Why Are Brand Guidelines Important?
What company wants to waste the hours of thought and effort that went into crafting your business messaging, logo, website, and marketing materials?
What business wants to present a message that confuses their customer or clients?
IMPORTANT: Brand guidelines help business present a clear and consistent message across all platforms and communication channels. Remember, if you confuse, you lose.
What Are Brand Guidelines?
Brand guidelines are a set of parameters, tools, and rules to present your company’s branding. These guidelines will be given to social media managers, business development representatives, virtual assistants, writers, or anyone else conveying a message through your brand channels or creating marketing materials.
Together, these elements form a brand identity.
What’s Included In Brand Guidelines?
Your business is unique, and in order to stay ahead of the competition, it needs to stay that way. However, every brand’s guidelines will have some common elements or themes:
- What colors do you use in your brand (e.g., color palette)
- Why Type Font (i.e., typography) is associated with your brand?
- What messaging is associated with your brand?
- Are there different versions of your logo? If so, How are they to be used?
- Are there separate graphic elements that can be used in your messaging?
- What symbols are permitted, if any?
- What kind of brand tone should be reflected in your messaging? Assertive, Energetic, Calm, Trust, or something else?
These elements, as well as others, make up a brand guideline to keep your company messaging consistent.
Why Do You Need Brand Guidelines?
Branding guidelines are an important resources to ensure your brand works efficiently and effectively.
If you’re a lawyer, you want to be trusted and taken seriously, so you’ll want to stray away from using graffiti font in your social media posts or cracking jokes on your twitter feed.
If you’re a doggie daycare provider, would you include content about cats and birds on your blog feed? We hope not.
If you’re a solar panel installation company, do you want to send out a mailer with a purple, black, and gold color palette? Definitely not.
Branding Guidelines….
- Promote Brand Consistency
Your existing customers should recognize your brand. If you confuse, you’ll lose.
- Set Standards with Rules
Marketing agencies, web designers, and social media coordinators must know how to communicate your brand. Rules help anyone creating messaging understand which elements to use and how to use them.
- Provide Tools
A Brand guideline is more than setting rules, it equips your company with tools to convey a consistent message: Logo, Color Scheme/Pallete, Messaging, Font, and more.
- Avoid Confusion
If you’re looking to add people to your company, they’ll want to include your branding in an email signature. What should they look like?
If you hire a social media coordinator, they’ll need to know how to use your logo and the tone of voice in your messaging.
While you may know your brand, a new employee won’t know the rules of your brand identity unless they have a brand guideline.
CONCLUSION:
At Circle City Web Design, we help businesses create websites that stand out from the competition and connect their customers with a story. We can help you create your brand identity and establish brand guidelines.
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