Does Your Brand Style Guide Set You Up For Digital Branding Success?
Nearly 80% of consumers report interacting with brands beyond using their products or services, according to Edelman’s 2023 Trust Barometer Report. Whether following their favorite brands on social media or engaging with brand content, people today prefer to peek behind the curtain before making a purchase. The same Edelman report found 59% of consumers say they’re more likely to make a purchase when they trust the brand, even if it’s more expensive than a competitor. In 2024, that percentage climbed to 63%. So what does this mean for businesses?
Clear, consistent brand marketing guidelines are more important than ever, as social media and digital platforms make it easier for consumers to interact directly with brands. Yet, brand digitalization considerations are often overlooked by brand style guides that haven’t kept up with the times. As your marketing and sales teams work together to promote your products and services, don’t forget a comprehensive brand style guide helps your company gain brand recognition by presenting a unified front across all platforms and locations—including your digital branding efforts. Inspire consumer confidence in your brand by empowering your team with a company style guide that breaks down how to tell your brand’s story authentically both out in the world and online.
What Are Brand Guidelines?
Brand marketing guidelines are essential to outline your voice, vibes and visuals for print and digital platforms like your website and social media. Using assets like your logo and brand name consistently encourages brand recognition. Ultimately, a company style guide establishes brand identity and how you relate to your audience.
How A Company Style Guide Enforces Consistent Branding Efforts In Print & Online
Even if you have multiple departments or locations directly communicating or interacting with consumers, a thorough brand style guide can help your team work together to infuse a consistent brand personality into your business while staying true to your identity and mission. The goal is to avoid inconsistent customer service or confusion surrounding what your brand does and who you are as a business because if your team can’t get that right, neither will your customers.
A company style guide might seem counterintuitive to inspiring creativity, but brand marketing guidelines can actually be an empowering tool for team members to know the parameters they’re allowed to operate in when representing your business. This is especially true for fast-paced digital branding efforts. Reducing uncertainty about what’s permitted allows for flexibility as your team navigates how to post on social media as your brand, how to write blogs as your brand, how to create videos as your brand and more brand digitalization considerations. Clarity inspires confidence for team members to embody your brand while still allowing for creativity and flair to make it their own.
Beyond benefitting your internal team, a company style guide can also help external parties, like news platforms and media, to share information about your brand accurately on their own channels. If you work with external partners, regularly share press releases or outsource marketing efforts to influencers, a public-facing brand style guide is an opportunity to clearly outline requirements for using your brand logo or otherwise representing your brand on print or via digital. Consistency across platforms, channels and partners protects your brand’s image and promotes a cohesive brand identity consumers can connect with no matter how they’re discovering your business.
Why Brand Consistency Is Important For Business
Whether you’re a B2B industry with a niche audience or a B2C business with wide consumer appeal, consistent branding breathes life into your business. Creating a distinct personality humanizes your brand and enables customers to trust and resonate with your products, services and overall mission.
For instance, if your business operates in a more technical, jargon-heavy industry, a consistent brand presence is key to ensuring your audience is able to understand your value. But taking a difficult subject and turning it into a compelling brand story takes time and planning. Instead of having to reinvent the wheel every time, established brand marketing guidelines can clarify common phrases, overall tone of voice, what to avoid and more tips to help both internal and external parties portray your brand at its best.
Even if you’re in a competitive industry selling popular consumer goods or services to the masses, brand consistency matters so users recognize the unique value your business provides compared to competitors. The last thing you want is to misrepresent your brand and fail to make an impression on your audience. Especially on digital platforms like your website or social media where all of your content is readily accessible via the web, inconsistencies can cause users to lose trust in your brand or fail to make an impression altogether. The more you can remind them of your strong brand identity, values and capabilities, the more likely you are to stand out amongst your competitors. To do so, you need to set the tone for your brand with a comprehensive company style guide and brand digitalization best practices covering the core digital branding and marketing components of your brand identity.
What Should A Brand Style Guide Include?
The goal is to make your brand’s style guide a go-to resource detailing how to use brand voice, messaging, logos, colors, typography and images consistently to create efficiencies for your team. With these key elements carefully laid out, your team should have everything they need to digitalize your brand and bring it to life.
How To Optimize Your Company Style Guide For Digital Branding
Once you’ve thought through the core elements of your brand’s style guide, consider what it will take to catch your digital branding up to speed. A lot of components will overlap with your overall brand strategy, but your presence will be stronger when you consider the implications of your brand marketing guidelines for the digital landscape, too. Core brand digitalization components to focus on include:
1. Enforce Brand Voice, Mission & Vision
No matter the size of your company, it never hurts to share guiding factors like your mission and vision far and wide. As part of your overall brand voice, your mission statement and company vision set the tone for who your business is, what you care about and how you address the needs of your audience. In the interconnected digital landscape, users have more ways than ever to find you. Whether they visit your website, check out your social media channels or watch your video content, they should be greeted with a consistent brand voice that speaks to your credibility. If your brand voice, mission and vision aren’t recognizable across platforms, users will have a hard time trusting your brand.
Another key consideration for brand digitalization is how you want your business to appear in search results when web users search for services in your industry. Make search engine optimization (SEO) a priority for your business and consider what keywords best represent your brand. Integrate relevant keywords your audience is searching for into your digital brand content to meet your audience where they’re at in search.
2. Consider Digital Logo Usage & Configurations
As the face of your business, your logo should always be prominently displayed and recognizable. This is especially true for logo usage on your website and across social media platforms, where logos are displayed via pixels. Depending on where users are interacting with your brand, your logo should be responsive across devices and platforms so it's clear and visible on desktop devices, mobile devices and throughout your social media profiles. Parameters to consider include logo size and spacing, pixelization, how the logo should appear on different colored backgrounds, whether there are acceptable variations to use and more guidance as you see fit. If you aim to share your brand style guide publicly with media personnel, business partners or other third parties, clear logo guidelines ensure the integrity of your logo and brand remain intact.
3. Make Your Color Palette Accessible
Consistent brand colors allow you to creatively market your brand while staying true to a defined palette people will recognize across both print and digital branding platforms. You don’t want to deviate too far from your brand colors when designing your website, but do take the extra step of ensuring the colors you’re using online are ADA-compliant. Colors online should have enough contrast from typography on the page so content is readable and accessible to a wide audience. Free tools like the WebAim Contrast Checker are a good starting point to compare different colors and how well they contrast with each other.
4. Ensure Easy-To-Read Typography
No brand style guide is complete without font selections to guide typography choices for your content. Typography defines the font family, style and size specifications for all of your headings and body copy as well as digital-specific elements like buttons and forms. One factor to look out for in digital typefaces is the “x height,” which represents the average height of lowercase letters used within a font family. Since the majority of copy online is written in lowercase, you need to be sure your digital branding uses a font that has an x height large enough for text to be clearly legible in body copy. As previously mentioned, typography must have appropriate contrast from the background color and be adequately sized to be ADA-compliant.
Keep it simple for your team and users reading your site by selecting no more than two to three fonts to use across heading tags and body copy. Clear, distinguished headings allow readers to skim content and quickly find what they need. For your website, creating distinct heading tags also makes it easier for search engines like Google to digest your content and rank it in search results for relevant user queries.
5. Create Consistent Images & Visual Elements
Because visual elements like images, icons or charts often catch a user’s eye first, incorporating a consistent style across design components is especially important for brand digitalization and cohesion. Establish company style guidance for photo sizing and treatment so all photos align with your overall branding, web design and digital marketing assets. File sizes should take into consideration your website’s ability to quickly load content for users. Massive files slow page speed significantly, so define a maximum file size for your team to follow when adding assets to your website. Typically once you get into files measuring in megabytes, your site will likely struggle to load.
Another guideline to be clear about is your brand’s stance on stock photography online. Users can spot a stock photo a mile away, so it may make your brand feel less genuine and credible if you rely solely on stock imagery to tell your brand’s story rather than original photos. Does your business allow stock photos within certain parameters, or do you only feature original content? For graphic design elements or iconography, include examples of acceptable styles and usage to enable seamless design.
Explore Brand Digitalization Basics For Your Brand Marketing Guidelines With Blue Compass
Businesses need a brand identity to stand out, but inconsistencies in branding make a business stand out for the wrong reasons. If your team isn’t on the same page about how to represent your brand online, potential customers aren’t going to feel confident putting their trust in your products and services. A consistent company brand style guide that incorporates digital branding considerations ensures everyone is on the same page presenting your brand in the best light. At Blue Compass, we work with brands ranging from Fortune 500 companies to family-owned businesses every day, strengthening their digital presence. Whether you’re starting brand marketing guidelines from scratch or need help with brand digitalization, get in touch with our talented creatives to learn more about building a brand identity that translates across the digital landscape.