How to Prepare a Brand Guideline, Part-1

A brand guideline is a set of identity and style standards that maintain your brand’s visual, ideological consistency across various touchpoints. 

When you stay true to the brand guidelines, you achieve:

• Improved brand-to-consumer communication 
• Consistency in content creation 
• Enhanced reputation and market recognition 

In this blog, we discuss the method to prepare a brand guideline template for your business. 

1. Understand your Mission, Vision, and USP

To formulate the perfect brand guidelines, understand your brand’s personality. What’s your purpose? What’s your mission statement? Analyze your day-to-day activities to get a descriptive idea of your brand’s approach. 

Be dead clear with the problems you want to solve and the changes you want to introduce. To set the tone for brand consistency, write down a set of adjectives that incline with your vision. They define your purpose and provide meaning to your existence. 

Your USPs differentiate you from the rest of the competition. What pain-points does your venture address? How are they any different? Include them in the brand guideline to ensure that you stick to your goals and follow your core values. 

2. Perform in-depth Market Research 

Explore the competitive landscape to know the products that are your direct competition. Understand their sales process, collect consumer feedback, and mention the best ones in your brand guidelines.

You can get data from various social media platforms. Evaluate the consumer’s opinion of your competitors and prepare a brand guideline that matches their demands.

A market research section is critical for any brand guideline template because it always pushes you to stay ahead of your competition. It’s of great help during the rebranding phase as well. 

3. Prepare your Buyer Personas 

It’s imperative to know who you’re serving to foster appealing offerings. You can define the “Who” through a buyer persona. Any change that you introduce in your business must incline with your target audience and their interests.

Brand guidelines that comprise detailed buyer personas always stay on the right track. Avoid generalization of data and be thoroughly specific with the buyer’s information. Know your consumer demographics because you can’t be everything to everyone. 

4. Establish a Brand Voice

What’s your mantra for customer engagement? Do you prefer plain English or you like fancy words? You can establish a brand voice only after you define the mannerism of brand communication.

Once decided, be consistent with it across all channels. If you use a corporate tone on one social media platform and share memes on another, it’s a fundamental contradiction. 

Include examples of the preferred brand tone and voice in the brand guideline template to ensure all team members are on the same page. Sample Emails, social media posts, etc., are the best ones to keep in the guidelines. 

5. Organize the Brand Guidelines 

After you’re done preparing the brand guidelines, it’s time to compile them in one document. The same doc can be used as a print copy and a digital media file too. Follow your brand guidelines when you design the final document that’s about to go public. 

Modify it separately for your consumers and your business members. The purpose of brand guidelines is to maintain brand consistency. Therefore, prepare the deliverable document that satisfies all the benchmarks which you set previously. 

To Conclude 

A brand guideline helps you to strengthen your brand’s identity and its emotional persona. You define your mission and USPs and follow it with in-depth market research.

Buyer personas help you identify your audience demographics. To maintain brand consistency across all channels, always include brand voice in the brand guideline template. Create an outline to organize the defined guidelines to achieve the brand guideline document. 

We’ll cover five more aspects that’ll help you prepare your brand’s guidelines in Part-2 of the series.

What’s your take on brand guidelines and its importance? Share your views in the comments section? To write a Guest Post for RedAlkemi, click here.