Branding & Marketing—Should I Have a Brand Guide for my Business?
Brand Guidelines communicate a variety of things about your brand, both to your business, as well as externally to your clients and the general public. brand guidelines are not all standard across the board, but the most reputable businesses utilize brand guidelines as a way for everyone to understand how to represent their brand.
Brand guidelines are a very useful resource when you want to communicate with current and prospective customers about who your brand is.
So, what is a brand guideline?
Brand guidelines are a set of rules to create a unified identity when connecting multiple elements within your brand, such as colours, your logo, and your typography
What elements do I need in my branding guide?
Colour Pallet: What colours that make up your brand? Think less is more, it makes it easier for your brand to stay consistent. Brand guidelines should include RGB and CMYK colour codes, so your colours stay consistent between web and print formats.
Typography: Brand guidelines will include typefaces and families, font sizes, and the hierarchy of the fonts your brand uses.
Logo Design: How your logo is displayed in different formats is an important part of your guideline. This could include size restrictions, specific colours, and how your logo should be displayed on different backgrounds. Having examples of how not to brand your logo is a good way to visually show what doesn’t work with your logo, such as the background colour.
Consistency is Key
Consistency is important in making your brand recognizable and credible. It ultimately communicates that your brand takes pride in the details. Your audience expects you to lead them through the marketing funnel with content that is consistently branded. This means that your business cards match, which is similar to your emails, which look like that nicely designed website you have.
Following your brand guidelines Keeps your brand consistent and allows it to be immediately recognizable within your industry and with your target audience.
Easily increase your brand value
An easy way to increase your brands' value is to show confidence. When your business has set out cohesive guidelines and rules, it shows that you are confident in how you want to represent and communicate the identity of your brand. By implementing brand guidelines, you make it easier to maintain the quality and integrity of your brand’s image.
Give yourself a hand
Managing your brand is hard enough. When you’ve created a brand cheat sheet, it can make your life a lot less complicated. Keeping it all in one place is a great way to make sure everyone has a clear understanding of how to use the logos properly, and how the other elements of your brand work with your logo. Saving it to the same place where your logo files are, is always a good idea, so your employees can easily double-check or grab info right from the guide so it’s correct every time. Your brand guideline should be detailed, but clear and able to explain your brand with simple examples of correct and incorrect uses of your branding elements.
Do you have a brand style guide for your company? If you do, great! Be sure your company is making the most of it. If you don't, get on it! It is important that everyone in your company understands that there is an expectation for higher-quality when it comes to your brand. Give them easy access to the style guide and to branded templates that will help everyone keep things simple, but still consistent and well-rounded.
Below are some examples of some beautiful branding guidelines to inspire you!