One Weird Trick for Building Trust and Loyalty:

Being Consistent

It is, perhaps, fitting that this installment has been the most difficult to write of our series presenting Dossier’s philosophy of connection as a business goal.

That’s because today we’re looking at…consistency. The way we show up again and again and again, the actions that become patterns that become habits that become who you are as a business. And consistency? Is hard.

Consistency means not ghosting your readers when you get busy or stressed or when something falls apart. It means a blog post when you’re tired and scheduling social media when you’re not really sure what to say. It’s business when things are anything but usual. (Though by now, we can probably call it usual and incredibly difficult.) Showing up across all the channels, broadcasting your message so that everyone who needs to hear it, gets to hear it. It’s staying on-brand every. single. time.

The reason consistency matters is that it shows your audience who you really are. They say that it takes six points of contact to make a sale. (I’m not sure who “they” are, but they seem very sure of this.) That means you have to present your offering six times before you can reasonably expect someone to sign on for what you have to offer. It also means that it takes more than one heartfelt post to convince your readers that you’re genuine. More than one interesting, engaging discussion to prove that you know what you’re talking about.

Great Facebook Live? Okay, do it again. And again.

Spectacular open rates on your last email? Okay, now the next.

I know. It can be so frustrating. You feel like you’ve finally cracked the code, that you’ve gotten something out there that people loved, and all that matters now is doing it again and again and again and hoping that maybe eventually it’s going to turn into rapport and community and sales.

But here’s the thing. When you’re showing up in integrity, when you’re basing your business on being authentic and exploring the things that bring you joy, consistency is kind of…fun. It’s not doing something you hate every day, it’s sharing something that you think is cool or interesting or important.

Oh, it’s still hard. There will still be days when you want to spend seven hours doomscrolling the latest crisis or take an extra-long nap or just…go on vacation. This is why we have systems and delegation and batch-creation. This is why you have 50 social media posts already written and a VA with account access and this week’s blog post pre-loaded because you know that this is the first week of the month and that’s when you talk about setting goals. And you get to relax or work or whatever it is you’re doing, because your systems take the work out of maintaining consistency.

There’s no one way to do this. You can’t template a marketing plan and expect that it’s going to work the same way for every single person. But you can build a system based on how you want to show up and use that as the framework for your own form of consistency. 

Pick a style and stick with it. Build a brand voice that’s based on your real voice and use it every time. Remember that authenticity: a) calls your ideal clients to you, and b) makes it sustainable for you to be who you are, consistently, no matter where or how you show up. 

In The Aurum, we help you figure out the systems that work for you. It’s not a template or a swipe file that sounds the same no matter what your business is. It’s a way of presenting yourself based on reality and authenticity that forges a connection that is both genuine and sustainable. And yeah, there will be days when you need to take a break and not send that email. But with just a tiny bit of structure, you’ll find such an immense amount of freedom—and your clients will feel like they know you for who you really are.