6 Important Elements to Include in Your Brand Style Guide
What Is a Brand Style Guide? On this page, we’ll explain exactly “what is a brand style guide” and we’ll discuss six elements you need to include to create a successful brand style guide. If you need help creating your branding guide, call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist.
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What is a brand style guide?
A brand style guide sets the standards for your company’s branding, and it includes information about your tone, logo usage, colors, word usage, grammar, and more.
In other words, a brand style guide helps you communicate your brand positioning to the world. And it helps your business stay consistent, regardless of who is working on your campaigns.
When you market your business, you want to build consistency and cohesiveness with your brand. It helps your audience become familiar and comfortable with your brand. A brand style guide ensures that all your marketing efforts, digital and traditional, present your brand the same way.
5 core elements of your brand
When you build your brand style guide, there are five core elements of your brand that you need to consider:
- Mission: Why does your company exist? What need do you fulfill or problem do you solve? This is where you state your company’s purpose.
- Vision: This is where you see your business going in the future. You can have a big vision or small vision of what you hope your company achieves.
- Target audience: These are your customers. In this part, you want to think about who your customers are and why they need your business. How do your products help improve their lives?
- Brand personality: When you think of your brand, what are some adjectives that come to mind? Are you classy, trendy, modern, or vintage? You’ll want to think about ways to describe your business to help you build your personality.
- Core values: What guides you to do the work you do for your company? Your core values should be things that your company abides by through your daily work.
These are the five core parts you need to know in and out before you start your branding guide. It will help you get a deeper sense of your business, which will help you build a better brand. If you keep wondering “what is a brand style guide”, keep reading to find out six things you need to include in your brand style guide.
6 things to include in your branding guide
Now that you know the basics of how to prepare to build a branding guide, the next step is to build your guide. There are six key elements you want to include in your brand style guide.
1. Brand voice
When you build your brand style guide, you need to think about your company’s voice. Your writing needs to stay consistent across your digital and traditional methods. A brand voice helps you convey your message in a way that fits your brand.
You need to think about how you phrase things in your brand style guide. It is important that you choose a writing style to help guide your team to convey your brand’s message the same way. This is where you’ll want to think about your brand’s personality and how that personality influences the way you send your message.
You can also scope out some brand voice examples from other brands for some inspiration!
Quick tip: Create a list of words you like and don’t like. For example, instead of saying “don’t,” you may want to use “do not” to sound more professional. A list of do and don’t words can help your team get a sense of how to write in a way that reflects your brand.
2. Typography
Typography is a big part of brand identity. The fonts you choose can convey different meanings of your brand’s personality.
You want to select fonts that resonate with your brand. This is another instance where your brand’s personality will help you choose the right fonts. Fonts will help you convey a classy, whimsical, professional, or any other number of traits.
You’ll also want to set the alignment and spacing for your text. This ensures that you build consistency across all pages. You want your pages to look like one another.
Quick tip: Don’t use too many fonts. An overabundance of fonts will make your page seem disorganized. It’s best to focus on a few fonts that coordinate well together and decide which part of your page your team should use them (ex. Header, body text, captions)
3. Logo
Typography is one of the important elements of your logo, but there are other factors you need to focus on with your logo. When you create your brand style guide, you need to give your team guidelines on how to use your logo.
This isn’t merely about color choice. You need to think about how your logo looks in different environments, or how sizing affects your logo. When you create your brand style guide, you need to show your team how the logo should look on anything they create for your company.
These guidelines prevent mistakes. It prevents your team from stretching, condensing, or altering the logo. This consistency will help you build brand recognition with your audience.
Quick tip: Give all the perimeters for how to use the logo. In your branding guide, you should detail the proper size for your logo, how much white space it needs surrounding it, and the color variations that are acceptable. This will help guide your team to use the right logo at the appropriate time
4. Color palette
Your color palette is one of the most important parts of building your business’s brand. Colors build consistency across all platforms. When you create your brand style guide, you need to establish your brand’s color scheme.
When you choose your colors, you want to stay consistent with the hues. This ensures that all your colors continue to meld together and look clean.
Quick tip: Use four or fewer colors for your brand. Most businesses use four or fewer colors to build their brands to prevent their images from being too muddled by an abundance of color. A great rule of thumb is to select a light color for backgrounds and dark color for text (or vice versa), a neutral color (white, gray, black), and one color that pops against these other colors.
5. Imagery
Imagery is an essential part of showcasing your brand. Images convey your brand’s message to your audience. When you create your brand style guide, you need to include directions on how to use images.
You can include images you’ve previously used for your brand to give your team an idea of the right kinds of images. This will help guide them to use images that work for your brand. It builds consistency across all platforms.
Quick tip: Use examples from other companies to showcase the best image selections. You may not have a large selection of images that cover what fits into your brand, so you can rely on other companies to showcase images that work for your business. This is especially helpful if you’re changing your brand’s direction.
6. Brand story
Your brand’s story is a powerful tool to captivate your audience. When a company has good values, it makes consumers feel good about choosing that business. Your brand’s story is an opportunity for you to introduce your brand to the world.
When you create your brand story in your guide, you want to share a simple summary to give people insight into your company. It will help your team better understand your brand, as well as your audience.
Quick tip: Use emotion to convey your brand’s story. Emotion strikes a deep chord with people. When you resonate emotion in your brand’s story, you help your audience connect better to your brand and inspire your team to convey that emotion through other avenues, such as writing or imagery.
WebFX will help you build your brand
Now you know exactly “What is a brand style guide”, you know how important your brand is for your business. It helps you attract the right customers and get them interested in your business. If you want to see success with your brand, you need to build a brand guide to help keep your campaigns consistent.
At WebFX, we have more than 28 years of experience building brands for our clients. As a full-service digital marketing company, we know how to showcase your brand across multiple channels and build a consistent image. When you partner with us, you’ll get a team of 500+ experts that are dedicated to your campaign.
If you want a company that drives results, WebFX is the company for you. To date, we’ve driven over $6 billion in sales and over 24 million leads for our clients. We focus on driving success for our clients first.
Our clients love the work we do for them. In fact, we have over 1,100 client testimonials that attest to the great work we do for them. Check them out to see what it’s like to work with a branding expert like WebFX!
Create your branding guide today!
Want to put your branding guide to use and create online marketing campaigns that drive results? WebFX can help.
Our professional brand voice copy services help you shape your web copy into revenue-driving content that reflects your brand’s voice, tone, and values.
Call us at 888-601-5359 to learn more about our copywriting services!
Contact us today, or give us a call at 888-601-5359 to connect with a strategist.
We look forward to helping your business reach new heights!