- The world's most recognizable brands
use this one document to build credibility and trust.
That document is a brand style guide.
A brand style guide is a foundational document
for your brand and becomes incredibly helpful
as your business scales.
It helps you define your brand's identity
so that you can create consistent content
for your potential customers.
And for anyone who's just getting started,
think of your brand style guide as a rule book
for all of your marketing and communications materials.
In this video, I'm gonna outline exactly
how to create your own brand style guide
and provide you with some examples and tools to get started.
Every great brand style guide will have two components.
First, a brand overview that defines your audience,
company mission, and messaging.
Second, a visual foundation that defines your logos,
colors, fonts, and creative elements.
Let's get started.
To help us, I'm going to use a brand style guide template.
When creating your brand overview,
you first need to have a brand purpose, or mission statement
that explains why your brand exists in the world.
Think about the value that you bring
to your potential customers.
For example, let's look at Google.
Our mission is to organize the world's information
and make it universally accessible and useful.
This is a great example to follow
because the mission statement is short and to the point
but it lets us know that Google's goal
is always to serve the user.
Some other pieces of information
that you can include under this section
are things like your brand origin,
promise, values, and personality.
Within the template,
you'll see examples to help you draft your own copy.
These details will help anyone on your team
understand how to write for your brand.
For example, if you were creating content for Nike,
it would be inspirational.
Apple would be innovative, and Mercedes would ooze luxury.
These brands establish their tone and personality early on
so that all the content they create would be aligned.
Google does a great job of listing out their brand's values
so that when it comes to their content,
everyone is on the same page about striving for the best
and always putting their users first.
The second component of a great brand style guide
are the visual guidelines.
This is going to be things like your logo,
color palette, font, photography, and typography.
It's a lot to define, but our template
will help you identify each creative element.
First, let's define your brand color palette.
You can customize it using the color wheel.
You can also define if it's a primary
or secondary color for your brand.
This will help people know when to use the color
in the content that they develop.
Your logo and colors are crucial for brand recognition,
so make sure to define your official colors and usage.
One of my favorite examples of this
is found in the Twitter brand style guide.
Their brand style guide defines
how their logo should be displayed
and even defines which colors are allowed to be used.
Once you define your logo and colors,
you can move on to selecting your font.
To add variation, your company may have a primary font
which is going to be
the most recognizable and frequently used,
and a secondary font, which you can use to reflect
the different tones of your brand across multiple channels.
Some fonts work well in print
but don't look so great on screen
so if your brand exists mostly online,
make sure to choose fonts and font sizes
that are optimized for digital.
Typography can distinguish your brand from the crowd
and play a major role in your company's identity.
For these reasons
you may even want to create your own custom font.
Now let's move on to selecting your photography.
Most content you create will include images.
Filling out this section in detail will help tremendously
when you're working with any agencies or photographers.
Here you can fill out details on your lighting, colors,
moods you wanna capture, et cetera.
For HubSpot, our content includes a lot of action shots,
smiles, and our signature color orange.
I would recommend creating a library filled with images
that you can have as inspo for all your projects,
or you can even add extra slides in this template
and create your own mood board
that explains exactly who your brand is
and the types of images that you want to create.
If you scroll down to the last slide,
you'll see that we saved it for you
to add anything extra that we may have missed.
I would recommend using it to include information
on your buyer persona.
This outlines details of your ideal customer.
Writing your customer's job, age, gender,
and any challenges they have
that your brand can solve will be a great reminder
on who you serve when creating your content.
This template includes slides that go over
many different elements that you can include
in your brand style guide and the best part is
you can continue adding onto this document
as your brand grows and evolves.
Make sure to download this free template,
I'll have it linked down below.
Thank you guys so much for watching
and I'll see you next time.
- I can't find this client info.
- Have you heard of HubSpot?
HubSpot is a CRM platform
so it shares its data across every application.
Every team can stay aligned.
No out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases.
HubSpot, grow better.
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