3 Reasons You Need a Brand Guide

Do your ideal clients and customers know your business?

Like, REALLY know it?  Do they know

• Where you came from

• How you got where you are

• What matters to you

Can they tell a product / message / email / social post came from you based on

• The colours used

• The fonts

• The message

• Words that are and are not used

• The values made clear in/through it

If you’re not nodding along, confidently muttering “yep” and “absolutely” to yourself here - you might need to spend some time working on your brand story and making sure the elements of it are accurately represented in every single thing that gets released by your business. Don’t limit yourself by thinking this only means things released to the public - you’ve also got to make sure you properly brand the content shared internally to your staff, volunteers, freelancers etc - if they don’t know your brand, they can’t represent your brand. 

So how do you go about doing this?  How do you get and keep your story front of mind for your customers and make sure your business is automatically recognizable to your clients?  You build a brand guide and you use it well.  

A brand guide is basically an instruction manual for how to communicate your brand.  It holds 

• Your logo and all its acceptable variations and uses,

• The hierarchy of fonts used and when to use them,

• Colour palette,

• Your values,

• Acceptable language,

• Messaging,

• Values,

• Textures

• Image/graphic options

And is an invaluable tool in your business. 

Developing and using a brand guide saves you time - you’ll have everything you need at your fingertips - no more sifting through fonts to find the one you used last time, searching your files for your most recent logo files, or struggling to figure out whether the colours you are using will get the psychological response you want, or even “go” together.   

Developing a brand guide helps you tell your story - just the process of creating the guide can help you get crystal clear on what you want people to know and the journey they need to come on with you.  It’s really just a bonus that you get a handy collection of all the necessary assets at the end! 

Developing a brand guide saves you time, money, and frustration when outsourcing work - outsourcing any sort of communication is, in my opinion, a futile task without a proper branding guide to support the work.  In order to accurately represent your brand; using the correct tone, communication style, imagery, colour, etc  is crucial and a freelancer/contractor is going to have a hard time doing this well for you if they don’t have the proper resources to refer to.  And you aren’t going to feel like the task has been taken off your plate if you have to review everything for consistency or to make sure it “feels right”  - enter…the branding guide.  

Is this the next best step for your business?  Get in touch with us and we’ll help you figure that out!