Does Your Business Have a Brand Guide?

While you develop your business’s look and feel, compiling everything into a brand guide is essential. Having all of your branding elements in one easy-to-find place will ensure that all of your marketing materials, communications, and more are all consistent and recognizable to customers, employees, and everyone who comes in contact with your business. Maintaining consistency throughout your marketing and communications efforts is key, and a brand guide will make sure you get it done right. Keep reading to learn more about brand guides, what they include, and what to do if you need help crafting yours.

What is a Brand Guide?

A brand guide is a document that includes everything regarding the way your brand presents itself. The brand guide is your marketing, communications, and public-facing bible. It is the central place to store all your visual information, guidelines, rules, and more.

Maintaining visual consistency is very important with marketing and communications, as it makes everyone feel familiar with you. Whether it is customers, potential customers, employees, vendors, or beyond, you need to have a consistent look and feel that people can become accustomed to. Think about it: You know a Starbucks building from a mile away without even seeing its logo on the front, because all their buildings look and feel the same.

Why Every Brand Needs A Brand Guide

A brand guide serves many purposes, including:

• Consistency. As mentioned, you want to make sure that all of your public-facing visuals are consistent and recognizable. The brand guide will ensure all of this happens. Whether it is used by you or vendors (more on this later), everyone will have exactly what they need in order to move forward with any marketing or communications effort.
• Reputation. Having a consistent, recognizable look gives your brand credibility. Misuse of fonts, having multiple versions of your logo, or using all the wrong color pallets will make your brand feel sloppy, inconsistent, and untrustworthy. Having a brand guide will make sure that all visuals are used correctly and that the look and feel are all on point.
• Decision maker. Not sure how to proceed with a certain font, color, marketing material, or billboard? Take a look at the brand guide. The brand guide will eliminate a lot of brainstorming, indecision, and unknowns as a reference point for what to do and what not to do.

Who Uses The Brand Guide?

Why put so much effort into a brand guide if you, as the business owner, know your brand inside and out? That’s because you won’t be the only person using your brand guide. Here are all the types of people who will need access to it:

• Designers. When working with graphic designers, you want to make sure you are as specific with them as possible. Graphic designers are very creative by nature, and without guidelines, they may turn in something to you that isn’t on brand. Make sure you provide your designer with a brand guide—most professional graphic designers will ask you for one.
• Writers. When working with a professional copywriter, they will want to speak with you about the tone of your business. Is your brand fun? Professional? Emotional? Helpful? These are all things that happen during the empathy mapping discovery process and should be kept in the brand guide to make sure your voice is the same on all materials moving forward.
• Marketing team. Whether you have an in-house marketing team or are using an outside agency, you will need to provide them with your brand guide for all elements. Whether they are working on Google ads for you, streaming ads, or building a new website, your look and feel need consistency.
• Collaborators. Are you working with vendors, partnering up with another brand for a special project, or hiring a contractor for a small job? Make sure all of them have your brand guide to ensure the partnership is on-brand and consistent.
• Employees. When hiring employees, it is important to make sure they know the values of the company, how to answer certain questions, and how to present themselves on-brand when facing the public in a professional setting.

What Are Brand Boards?

Brand boards are the Cliff’s Notes version of your brand guide. It includes all pertinent information in one easy-to-read page. Examples of using your brand board include:

• Designer. If you are working with a new designer, make sure they have your brand board as a quick and easy way to reference fonts, colors, logos, and more. Rather than sifting through an entire brand guide, it is helpful for designers (and for you) to be able to reference a quick one-sheet.
• At-a-glance. Do you, your employees, or your marketing and communications team need to reference something in your brand guide quickly and easily? Having a brand board can get that done by trimming some of the fat of the brand guide when it has already been reviewed and understood.
• Front page of your brand guide. Having your brand board as the first page of your brand guide will give all who use it a quick and easy summary before diving into the brand guide. The brand guide is the bible and dives deep in order to answer questions and make decisions; the brand board can be seen as more of a reference summary.

Elements to Include In Your Brand Guide

When developing your brand guide, it is important to include everything visual regarding your business. There are so many things to include within each chapter, which is why keeping track of everything in one place within your guide is so essential. The most common components of a brand guide include business information, tone, typography, logos, colors, imagery, and usage examples.

Business Information

One of the things you will want to include in your brand guide is all of your business information. This includes:

• The full name of your business
• Any nicknames for your business
• Correct spelling, capitalization, and styling
• Up-to-date phone numbers, addresses, and email addresses
• Slogan
• Elevator pitch
• Mission statement
• Core values
• Headlines

Tone

The way your brand speaks should be outlined in detail within the brand guide. This is especially helpful for copywriters and marketing teams to develop the correct wording and language for ad copy, websites, billboards, and more. Things to include in the Tone section of your brand guide include:

• How your brand uses language, whether your brand speaks authoritatively or enjoys a good Dad joke
• The type of emotion your brand portrays, such as excitement or charity
• Situational grammar usage, such as the Oxford comma, that needs to be decided on and used consistently throughout
• Abbreviations your business uses
• Acronyms

Typography

Typography is an important aspect of every brand. It is much more than deciding on a font and going with it—fonts are little pieces of artwork that can portray different moods. For example, a professional law firm wouldn’t use Comic Sans for its marketing, and a children’s dental clinic wouldn’t use a simple font.

In addition, typography expands even further than just font style. It includes:

• Sizes. Fonts can look drastically different as they increase or decrease in size. Make sure you establish everything regarding font size, including whether you want 12pt or 14pt font on internal documents, right up to how big your designer is allowed to go for billboard pieces.
• Spacing. How far apart are your letters and lines within documents or marketing pieces? Spacing is a huge design aspect that can completely change the look of something, and establishing this component is key.
• Secondary fonts. Headline fonts can’t be used for paragraphs or fine print, so what fonts do you use for those types of things? Establish this and put it in your brand guide.

Logos

There are many different types of logos that will need to be developed for your brand guide. Each logo is used for different things and should all have the same look and feel. The logo section should include all logos in all their forms, in full resolution, in black and white, all white, and color, and easy to download. These include:

• Wordmark logo. Wordmark logos are exactly what they sound like — Your business name in words. Think of Google: Their logo is a Wordmark logo.
• Abstract mark. Do you have an interesting visual that is used as your logo that can be recognized without the wordmark? Nike and Pepsi do, and they are typically used for things like social media.
• Emblem logo. Starbucks uses an emblem logo, and so does Harvard University.
• Mascot logo. Does your brand have a recognizable mascot that can be used as part of the logo? KFC and Michelin do.
• Combination logo. A combination logo may include some or all of the above types of logos. Burger King and McDonald’s often use a combination logo with their Abstract Mark and Wordmark all in one.

Colors

What is the color palette of your business? Chances are there are many colors that your brand uses, but you want to make sure you define them so they stay consistent throughout your marketing and communications efforts. You will also need all your colors in all their forms. Each medium, such as digital or print, uses different color codes.

• Primary colors
• Secondary colors
• HEX
• RGB
• CMYK
• Pantone codes

Imagery

When posting on social media, creating billboard ads, or filming a commercial, you want to make sure you use consistent imagery throughout. Speaking to your target audience and showing them visually is important, as well. Some examples of imagery to include in your brand guide are:

• Photos
• Illustrations
• Artwork
• Social media post examples

Usage Examples

Are you wondering whether you can put your logo on a bright background? Should you film that new commercial at the beach? Is there a certain holiday your target audience gets really excited about? Are there topics you should avoid? Make a section for usage examples that can be considered a sort of FAQ of do ’s-and-don’ts for your marketing and communications team.

Get Your Brand Guide On With Navazon Digital

Are you in need of a brand guide?

Navazon helps businesses increase profits through data-driven marketing that expands opportunities and reduces risk. As marketers and entrepreneurs, we understand the value of developing a memorable brand through creativity and consistency. This is accomplished through targeted graphics, videos, and websites that reflect our proven, time-tested methodologies and detailed analytics. It is an approach that’s proven effective for companies of all sizes, from start-ups and medium-sized businesses to large firms with an international presence.

We are content creators who listen to our clients so that we can formulate ideas and strategies based on your unique goals and philosophies. Thinking through those goals with our analytics-based approach, we study not only your tendencies but those of your competition and the market as a whole. Equipped with this knowledge, we develop a powerful plan, test it, and then roll it out on a modest scale. Once we arrive at the winning formula, we can scale up rapidly to meet even the most optimistic growth projections.

Navazon does not believe in “one size fits all.” Every part of the marketing plan is customized to address your unique niche and positioning strategy. It’s how we excel. It’s why we succeed.

Schedule a free consultation with us now! Visit us at navazondigital.com for more information.