In the world of marketing, it’s quite common to see marketers and businesses constantly chasing for the elusive virality, now considered the Holy Grail of marketing. Having one of your ads go viral could launch your brand into the spotlight just in the matter of hours, which can be a huge boon for any small or new business that has little by way of name recognition. The downside is that in chasing this virality, businesses can lost sight of what they stand for and pivots from one type of content the next depending on what’s trending.

The thing is, this constant pivoting can be very exhausting and it’s a bit like having to deal with multiple, and sometimes conflicting, personalities and with each of these personalities being really, really loud. One minute, you’re posting Game of Thrones memes on social media and the next minute, you’re writing an in-depth piece on tax cuts. This shift makes absolutely zero sense and why it’s better for businesses and marketers to just decide on a direction and to simply be consistent with that direction when it comes to marketing.

Why constantly hoping to ‘go viral’ isn’t ideal

To put it simply, viral contents can be completely random. It depends on the collective random whims of the internet and you rarely could predict just what kind of contents would go viral at any given moment and sometimes, these viral contents aren’t even new; the internet just simply decided to bring it up for their amusement. For example, take a look at a 2016 ad from the Brazilian team of the sandwich chain Subway that began trending on Twitter earlier in June this year.

Ryan Simmons of the sports blog SB Nation tweeted about the ad in June this year, offering a hundred bucks if anyone could figure out the brand behind the ad by the end of it. And it was quite a challenge as quite literally nothing about the ad, showcasing the growth of a person all the way from birth into adulthood, is connected in any way to Subway and/or their sandwiches. The tweet and the ad immediately went viral, racking up more than 40,000 retweets, 120,000 likes and 6 million views at the time of writing.

The video makes absolutely no sense, even if it had some very nice production quality, and true enough, it took three full years before the ad took off and Subway didn’t even have anything to do with the fact that the ad went viral. It’s practically pointless to make contents with the hope that they’ll go viral as that decision ultimately lies on the fickle minds of the internet. It’s better for business to simply focus on consistency, ensuring that their contents shared a common ground with each other and each of them faithfully represents their brand identity.

Marketing consistency helps get your point across

Apple didn’t come into their reputation as a tech innovator by accident; it’s embedded in their design philosophy and marketing messages. I know some people in my circle who thinks that their standing in the industry is a bit undeserved but any music enthusiast would be able to vouch for their brilliance with the iPod. What makes the iPod great is that managing the device is as easy as opening up iTunes and managing it from there. The iPod and the iTunes makes managing your growing music library a whole lot easier and Apple has never been shy about showcasing this, often bundling both iPod and iTunes in the same sentence.

Simplicity and ease-of-use was their marketing focus and even now, Apple has a reputation not for great technology but for making technology that people could easily use and even now, this simplicity is still the image they’re trying to portray. If your business wants to convey something, what your business believes in or what you think separates your business from others, keep reinforcing that message in your contents. This consistency should also be reflected in your products and/or services, which can massively help get your point across.

Consistency helps your standing within a particular niche

As has been mentioned before, sticking to the same general talking point could help get your message across and at the same time, consistency also helps your credibility in a given subject. The internet makes it easy for people to publish whatever thoughts they have to be read by other people. Credibility it what separates a film review posted on the late Roger Ebert’s website and a review posted by some random guy on Medium and one part of gaining this credibility is by being consistent with your content.

Of course, the quality of the content itself matters but if you’re posting about films once every full moon, people aren’t going to be looking your way whenever they’re looking for something to watch on Friday night. Instead, they’re going to go with someone who actually posts about film on a regular basis. This consistency wouldn’t just help build your credibility, it would also help deepen your understanding of a subject because practice makes perfect and repetition is the mother of learning.

Consistency helps with SEO

If you want search engines to point to your websites more often when it comes to certain keywords, it would help if you’re regularly posting contents revolving around the those very same keywords. Having a focus around a particular subject would also help search engine crawlers in trying to identify what your website and business is all about. This can help search engines point the right kind of traffic to your website by displaying your website on the results page on queries that are related to your field.