Your branding tells your customers everything — your What Are values, voice, and personality. When it comes to conversions, 43% of people spend their money on brands they’re loyal to. Having consistent brand guidelines for all platforms is crucial for a solid brand presence.
Brand guidelines are your team’s cheat sheet for creating content on any platform. Brand guidelines establish consistency and help tell your team’s story.
Want to learn what to put in your brand guidelines? This page will cover the following topics:
What are brand guidelines?
Businesses can target consumers based on country-wise email marketing list geographic locations with the aid of a country-specific email marketing list, which enables the creation of tailored content that appeals to linguistic and cultural preferences. By providing pertinent messaging, this strategy raises engagement and conversion rates. Furthermore, it guarantees adherence to regional data laws, bolstering credibility and confidence. For international marketing campaigns to be successful, country-specific lists are necessary.
Brand guidelines — also known as a brand style guide — are standards that companies use to remain consistent across channels. These guidelines ensure that no matter where you see a brand, you can recognize it and trust that it came from the company.
Brand guidelines comprise the following:
Visuals: Logos, colors, images
Language: Typography, trademarks, personality
Values: Your mission and goals
If you’re already using an omnichannel strategy or want to start, your brand guidelines might be part of your marketing plan.
Why do brand guidelines matter?
Having consistent branding matters for multiple reasons. Here are our top three:
Branding guidelines encourage cohesive material
Designers, copywriters, salespeople — everyone on your company’s team can use your brand guidelines to create a specific look and feel. Establishing rules can immerse employees in your company culture and help them represent your brand.
How to create brand guidelines
Now that you have seen some examples, it’s time to start preparing your own. The following list covers what to put in brand guidelines:
Your mission statement is what your company stands for. Many companies also have this information in their “about” section, but you must tie your branding into your mission. Why does your brand work? How does it accomplish that?
A strong mission statement will help people connect with your brand as a unified concept. They likely know your product and services, which are what you do. Your mission statement tells them why you do it.
If you don’t have a mission statement, you can list the values that you want your company to promote.
b.Voice
Your voice is what you say. Your tone is how you say it. Outlining your language style can help people understand your brand’s personality and messaging.
How you communicate matters to your industry. A health care clinic might not use a lot of flowery, comical language when they help patients with serious illnesses. Likewise, a daycare doesn’t want to come off as overbearing.
Decide how you want your brand to sound
c.Buyer personas
Buyer personas are profiles you create to represent your target audience. Instead of limiting your audience to the following:
85% female
Age 25-35
Middle class
Create a character that represents someone who would likely buy your services. For example, your buyer persona could be Sara, a 27-year-old receptionist with no kids. You could even be more thoughtful with personality traits, like someone who enjoys the outdoors or vacations frequently.
Once you think about your audience, you can understand what kind of people interact with your brand and keep your employees on board with who you are serving.
d.Colors
Your brand colors give users a signal to look for. Color can improve brand recognition by 80%, so outlining your colors matters.
Outline the HTML and HEX codes for your colors and make sure that you keep them consistent across platforms. If necessary, you can also trademark your product colors.
Check out these websites for examples of how to use colors in web design.
e.Branded terms
Make sure to list all branded or trademarked language, including:
This step creates consistency across platforms and acknowledges any legal restrictions for trademarks.
Image preferences
If you have image size regulations or certain backlinks from visuals imagery, add it! This section can include your logos, designs, graphics, and more.
If you don’t have in-house resources for images — or any content mentioned above — consider partnering with a digital marketing agency for extra help.
Brand guideline examples
All brand guidelines will look different depending on the company’s personality, size, and industry. Many don’t share their complete branding sheet online, but you can reference their guides for designers.
A music streaming platform, centers its branding around the user. They create personalized content and user-friendly data to give people more control over their music library.
Spotify has a distinct set of rules for developers connecting their software with Spotify. Let’s go through a few of their branding elements:
Logo
Here, the brand outlines its logo and icon preferences in detail, including the logo and icon. With these examples, Spotify can establish one clear logo that prevents variations.
SCreenshot of Spotify logo titled “Using our logo”
Along with the logo downloads and examples, they also include what not to do with their logo. Being as explicit as possible and outlining all the possibilities ensures that developers and designers have the same information and use it correctly.
Screenshot of the Spotify Logo Misuse page
Colors
While Spotify’s colorful interface comes fromaqb directory album artwork or playlist covers, but green and black are the branded colors to watch for. You can access their colors in their branding guidelines, including how they layer them with other branding.
The guidelines include multiple formats (HTML and RBG) to be as clear and specific as possible.
SCreenshot of page for Spotify color practices
They also include the difference between the shades of green and how each one appears within and outside of the app.
Formatting
Other sites and services can embed the Spotify player onto their platform, which poses the need for a unified format. Spotify outlines their preferences, including the album artwork, artist, track title, and more.
