All businesses understand that in order to stand out in the marketplace, they must have a distinctive brand. Customers will only pay more if they believe they are getting something in return, whether that something is higher quality, more status, or better value.
CEOs of Fortune 1000 businesses must consequently think strategically about digital branding. In today’s market, it’s not enough to have a hazy idea of what your brand is. You need something tangible that details the criteria so that everyone in the company is on the same page.
This is when digital branding standards come in handy. These guidelines state unequivocally what is authorized branding material and what does not. They contain specifics such as the exact shade of green used in your logo or the tone of voice marketers should use in public communications. The exercise’s fundamental goal is to achieve maximum consistency, allowing you to create trust and recognition. You want everyone in your company who engages with clients digitally — salespeople, marketing professionals, and designers – to be on the same page. Colleagues should be able to examine each other’s proposals and agree on what your brand is. Cross-channel branding that is consistent improves revenue by 23%.
Setting digital branding standards for your company
Fortunately, our top digital marketing company is here to assist. In the next section, we’ll go over the actions you’ll need to take to create a document that anybody can use to ensure brand consistency. Let’s get this party started.
Step 1: Determine Whether Your Brand Is Ready for Digital Branding Guidelines
The goal of digital branding standards is to enshrine brand principles in stone. They mention nothing about the brand’s substance. So, before you even start writing a branding guidelines document, make sure you have compelling and well-positioned brand concepts in place. Not every brand is ready for formalization.
Quality businesses establish their brands on four pillars.
- Values. Values are essential ideas that drive how individuals make decisions in businesses. High-quality brands make them memorable, so that every member of the team may use them in their job.
- Mission. Its company’s purpose is the reason for its formation, and your vision is where you want it to go in the future. Tesla’s objective is to create enticing electric automobiles. Its objective is to facilitate the transition to sustainable transportation. Can you tell the difference?
- The intended audience. Before you can design brand standards, you must first identify your target audience. Who are you marketing to on the internet? How do your products and services address the concerns of a certain group?
- Personality. Finally, well-planned brands consider their character carefully, generally by selecting three to five characteristics that represent the public persona they aim to establish. “Quirky,” “professional,” “honourable,” and “innovation” are all suitable single-word characteristics to consider.
Step 2: Gather Inspiration for Your Brand
After you’ve worked out the fundamentals of your brand, the following stage is to gather inspiration to fill out the specifics.
Regrettably, this stage of the procedure is not prescribed. There is no blueprint to follow. Your only option here is to seek creative inspiration, maybe by reviewing work examples from branding firms and utilizing it to build particular brand directions, which we will address in the next section.
Begin by considering what has previously worked for your organization. Perhaps you had a successful email campaign last year and want to learn from it. Or perhaps you’d want to discover a method to incorporate your basic principles into the visual images you utilize rather than hiding them in your “about” page.
Consider the features of other brands that you admire. Evaluating the brands of other firms allows you to present your own in a unique way. What additional services do you provide? What steps can you take to carve out a fresh niche in the industry? Perhaps you like how they employ colours or tone of voice in their messages. Consider how you could put your own spin on what they do.
A team of brand-focused individuals should be assembled as part of this approach. Creating brand standards is not really a one-man show. You want to bring as many people as possible along for the voyage so that everyone understands what you’re attempting to accomplish. Use brainstorming sessions to consider ideas you don’t like as well as those you do.
Step 3: Define All of Your Digital Brand’s Essential Elements
Digital brands are one of a few factors that may be controlled. To create branding rules, you must first define each of them.
Your Company’s Logo
You may have a basic sketch of your logo. However, maintaining consistency across digital platforms is more difficult than you would think. Customers’ perceptions of logos change based on how and where they perceive them in digital media.
As a result, businesses must explicitly specify basic brand characteristics to guarantee that their graphics remain consistent. Digital elements such as alignment, scaling, stretching, and resolution can all have an influence on the final design.
Include the following in your brand guidelines:
- Sizing information, including proportions, ratios, and minimum pixel dimensions.
- Guidelines for picture file formats (such as JPEG or PNG) and which formats operate best in specific environments.
- The absolute minimum and maximum amount of white space for your logo (as measured by pixels emanating from the top, button, left, and right of your design).
- The colours you choose for both white and black backgrounds, as well as specifics on color reversal.
- Information on the settings in which your logos should not be used, such as on specified third-party websites, landing pages, or forms of communication.
- Once you have this information, you may formalize it in your branding document.
Your Color Palette Is Acceptable
Using unauthorized colours is one of the most effective methods to generate brand confusion. As a result, you must develop a colour palette that you will utilize consistently throughout all of your messages.
Because of the variance in device quality, digital firms often have less control over colour palettes than their printed equivalents. Your colours will be seen by certain people on high-quality OLED screens (such as those you find on the latest smartphones). Others, on the other hand, will see you through washed-out TN panels that will not do your colours justice. Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do about it. Your best strategy is to develop a colour palette that is permitted inside a certain device.
The following digital colour codes must be included in your style guide:
- RGB
- HEX
These standards will allow colleagues to cross-check the colours they use across several tools and platforms. Some people use RGB, others HEX, and yet others use both. Giving customers universal codes allows them to stay loyal to your business in any digital setting, including WordPress, Adobe, email communications, and social media.
For digital marketing, most businesses use both a major and secondary brand palette. The primary palette is your essential brand image — think of the original Coca-Cola logo in red and white. The secondary palette is similar to the primary palette, but it may be used in other situations — see the black and white Coca-Cola logo for its diet variants.
Finally, examine the shades of the basic colours that you will allow and write down the RGB and HEX codes for them. Specify the colours you accept in various circumstances for smart brands.
Fonts You’ve Used
The typeface or font is an important aspect of branding. You should ideally establish various approved typefaces as well as how members of your company should utilize them.
The majority of brands structure their typeface rules as follows:
The brand determines the allowable characters that workers can use in headers and titles in this section. They may accept both upper and lower case, or only one.
Step 4: Design Your Guidance Layout
You should now have the raw data you need to fill out your digital branding standards. The next stage is to build the document’s framework so that it can be laid down logically and uniformly.
Step 5: Allow Your Brand To Grow
It is uncommon for a corporation to create a comprehensive digital branding guide that covers all aspects in a single pass. But perfection isn’t the objective here. Its purpose is to give a reference for individuals to utilize in order to brand more consistently.
After you’ve filled out all of the data, print it off and send a PDF copy to everyone in your company. Then, at regular intervals, host brainstorming sessions in which colleagues make recommendations to modify or add to the document over time.
Ready to begin
You should now have all of the fundamentals necessary to build web marketing guidelines for your organization. You may use it to stay faithful to your mission and minimize brand drift, which is a serious danger in large enterprises. If you’re stuck, our Kreationsite firm, one of the best marketing companies in the United States, can help.
