Why your brand needs a style guide

To resonate strongly with your audience, it is essential that your branding is consistent and sets the right impression.

By creating a sense of cohesion in everything your business communicates, your audience is more likely to identify with your brand. A great way to establish brand consistency is to create a style guide.

What is a style guide?
A style guide is a set of guidelines used to ensure that everything your business communicates is relevant and related to your organisational goals. It acts as a referencing tool to help your business stay on brand, focusing on content that upholds the values and objectives that sets your company apart from competitors.

How can a style guide help your business?
A style guide is a great way to keep consistency in your content and design. This is vital in maintaining your brands visual identity. Over time, this identity creates a relationship with your audience, instilling integrity, brand awareness, and ultimately brand loyalty.

What should be in your style guide?

Brand voice
Your brand voice should be easily described in 3 words. Let’s say your brand voice is passionate, enthusiastic and innovative. From here, you can elaborate on each of these. For example, passionate could extend further to driven, action-orientated and expressive. Now you can think about what is your business passionate about? How can you communicate this to your audience?

Let’s say you own a coffee shop that is passionate about the environment and reducing waste. Your action could be to use bio-degradable cups and promote the use of reusable coffee mugs. You then take this to social media, promoting photos of your coffee shop taking on this initiative with the hashtag #zerowaste. You could go one step further and write a blog post about the harmful effects of using plastic coffee cups.

Colour
Using a style guide to introduce a colour palette for your brand encourages consistency across all communications and content. When your audience sees these colours, they will come to recognise and recall your brand. While it may not seem of priority to designate a colour theme, these colours will come to feature on advertisements, uniforms, social media, your website, in-store merchandising, fonts and logos. Studies have shown different colours provoke different emotions. If your business doesn’t already have a colour palette, do your research and see how you can use colours to communicate to your audience.

Font
Fonts are similar to colour, as they lend themselves to becoming visual cues for your audience. Once you choose a font you feel is appropriate for your business, it should remain consistent throughout all your content.

Now that you have your style guide, creating a cohesive social media strategy for your brand is easy. Make sure your posts use language that sticks to your brand voice, all branded content follows the colour theme and post content relevant to your business and interest of your key audiences. By doing so, the online identity of your brand is much more likely engage and resonate with audiences.

Want to build a strong personal brand? Download this free action sheet today!

Sydney Social Media and Public Relations Agency, CP Communications blends cutting edge offline and online PR and social media to help you gain a competitive advantage. Contact us today. For more great tips visit our website www.cpcommunications.com.au.