UPDATED: Why Do You Need A Brand Style Guide For Your Business?
A business's branding is more than their logo, a brand is everything that encompasses a business from its company culture to its perception with customers and the community.
Building a successful business and brand are kind of like building a house from an empty lot. A custom built home takes a considerable amount of time to develop and execute from the first draft to the final touches within the decor. One of the main components to keeping branding consistent and ensuring it is correct from social media posts to print media is with a style guide!
As your business grows, so does your marketing collateral collection. When you started your business, you likely had a logo designed, created a website and ordered some business cards with maybe a few other promotional pieces.
If a business heads to a creative management firm like Denver Media Group to handle their branding moving forward or digital marketing strategies, our experts will ask a couple of questions.
The first is, “Do you have branding set in place? If so, please provide us with a corporate or business branding guide.” This ensures that our marketers, designers and anyone else who jumps in from our various teams can ensure that the branding is clear and concise.
On the other hand, our experts are also used to hearing that businesses do not have a branding style guide. It is not uncommon, but it can cause the inconsistencies that businesses come to us to fix.
Here are the reasons why style guides for branding are imperative to decrease inconsistency and branding identity crisis.
What is a brand style guide?
A brand style guide is essentially a set of rules any employee is expected to follow if they are representing your brand in any way.
This is a very basic style guide that our experts put together for all of the clients who do not have one! This provides the primary and secondary colors of the business that can be utilized on all digital and print mediums. This also provides the fonts and any alternative fonts that can be used.
A comprehensive brand style guide can include the following:
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Brand representation guidelines for your company: vision, mission and what can happen if someone misuses or misrepresents the brand
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Design elements of your brand: logos, file size, fonts, color schemes
For some clients, the need for style guides for branding are for legal purposes such as trademarks and copyrights. However, no matter the legal reasoning or requirements, these are the other reasons why a business should implement style guides for branding.
Why do you need style guides for branding?
New employees will have guidance on your brand from day one.
A new employee, agency or freelancer will have the ability to easily implement all branding into place, no matter the medium because they know these branding guidelines.
This helps everyone involved in the project
All of your writers and creators who work on your marketing and advertising, or any other communications, should be able to get trained quickly on your style. This helps them match the tone and create work representing your brand professionally and exceptionally.
With guidelines spelled out, managers and editors will spend less time fixing mistakes or repeatedly going over directions for how to use different elements or match the tone. This helps companies to stay on-brand easily.
There will be less confusion with inconsistent messaging.
It takes about seven to 15 times for a consumer to start to trust your brand, but inconsistent branding from colors to logos and even brand voice can create confusion for consumers. This creates a lack of trust between the business and consumers, in return, this creates a confusing and unsure emotion between your brand and customers.
For help with getting branding in order, rebranding efforts or any of our other services, contact our experts today!