How To Create Simple Brand Guidelines For Your Online Presence

Your brand says a lot about your business. It sends a message to your audience about who you are, what you do and what your business stands for. It will also allow consumers to differentiate your offering to that of competitors too.

Online branding is a great way to get more exposure for your business. However, it must remain consistent in order to get your message across consistently and make your online presence known. And to be consistent, you want to lay down some brand guidelines.

Start With The Basics

When it comes to laying down the law for your brand guidelines, you want to start with the basics. Make sure you fully understand your market so that you can begin to decide on what sort of branding is right for your business and your audience.

Focus on analyzing your audience, proposition, competition, mission and personality. The more you know about your business and understand about the market, the easier it will be to create your brand and brand guidelines.

Logo

An obvious aspect to include in your brand guidelines is your logo design. This should detail logo placement on any designs or content that are created to go online, as well as any logo variations you might have and when they should be used.

For example, when it comes to social media, you might have a logo variation for smaller screens. Therefore, you want to instruct how to use your logo across a range of devices (e.g. tablets or laptops).

Brand Typography

You also want to document your brand typography in your brand guidelines. Having a specific font will help you to develop your brand identity and make your online content more memorable.

Your guideline should include the font to be used within your logo, as well as headlines/headings, sub-headings and paragraphs. It’s also important to include what sizes your font should be used at and where they can be accessed.

Brand Colors

While you want to remain consistent in your branding, it’s important you still allow for some flexibility in order to switch up your content. So, it’s important to define primary brand colors and secondary brand colors in your guidelines.

According to Canva.com, 85% of consumers believe that color is the biggest motivator to choose a particular product. Therefore, it’s important to choose a memorable color palette that’s right for your brand.

Social Media

A big part of online marketing is of course social media. If your business has dedicated social media pages on different platforms, then it’s crucial to include this in your brand guidelines.

For example, your logo may be condensed or a variation of it might be used to fit within social media dimensions for things such as headers or profile pictures.

Putting It All Together

Once you’ve decided the different areas of branding to include in your guidelines, it’s time to put together a document that can be accessed by and shared with everyone in your business. It’s crucial that your document is simple, precise and easily understood, to allow anyone in the business to use appropriate branding.