Is Your Business Using Brand Guidelines?
Do you have a logo? Have you got cohesive and clear messaging? Are you using a variety of marketing platforms to advertise your business on such as social, email and PPC? Have you got brand guidelines?
If you are not sure, or you would like to establish a brand that matches the ethos of your business, read on…
What are brand guidelines?
Brand guidelines work to establish where your business is, where you want it to go and how it should look and feel. The key to this is consistency, and should be extended across all marketing platforms. All brand guidelines should stick to the same “rules”.
Some of these can include:
- An overview of your brand’s history, vision, personality and key values.
- Brand message or mission statement – including examples of ‘tone of voice’.
- Logo usage – where and how to use your logo including minimum sizes and spacing.
- Colour palette – showing your primary and secondary colour palettes with colour breakdowns for print and web.
- Type style – showing the specific font that you use and details of the font family and default fonts for web and print use.
- Image style/photography – examples of image style and photographs that work with the brand.
- Business card and letterhead design – examples of how the logo and font are used for standard company literature.
Why do I need brand guidelines?
Now that you know what brand guidelines are, you may be wondering why you need them and how they will benefit your business.
Brand guidelines are vital in helping your brand stay consistent across all mediums in order to work effectively. Without these guidelines your brand’s message could become diluted, causing uncertainty in how to communicate your business values - inevitably, this can leave your audience confused.
These brand guidelines are something that everyone in your business should follow when creating any project within your business, whether this be a piece of content for the website, a post on social media or any printed materials.
How we can help you…
Many businesses can struggle to successfully implement brand guidelines within their businesses – unsure of where to start.
At iCD we can provide a free consultation to help establish your brand guidelines. We can also help to strengthen your brand identity too! For more information, please contact us on info@icandydesign.com or give us a call on 01256 895805!