Regardless of whether you’re a new business creating branding for the first time, or an established business who have recently undergone a rebrand, you’re no doubt feeling really excited about where your company is headed, with its new branding at the forefront of its journey to reach your target audience. Your brand should be the flagship and first impression of what you do, and as such, it’s important to protect how it is used. Brand guidelines can help with this.
Even with the best of intentions, without brand guidelines, there are likely to be times when your branding is not used in the way in which it was intended. No matter the size of your business, here are five reasons why brand guidelines are important:
What are brand guidelines?
No matter how big or small your oganisation is, brand guidelines can help you to stay on track with the way that your logo and your branding is used when implemented across marketing material. Brand guidelines communicate to your team, and to any external partners and stakeholders who may need to use your logo, how your branding should be used.
Amongst many other things, brand guidelines can contain sections on aspects such as:
- Your brand ethos, proposition and values.
- How to use your logo – and how not to use your logo!
- Your colour palette, including any relevant Pantone, CMYK, RGB or Hex codes.
- The fonts to be used in marketing literature.
- The type of photography that works for your brand.
- Usage examples on different collateral.
All of these aspects of your brand combine to form your overall visual identity, and as such, having brand guidelines that you and your team and wider network can follow will help to maintain that identity. With this in mind, here are 5 more reasons that every brand, no matter its size, needs brand guidelines:
1. The creation of brand consistency
If you’ve spent time and money have a logo and accompanying visual brand language professional created, brand guidelines can be a really useful tool in terms of creating consistency. There is no point in having a beautiful logo if your visual identity can be ruined by the use of different, non-complementing fonts, the use of the wrong colours or by using the logo in an incorrect way.
Brand guidelines create a clear set of instructions of which fonts to use, how to use the logo in different situations, your brand’s colour palette, and can even go as far as to suggest the type of imagery and iconography to be used, as well as Tone of Voice.
2. Empower your team to use your branding
Guidelines are also a useful tool if there are multiple people in the team who need to use aspects of your branding. By having a set of brand guidelines available to everyone who needs to use your logo, brand colours or other aspects of your visual identity you can ensure that they will be used in the right way; there will be no rogue colours or uses of the logo, or imagery that doesn’t fit with the brand creeping in.
This will ensure that communications by all team members will look consistent and professional at all times. Similarly, it can improve workflow efficiencies when producing your marketing collateral as all team members will know where to find all of the brand assets they need.
However, it’s important to provide training to your team on how to use the guidelines and advise on any updates regularly, so that you can ensure the aforementioned consistency throughout.
3. Your audience will respond to consistency
Consumers respond to consistency. You want your logo and branding to be instantly recognisable by your target market. Just think of all of those big brands and how we can instantly recognise them from even the smallest part of their branding; brand guidelines can help to create the sort of consistency that consumers respond to.
4. Strong branding helps to build loyalty
Having a strong brand which is consistently presented at all times will help to build business loyalty among your audience. Your audience will come to know what to expect from your brand at all times, whether that’s a quirky tone of voice or perhaps sharp photography.
Brand guidelines help your internal teams to know how to present your brand to the outside world, and when combined this builds a strong brand that your audience will come to rely on.
5. Brand guidelines give your brand an identity
By pulling together all of the elements that make your brand stand out from the crowd, you will be building your brand’s personality. By having a strong lifeblood in your brand, it will help you to stand out from the crowd, and will ultimately catch the eye of your target audience much better than if your visual identity is weak and inconsistent.
Want to know more about brand guidelines? Get in touch!
Whether you’re a large corporation with an existing brand or a small organisation just starting out, we can help you to create brand guidelines that the whole team can follow. Let us create brand consistency for you, regardless of who needs to use your logo or elements from your visual identity. Get in contact today to see how we can help.
