Have you ever found a recipe that was pure gold? I love cooking and have many of these that I go back to several times a year. But sometimes, even if I’ve been making it for years, it doesn’t quite turn out right. It doesn’t live up to the glory of my favorite dish anymore, and it’s much harder to change now that it’s done. All I can do is make a mental note to revisit the recipe and read more carefully next time.
Sometimes something similar happens with our marketing materials. We format information differently from the website or we use a new combination of our colors unwittingly. These kinds of mistakes can be hard to catch and fix after the fact. But a sort of brand recipe card can help us from making these kinds of mistakes in the first place: the branding style guide.
What is a Brand Style Guide?
A brand style guide is a series of instructions on how to present your company across a variety of mediums including social media, emails, slide decks, paper goods and more. It can present large concepts like the color code for your logo and smaller details like whether your company uses the oxford comma.
A style guide can be as simple or as complex as you like. Use it to prioritize what are the most important aspects of how you present your business. This is especially useful when working with third parties like a brand ambassador or marketing agency, who may not see your content as often. The more information you provide, the more accurately your teams both internal and external can represent your business.
Reasons to Have a Brand Style Guide
Consistency
Your team works hard to create key messaging that will resonate with its audiences and capture the core of your business. By creating a style guide, you can simplify this process and replicate the same experience all along the customer pipeline. We need to ingest the same message seven times before we take action on it, and a consistent message delivers that more quickly.
Strengthened Identity
A brand is the personification of a business. If your brand were to walk around town, what would it wear? How would it speak? What are its values? A style guide can answer all of these questions and give a stronger sense of what being part of the company means for your employees and client base alike.
More Effective Marketing Strategy
Search engine optimization is an enormous part of bringing in customers, and having a consistent message means creating more content with the same keywords that are important to your company! Not only that, the distinctiveness created with your style guide has a secondary effect in how your target audience thinks of your business by creating a potent experience we call the “stickiness” of your brand because it sticks in the minds of everyone who comes into contact with it.
Creating a style guide can galvanize your message across all channels, but first you need a revitalized brand with a realistic sense of how it is being perceived and how it can grow. Reach out to the Boldthink team for more information about what it takes to make your brand bold.
