Brand Style Guidelines: Why Every Business Needs One and How to Start

Your business needs to be in constant communication with your customers, employees, and other stakeholders. While each message will be different, a brand style guide ensures that communication is confident with your business. Without such a guide, you will likely end up confused or send messages that seem to be from two different companies.

What Is a Brand Style Guide?

A brand style guide can be described as a roadmap that your business follows in creating and editing content. It puts in place rules that define how the company should be presented to the world. Details such as content tone and voice are clearly highlighted, as well as any unique formatting and spelling.

As an integral tool in product marketing strategy, anyone who regularly creates content for brands needs a style guide, including marketers, social media managers, email marketers, and graphic designers. This is not just a list of rules, but a defined resource that ensures everyone in the company represents the brand clearly to the customers.

Why Your Business Needs a Brand Style Guide

Many elements are involved in creating on-brand content. A brand style guide serves as a hardy reference that guides your writers and editors to make sure your business appears consistent across channels. This translates to several benefits:

• Effective Brand Voice Communication: A brand style guide keeps your business voice clear across the board. Whether your business is direct and informative or casual and friendly, having a guide ensures that every content maintains the same tone of voice.
• Achieve Brand Consistency: By keeping track of essential style rules that define your business, your writers and editors do not have to reinvent a new approach every time they produce new content. They have a fixed checklist to keep everything consistent at all times.
• Fosters a Cohesive Team: Your writers and editors, both in-house and freelancers understand how to deliver your brand voice the best. This cohesiveness prevents your business communication from sounding like a random collection of different writers.
• Cultivates Connection and Respect: A style guide ensures that you stay on-brand even beyond addressing your target audience. By harnessing inclusive language, you can cultivate meaningful connections with your readers, making them feel valued and heard.
• Improved Overall Organizational Efficiency: A style guide can improve efficiency by reducing the amount of time spent correcting mistakes related to grammar, formatting, tone, and spelling. Instead, all efforts are directed toward publishing content that is engaging to the reader.

How to Create a Brand Style Guide

Your brand style guide provides a clear outline to follow whenever you are certain content for your business. It can define industry-specific terms, buyer personas, key content outlines, company outlines, and more.

Brand Style Guidelines

The first component of a brand style guide is the specific guidelines that content creators need to follow. It may also include brand-specific elements that will enforce the unique voice and style of your brand. The main components added to the guideline include:

• Capitalization
• Formatting
• Grammar and punctuation
• Brevity rules
• Readability level
• Search engine optimization (SEO)

Official Style Expectations

Include all the important rules you want to be followed in content creation to improve performance. For instance, you may want that all words in the heading capitalized. Depending on the nature of your business, you can also adopt a standard style guide such as Chicago or AP styles.

Brand-Specific Words and Names

The purpose of pointing out your brand name and words is to make sure they are spelled accurately. You want to make sure they are capitalized properly or added a hyphen in the right place. For instance, these brands define themselves by how they format their names:

• Lyft – Unique spelling
• FedEx – Creative abbreviation
• Apple iPhone – Specific capitalization

Brand Voice

Your brand’s voice and tone define the ideal approach and message for sharing information. Some brands choose a casual tone on social media but take on a more formal approach to blog posts. Whether you choose a humorous or serious tone, make sure it resonates with a target audience.

Design Guidelines

Another component of a brand style guide is visual guidelines. This is particularly useful for content creators to make sure they create visuals that align with your brand identity. They can specify logo design, incorporate images into written content, placement to spacing rules, and more. It may also include a core color palette, graphic brand elements, and typography guidelines.

 

Get Started with a Ready Brand Style Guide

If you often create written and visual content for your brand, you need a style guide. Not only does it help to ensure brand consistency, but also allows for effective communication with your audience. Get yourself a ready brand style guide today with Nvent Marketing and boost your marketing efforts. With our digital marketing services, your brand is poised to improve performance and maintain a strong relationship with your target audience.