Brand guidelines: A ‘how-to’ guide

Developing and managing a consistent brand starts with creating brand guidelines. Sometimes called brand style guides, these act as a rule book for anyone representing and showing-and-telling your brand, be it your marketing team, agency, copywriter, graphic designer, web developer, sales team, whoever.

In this blog, we’ll cover the benefits and elements, and spotlight a few ‘good practice’ examples to set you off on the right path.

Why are brand guidelines important?

Brand guidelines act as your business’s North Star, directing and guiding you into the future. The advantages of brand guidelines cannot be overstated. The benefits include but are not limited to:

• Aid brand recognition. Establishing uniformity in everything you do means you’re instantly recognisable to clients and prospects.

• Keep on message. A consistent identity and consistent tone of voice maintains coherence, so you never steer off course.

• Uphold professionalism. Branding that’s erratic and irregular in nature simply doesn’t look good. Guidelines ensure impressions of competence and proficiency.

• Work smarter. A practical toolkit for existing employees and new recruits empowers your team to do their job effectively, efficiently and independently.

• Boost your revenue. Forge strong and relatable connections with your audience. It’s critical for generating leads. And leads effect financial performance.

• Retain clients. Branding has been proven to improve loyalty and retention, leading to repeat purchases (instructions) and higher lifetime value overall.

• Increase market share. Standing out in a crowded marketplace and highlighting your unique selling points (USPs) attracts consumers away from competitors.

• Amplify marketing efforts. With a better-working marketing team, your campaigns and activities are impactful, to fuel your sales pipeline.

• Charge higher fees. Premium pricing is one potential outcome of creating a high-quality brand, to earn more from the same caseload.

What do brand guidelines look like?

In truth, there isn’t one style to suit all. Because every business is special, it thus follows brand guidelines are individualised too. However, there are often commonalities and similarities which we’ll explain.

Strategic elements

Mission statement

If your brand guidelines are your North Star, your mission statement is its compass. It’s a statement declaring your organisation’s overriding purpose which makes sure everyone and everything works towards the same goal.

Some examples?

• LinkedIn: To connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.

• Microsoft: To empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more.

• Google: To organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

• HubSpot: To be the CRM platform that helps millions of companies grow better.

Value statements

These are expressions about how you require your employees to behave, and they’re your pledge to wider stakeholders about how they can expect to experience interactions with you. Essentially, it’s the principles driving your business, its beliefs and its culture. It’s not unusual to publish several of these statements.

Some examples?

• Ernst & Young: People who demonstrate integrity, respect, learning and inclusiveness. People with energy, enthusiasm and the courage to lead. People who build relationships based on doing the right thing.

• Intuit: We believe that we are stronger together by championing diversity and inclusion across the company. We care and give back to help our communities prosper. We show integrity without compromise and have courage to be bold and fearless in our thinking and actions.

Buyer personas

These are fictional representations of your archetypal clients based on the characteristics of your current and historical clients. These personas set out the demographics (age, gender, location, education etc), professional status (job title, seniority level etc), personality traits, objectives, pain points (challenges and frustrations), preferences, influences and purchasing processes.

Tactical elements

Logo

Your logo, or brand beacon, is arguably the most-important feature of your guidelines. Describe the design details of your logo, define its usage by internal and external publishers, include visuals of all its variants, and list the things to avoid.

Colours

Your colour palette feeds into every piece of visual content created, from your adverts to websites. As well as your primary colours, there may also be secondary, tertiary and neutral colours which permit variety and creativity in designs without straying from your brand.

Fonts

Your typography is made up of primary and secondary fonts with a combination of serifs and weights for different use cases, for instance headings and emphasis. Dictating a single font only can be limiting. Legibility is crucial to your font decision. As well as being visually appealing, it must be easy to read. Apply these fonts in all documents throughout your firm – letters, brochures, presentations, agreements, reports, whatever.

Imagery

Approved images, custom-made illustrations, pre-designed icons, recommended photographic styles and personalised symbols are great additions to your guidelines as they demonstrate what to use and what not to use. As it’s said ‘a picture paints a thousand words’, their omission is somewhat neglectful.

Tone and voice

Your brand has a distinct personality – the culmination of the aforementioned. As such, you’ll want your brand ambassadors to write and speak in the relevant and consistent tone of voice. In your guidelines, detail your messaging, consider a mini glossary of vocabulary, define the tone to be adopted across your various platforms and present some examples by way of illustration.

And there’s more

By following our advice, you’ve got the basis of a robust set of brand guidelines providing the information, tools and standards needed for brand consistency visually, orally and in writing, thereby sculpting its perception accurately among your stakeholders.

There are additional components to bear in mind for possible inclusion, these being your elevator pitch, image size guide, dos and don’ts, and positioning statement reinforced by client clients and useful links.

Your brand guidelines are never static. They constantly change and evolve as your business changes and evolves. So, begin by picking from the above, or use in their entirety, then review regularly to capture adjustments and flex accordingly. At review time, take into account any extra ingredients from these nice-to-have suggestions.

Why do we care about brand guidelines?

If you’re wondering what dedicated developers, trainers and consultants for the legal market have to do with brand guidelines, let’s clarify… two of our popular services are customising your Microsoft 365 environment and training users on the Microsoft 365 suite of products.

Microsoft 365 is part of your law firm’s technology ecosystem alongside other core applications such as your practice management and legal accounting system.

With customisation, your brand is placed front and centre, from configuration to templates, and everything in between. Visit iosl.co.uk/customisation-services.

With training, your employees become super users of Microsoft 365, thereby acting as your brand champions. From embedding procedures in your culture, to upskilling on Microsoft’s solutions, learn to do more with the brand-centric, client-pleasing features at your fingertips. Visit iosl.co.uk/training-services.

In fact, we care so much about branding, we’ve got a back catalogue of tricks to share. Browse ‘How important is your brand?’, ‘Microsoft customised ribbons: The benefits explained’, ‘Three benefits of brand consistent documents’ and ‘What does your font say about your brand?’ for starters.

Fancy some key takeaways and top tips?

• Walk your own path. Take on board these suggestions for producing brand guidelines but make it personal. These considerations and subject matter ideas aren’t for everyone. Be guided only – not restricted.

• Make it a team effort. Silo, solitary working is never going to achieve the best results. Cooperate and collaborate with colleagues across your business. They’re all agents of your brand.

• Review (at least) annually and refine. If any of your brand fundamentals have shifted or transformed, reflect this in your guidelines. It’s a ‘living’ document.

• Circulate far and wide. As you’ve invested time and effort into brand guidelines, reap the rewards by sharing with relevant internal and external people to protect your brand.

• Aid, don’t stilt, creativity. Being too prescriptive can be oppressive. Write in a way that your brand is conserved but creativity in copywriting and graphic design isn’t restrained.

• Learn from successful brands. Get hold of brand guidelines from companies you admire and respect. Typically, you’ll locate these guidelines on the business’s website.

• Connect branding to your strategies. Align your corporate strategy to your marketing strategy to your branding strategy. Utilise the valuable lessons and knowledge from your brand guidelines activity in marketing projects and watch your brand really pop.

• Engage with experts. To ease the pressure on your own resources and tap into skillsets missing in-house, reach out to suppliers like Integrated Office Solutions. Our Microsoft 365 services are a great place to start with your branding or rebranding campaigns.