Invest in Brand Guidelines for Consistent Execution

 Invest in brand guidelines for a consistent execution across all teams.

Branding “fails” often happen because of a lack of a clear guidelines being used. A lack of clear guidelines can result in inconsistencies or miscommunications among your content team. If you have a marketing team, they may already have brand guidelines. If they do you should request a copy to use.

Keeping some guidelines or a checklist can make keeping your brand consistent a lot easier and make it a lot more professional. You should still invest your time in creating brand guidelines even if it is just you and you don’t have a team.

Brand Guidelines are a set of standards that defines your company’s branding. Ideally they should reference your values, tone, logo usage, colours, visuals, word usage, point of view, and anything else you can think of that contributes to your brand, your values and your voice.

The guidelines will help you ensure that your published content is consistent and recognisable. Here are a collection of resources to help you create your very own brand guidelines.

• A Complete Process for Developing a Content Style Guide [GatherContent]
• 6 Steps to creating your Content Marketing Style Guide [CMI]
• Creating a Brand Style Guide [PluralSight]
• 36 Great Brand Guidelines Examples [Content Harmony]
• Example: Mailchimp Content Style Guide [Mailchimp]
• How to Craft a Brand Manifesto [Guide + Examples] [hubspot]