Creating a comprehensive brand guide is the best way to achieve being consistent across all digital and print expressions of your brand. Your brand guide should be the foundation on which your whole brand is built. Once you have developed a branding guide you have to implement it consistently to receive the best use from your guide.

Now let’s take your brand guide and use it to shape how your enterprise is expressed! We have 4 steps to aid in the total implementation of your brand guide:

Share it

• Make your branding guide accessible to all your internal employees and keep a digital or paper version to distribute to design or print partners. Dropbox or Google Drive are easy places to share a digital version of your brand guide both externally and internally.
• Inform everyone of the importance of the brand guide and following its guidelines.
• Sometimes, you can lose consistency with branding when your company makes internal changes. We recommend including the brand guide in the onboarding process to ensure that all team members understand the brand guidelines.

Expand it

• The template we provided is a fantastic start, but to really take advantage of what a branding guide can do, you need to add more to it. Some examples of additional elements to include in your brand guide are:

1. Graphic Samples
2. Mood Board
3. Idea Customer
4. Brand Voice

• You might even need to have mini brand guides that branch off from your main guide for specific product lines or services.
• Be sure to refer back to step one and share any updated brand guides with your employees and external partners so that everyone stays on the same page.

Use it…

• When creating any digital post or print graphic, always refer to the brand guide to ensure they are aligned.
• Make sure that your colors, logo usage, and typography choices are all within the branding guidelines. These are 3 of the most important aspects of maintaining a consistent visual brand.
• When writing copy for print or digital media, keep your brand voice in mind to avoid confusing customers.

Or Lose it

• If you don’t follow these steps of implementation, your brand guide will be useless to you. It can only help you if you follow it, so use it or lose it (and potential customers).

Pro tip: Have someone be a “gatekeeper” who checks all content before it is printed or published to ensure that the brand guide is being followed.

Now that you understand the importance of a brand guide and how to implement it both inside and outside your company. Go move mountains!

Implementing a brand guide can be difficult if you don't have the resources to dedicate to it. Schedule a free consultation with NWA Brand.