You’ve spent a lot of time and effort building a brand. Brands don’t just pop up overnight — it takes a great deal of time, thought, and effort to make one that really shines.
You don’t want that hard work to go to waste.
That’s why you need a brand style guide.
A style guide is simply a document that outlines the most important aspects of your brand so that anyone who is creating marketing or sales materials can easily reference it.
A style guide might include:
- Fonts and colors
- Logo size and positioning
- Use of photography
- Words to use (and not use)
- Examples of the right and wrong way to do these things
If you’re running a small business, this might seem like something you don’t want to spend time on, especially if there’s just one person in charge of your marketing and they’ve got it all stored in their head.
But what if that person leaves and has to be replaced?
What happens when you grow and add more people to the marketing team?
What if you bring in an outside marketing group?
Without guidance, all of these people could start basically doing their own marketing thing and ignoring all the hard work you’ve put into your branding.
Your Brand Is Your Baby — Take Care of It
The fact is that your brand is yours — not these other people’s.
You have to be the one who ultimately takes care of it.
All a brand style guide does is set down some ground rules. It ensures that people don’t go off the reservation and make branding choices that you end up hating.
Without a style guide, a font gets changed here, a color gets changed there, the logo ends up somewhere else, and before you know it, you end up with marketing materials that are inconsistent and confusing to your customers.
Changing the way your brand looks and feels isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but you don’t want that to happen without a clear plan and reasoning behind it.
If you have employees or outside marketing companies making your brand look, sound, and feel confusing or unorganized… well, that’s a problem.
A style guide allows you to maintain control of your brand and ensure it looks, feels, and sounds consistent and speaks directly to your target customer.
Brand Style Guides Make Everyone’s Life Easier
Rebranding is very common — as you grow and change as a business, it might make sense to redo your branding.
For many businesses, this just means a modernization of the brand. In many cases, they bring in an outside team.
This obviously costs some money.
And even if you do it all yourself, it’s a lot of work to update all your branding.
Do you really want to put in all that money, time, or both, only to have people down the road start changing that branding?
Of course not.
A brand style guide cements your rebranding efforts in place. It ensures your new brand doesn’t slip away over time.
It also makes everyone’s life easier. They don’t have to come up with new branding every time they want to make some marketing materials — they can just reference the style guide and go from there.
Your life is easier because you don’t have to worry about people messing with the brand constantly. Their lives are easier because they have clear directions.
Win/win.
Need a Brand Style Guide Template? Grab It Here
If you’re ready to put together a clean, clear brand style guide, then you’ll want to take a look at the Brand Board and Style Guide template.