrants, the competition to attract and retain customers is tougher than ever.

Carving out a consistent brand identity is critical for creating differentiation that both cuts through the noise of competing messages and creates a desire in your audience to act. It’s this brand identity, when executed well and with consistency across all points of interaction, that:

What are the challenges brands face building and maintaining brand identity?

JG: One of the most common challenges brands have with their identity is one that is really felt by companies across industries. The effect siloed marketing teams – often organized by channel specialty and each using individual tools – have on creating and distributing content and messaging. We often hear this internal experience likened to the childhood game telephone – by the time the message is distributed across all channels it is markedly different than the original.

Maintaining consistent messaging and brand identity across these silos with their individual tools takes monumental effort, and often results in a disjoined customer experience that stifles business growth.

What technologies will best help retailers address this challenge?

JG: First, eliminate the disparate tools. Instead, they should rethink their marketing development processes to include the use of a content management system (CMS). I was surprised to see in the results of Content Marketing Institute’s latest B2C Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends survey that just 45 percent of respondents are using a CMS. I think there is this perception that a CMS is just for managing long-form content or for B2B organizations leveraging a thought leadership and content marketing strategy. A CMS offers several advantages for B2C marketers.

Content is what powers every digital interaction. From the moment-in-time social messages to the website shopping experience, and everything in between. A CMS streamlines the marketing development process by serving as a content hub and creating single source of truth for all digital content — from text-based content to imagery and videos — for all channels. By doing so, using a CMS gets executions to market faster while ensuring message consistency that reinforces brand identity.

What should brands do now to build and maintain their identity in today’s competitive digital ecommerce space?

JG: They should consider partnering with a content technology provider, such as Arc XP. Arc XP Content is an agile content management system that provides publishing, workflow, collaboration, and delivery tools in one platform. Having these tools in one place enables marketing teams to:

For brands looking to give their marketing teams more control of their websites - to create new pages faster and edit existing pages to reflect new campaigns and updated messaging strategies, Arc XP is fully integrated with the Arc XP Experience Platform.

In today’s online shopping environment, where consumer options are virtually endless, creating and, even more so, maintaining your brand identity is critical to building the trust that translates to loyal customers. Arc XP makes it easier for brands to deliver the consistent digital experiences that create that trust.

This article originally appeared in Digital Commerce 360′s report, Being a Successful Brand in a Digital World.