Part Two: Brand Style Guides
In Part One of our Guide to Keeping Your Brand Consistent Across Platforms, we discussed setting up a specific guide that outlines your brand’s standards. In order to ensure that your brand is consistent across channels, it’s important to create a style guide. Once complete, you can refer to it when looking at your content strategy for each platform.
Your style guide will consist of personality, appearance and hobby traits.
When you begin to think of a brand as an individual, you can make sense of how that individual might act – not only within a digital context, but in reality. Build a brand persona and make sure it can be seen across all platforms.
This is the part of our guide where you’ll need a pen and paper (or a blank Word Doc) to jot down notes for your brand style guide.
Brand Personality
Start by listing out the characteristics that define and shape your brand’s personality.
- Is it funny, formal or a little bit of both?
- Is it a trendsetter or is it someone who waits to see if others take part in the latest trend?
- What makes your brand’s personality unique?
During this exercise, you may discover your brand personality has several distinctive characteristics worth listing. So spend some time really thinking about it.
Appearance
Make sure that your brand looks the same across channels. Answer the following questions:
- What does your brand look like? (i.e. luxurious, casual, neat, nerdy…etc)
- What colors come to mind when thinking about it?
Hobbies
This portion of your brand style guide will vary dramatically across industries. We’ve condensed it down to a single question.
What does your brand like to do?
- List out anything that your brand does that makes it unique.
Is your brand consistent across platforms? Compare your brand’s style guide to the current content calendars to find out if your current strategy is working the brand.
Check out Part Three of our series to learn how to create content calendars.
