6 min read
5 Simple Steps to Creating Your Businesses Brand Style Guide
With the majority of businesses operating digitally across a variety of platforms, brand identity has never been so important.
Consistency is key in today's competitive market and that consistency relies on a well-crafted brand style guide to help ensure cohesiveness.
Today we’ll talk you through the importance of putting together a brand style guide and five simple steps to put one together – whether your venture is new or well-established.
Having a brand style guide gives you a concrete outline to work with. It is essentially a document that defines your brand's identity. Working with a brand style guide ensures consistency and is efficient.
A brand style guide helps set a tone of voice for all team members to use and present the brand in a uniform manner both visually and verbally. This ensures consistency regardless of which platform your brand is promoting on or interacting from.
Brand recognition builds customer trust – and recognition is near impossible without consistency. Branding statistics show that consistency has the potential to increase average revenues by up to 23%.
With a documented brand style guide, you have a solid reference for team members. Training staff becomes a doddle, and no one has to second guess any marketing creation. They can simply use it as a manual when making decisions.
With the importance discussed, let’s take a look at how to actually create one so that you can reap the rewards!
Branding boils down to visuals and voice but before getting creative with an eye-catching logo, the core elements of a brand’s identity need to be defined.
First, you need a purpose to tie visual elements and a target audience in mind.
The world’s leading brands all have a clear mission statement. Your brand mission is the "why" behind your business.
Your mission statement should be short and to the point, telling potential clients the aim of your company and what they stand to gain by choosing your goods or services.
The values of your company will also factor in the tone of your brand.
Ask yourself what you care about – are you driven by innovation, customer satisfaction, or making a bigger impact such as saving the planet?
These are important considerations which your brand visuals and voice will need to reflect.
When creating a brand style guide you also need to consider the audience every step of the way.
Without understanding the preferences and behaviours of your key demographic, you can’t really make any decisions about your verbal or visual guidelines.
At the end of the day your brand needs to appeal to its audience, so, again, ask yourself a few questions about who it is you are trying to grab the attention of.
The visual elements of your brand are crucial; they account for 55% of brand first impressions.
These visuals are the foundation of brand recognition and represent your core identity, giving it a personality (or an avatar, if you would like) in which to present itself, setting the look and feel.
A logo is the cornerstone of any brand identity. There is much to consider beyond deciding on the initial graphic design.
Your brand style guide should give details on how to place the logo on something published and include any variations for specific platforms. You should also list acceptable background colours and be specific with measurements and spacing.
A brand also needs to think about its typography. Believe it or not, many fonts speak to us subconsciously and this can play a significant role in building brand trust.
Make sure your brand style guide outlines a primary typeface for headlines and a secondary for your body text and specify preferred font sizes, and line spacing. Don’t forget to detail your heading hierarchy.
Your style guide should also list your brand’s colour palette with HEX, RGB, and CMYK codes for your primary and secondary colours. Accent colours are fine too, but don’t go too mad! You want colours that complement your logo colour choices to create visual harmony and maintain consistency.
Adding specific instructions in your brand guidelines for photos, icons, illustrations, and other imagery you might use is also another crucial visual consideration.
Images set moods, grab attention and sway opinions – you can have your logo and palette sorted, but if the other graphic elements used contradict your brand values, then you basically fall at the first hurdle!
While visuals are important, the real communication and interaction of a brand is done with its voice. The tone of voice must reflect the mission and values and resonate with your target audience.
The way you speak to your audience is subjective. Broadly speaking, your service or product will weigh heavily on how authoritative or friendly you want to come across, but there is much to think about.
You might want to be casual, even if your services are very academic or complex.
In your style guide, be sure to give good examples of what would be considered appropriate “on-brand” language as well as inappropriate “off-brand” examples.
Remember to set grammar and style rules for your brand when deciding on your voice.
Consider whether you want to keep it conversational and use contractions or slang, or whether it is strictly formal, observing stricter grammar and vocabulary rules.
Decide in advance where you sit on the Oxford comma debate and what spelling you are going to opt for, given your demographic.
Whilst consistency is key, some different content might require specific guidelines, so it is important to think about how your social media posts should compare to your blog posts and emails.
With the visual and verbal elements established, all you need to do is turn your focus toward cross-platform consistency. The style guide now needs to be branched out to cover platform specifics.
The final part of your brand’s style guide should detail how you apply the visual and verbal elements decided upon across a variety of sites. While some may require a few tweaks, such as a smaller logo or a simplified version, remember you are aiming for consistency.
Extend your visual and verbal decisions to any physical materials, such as printed posters, brochures, and packaging.
Lastly, you must always be willing to adapt. Whilst your brand style guidelines might have been set, remember that they aren’t set in stone. It is important to review things from time to time, especially as market trends shift.
Brand style guides should be regularly reviewed to make sure you haven’t lost sight of your aims or lost touch with your audiences. They should be updated where and when necessary!
The leading digital platforms chop and change and new technologies emerge. If you want to stay ahead of the curve and on-trend, you need to be ready to adapt your brand style guides to incorporate the latest tools and use the hottest platforms, or you risk losing your audience!
If you want to have a strong brand with a genuine identity that is recognisable across a variety of platforms as well as in print, then a thorough brand style guide is a must-have.
It isn’t difficult – it just requires a bit of thought, but with a few key questions asked you can build a cohesive brand that resonates with those that it is supposed to.
The more detailed and specific your branding style guide is, the less room there is for potential errors. This is especially important if you are working with large teams remotely handling different content elements.
Remember a VPN app can help keep communication safe when handling remote branding consistency!
I'm Kerry. Content Writer at Shape – if you don't find me at my desk, I'm probably on holiday again!
