If you don’t already have a brand style guide, you’ve probably at least thought about the need to create a consistent brand identity. Why?
Because effective branding affects everything you do — from your business strategy to closing sales deals to talking to your customer. Branding defines who your brand is, what you’re brand does, and how you communicate that externally. Having a cohesive brand, in essence, creates trust both in the market and with your customers.
Because branding is so important to any business’s marketing strategy, we believe every company out there should have brand guidelines. And when it comes to branding, consistency is everything.
So what is a brand style guide exactly, you ask?
Your brand style guide is the collection of specifications that help you present a consistent visual brand to the world. It’s the guardrails that you share both externally and internally that help you say who and what your brand is. It’s how you communicate (both implicitly and explicitly) what your brand stands for.
While we believe having a brand style guide is essential to building an effective marketing strategy, it also has a few more tangible use cases:
• Gives your employees, contractors, and partners a central place to access important documentation and visual assets to create more effective content.
• It helps establish trust with your customers and audience.
• It helps you maintain consistency, particularly when making updates to your branding.
• It lets you define what and who you brand is, not someone else.
Now that you’re convinced of the importance of creating a brand style guide, we’re here to help you build it from the ground up. In the following sections, we’ll take you through the steps of putting together you style guide.
Best yet, we’ve also included some free style guide templates to make documenting your style guide as simple as possible.
