Updated: Oct 11, 2024 By: Marios
With digital visibility being more crucial than ever for virtually all businesses, consistent branding has naturally become a vital investment for business owners. Ensuring your brand’s presentation and tonality is cohesive from your website to your socials, EDMs, and across to your product packaging, display advertising, and all other branded physical marketing collateral is key to supporting brand recognition and making a lasting impression on your target audience.
While all of these different channels will require a different approach, it’s vital that you have systems in place to ensure consistency in your branding. And the most effective way to maintain consistency in your branding is to develop a brand style guide.
A thorough brand style guide should adequately outline various elements of your brand and graphics to ensure they look consistent across all platforms.
Elements like fonts, colors, graphics, tone of voice, messaging and other components of your branding need to be addressed to ensure that internal and external parties working on any of your digital or traditional marketing channels know just how to present your brand from the get-go.
While individually these are all small elements of your overall branding, together they represent your brand so it is important that you put the time into getting them right. Let’s take a closer look at how you can develop a detailed brand style guide for your small business with our detailed step-by-step process below.
Step 1: Start With What You Have
If you’re heading a startup, then it’s likely that you won’t have many branding assets to work with and you’re effectively starting from scratch. If this is the case, then compile what you have in the beginning notes for your style guide.
However, if you are an established business or even if you have been operating for a short period of time, you will likely have some branding assets to work with. Take the time to gather any and all docs that you’ve got and then consider merging the PDF files you have to compile the foundation for your brand style guide. From here you can start to assess your brand and finetune as needed.
Step 2: Identify Commonalities (That are Relevant to your Target Demographics)
Once you’ve gathered together anything that represents your brand, you should then aim to identify any commonalities or connections across the board. For example, if you always use the same colors, fonts, images or messages in your branding, you need to ensure that these are consistent across all of your branding materials moving forward.
There are many different elements that you can consider, depending on what type of business you have or the tone of the brand you’re looking to build. Tonality is vital in these earliest brand development stages, as the design aesthetics, vocabulary, and even the color schemes for your brand can be optimized to appeal directly to a targeted demographic.
Here, it naturally pays to do plenty of preliminary market research to ensure your branding decision-making is data-driven and poised for market success.
Step 3: Brainstorm Company Logos
A well-designed company logo is one of the most important assets you have when it comes to cultivating a strong brand identity. In fact, in many cases, the other elements of your branding guide will stem from what’s included in your logo.
Most brand guidelines will focus heavily on when and where different logos should be used. For example, you might have one logo for your website, a different logo for your pitch decks, another for your email signature and yet another logo to include on your social media channels. And on that note, it can also be useful to include information regarding when not to use particular variations of your logo, or logo .jpg files.
For social media platforms that require images within defined dimensions (i.e. Instagram), having tailored logo files and even vector images for graphic design work on transparent backgrounds can greatly simplify the process of creating branded materials that are ready for posting.
Step 4: Consider Brand Fonts
Every brand will use a selection of different fonts. These fonts will be used in different ways over different platforms. For example, you might have one font that you use for the main body of your website, another for headings, a different font for titles and there may be another font that you select for your logo.
Much like designing an optimized logo or color scheme (more on this shortly!), your brand fonts should ideally be reflective of your target audience. Clean, sans serif text is also generally considered to be a gold standard for readability, and readability is of particular concern when creating digital marketing materials or even designing your company’s website.
Thankfully, a lot of WordPress templates provide plenty of leeway for experimentations with fonts, so you can either customize a template to suit your pre-existing brand fonts or even identify suitable fonts whilst building your website!
Step 5: Color Selection
One of the most important aspects of any band style guide is selecting the color palette that you will use. Think of any major brand and their brand colors immediately spring to mind. For example, when you think of Coca-Cola, red and white come to mind right away; for Facebook, blue and white jump out, and so on.
While these are massive international brands, color selection is just as important for small local businesses. This is because color theory can actually play a foundational role in attracting the right eyes to your brand. Even minute decisions like opting to mix contrasting or complimenting colors or designing with pastels vs. bold shades can greatly affect the tone and appeal of your brand to different demographics.
So be sure to outline the color hierarchy, which colors can be used together, which cannot be used together and how the different colors should be used across all your different digital and traditional channels.
Step 6: Developed Branded Images And Graphics
The final element of your brand style guide are the images and graphics that you use. Custom icons, illustrations, photos and other graphics form an important part of any branding. If you’re looking to attract investors or even high-quality talent to your business, ensuring your brand style guide and digital presence has plenty of these bespoke design elements, can aid in providing your business with an extra sense of legitimacy.
Your brand guide is the ideal place to outline when, where and how these different graphical elements should and shouldn’t be used. Having this clearly defined in your brand style guide is essential to ensure consistent branding across all platforms moving forward, alongside ensuring your business looks well-established to prospective clients, staff, and stakeholders.
Create The Right Brand Style Guide For Your Small Business
Whether your small business is just starting out or you’re looking to level up your branding, it’s vital that you have a solid brand style guide in place. With the right style guide in place, you will be able to redesign your website, work with graphic designers, outsource to digital agencies and work with freelancers with more confidence moving forward.
If you have new employees joining your company in the future, your brand style guide will be invaluable in ensuring your branding remains consistent and strong moving forward.
