Branding guidelines are not only for brand new companies. They're also useful for existing companies that need to refresh their branding and bring it in line with the latest trends. Whether you're hiring a branding agency or doing it yourself, there are many benefits to using branding guidelines.
Here are five of them:
Having clear branding guidelines means your employees can create marketing materials that match your company's identity without sacrificing creativity or quality. Employees who don't know what the brand identity is will be able to use these branding standards as a guide and create marketing materials with consistency across all platforms such as social media channels, websites, presentations, etc.
Branding guidelines protect you from potential lawsuits by ensuring everything you create, whether it photographs for your website or social media posts, is consistent with branding.
Branding guidelines can help you plan branding projects more effectively by helping you figure out where branding money could be best used to reach new customers. For example, determining what products need branding first and what ones may not require branding at all can help you put branding dollars to work in the most effective ways.
Creating branding guidelines can be a risk management strategy if your branding project is larger and involves new branding elements such as color, fonts, logos, and taglines that may not be popular with everyone. Having clear branding guidelines will protect you from any negative feedback when rolling out branding changes.
Developing branding guidelines can be a huge brand management time-saver. You won't have to worry about whether social media images are consistent with the branding, as employees will already know what branding elements they should be used for social media posts or website photos etc. Also, if clients complain that branding is inconsistent throughout your branding efforts, you'll know where branding went wrong.
Here is a summary of all the reasons:-
The bottom line is that branding guidelines are good for everyone and having branding guidelines in place will ensure consistency of branding across all marketing platforms while protecting you from potential lawsuits or negative feedback.
Branding guidelines can help even the smallest brands take control of their branding by ensuring branding is consistent across all platforms.
Do you have branding guidelines in place? Do branding guidelines help your branding efforts? If so, we'd love to hear more about it!