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The Importance of Maintaining Brand Standards
Effective brand development is crucial for your business. It helps customers and prospects recognize your company, and it’s critical for building a relationship with them, so when it comes time to make a purchase, they choose you instead of your competition. The key for fostering this recognition and trust is consistency. And the key for consistency is creating and abiding by specific brand standards.
What are brand standards?
Your company's brand standards are essentially the guidelines that you follow when it comes to all your marketing and sales materials, website, and customer communications. It’s important that those guidelines cover not only visual aspects of your brand, like colors, fonts, logos, and typography, but also your voice, how you word things, and, generally, how you present who you are to the world.
Brand development and sticking to defined brand standards creates a consistent image, helps your business look professional, and differentiates you from other similar companies.
Why branding strategies are important
Nowadays, before people choose to buy from or do business with a company, they do research to see what it’s all about. They search for you on Google, look at your website, find you on social media, and maybe join an email list. The advantages of coherent brand development and adhering to brand standards are:
People will recognize your company – If you don’t have consistent branding, then people searching for you may not even realize that your website, social media, or other channels are all the same company. But if you have strong branding for your business, people will naturally take note of it much more than they would a business without it. A company that doesn’t really have any cohesive branding isn’t going to stay in someone’s mind for very long.
Cultivate trust – Building an audience and customer base that believes what you say about your products and trusts in their quality and effectiveness is invaluable for your business. Maintaining brand standards helps you show customers and prospects that you’re an established, credible company that cares about and pays attention to the little details.
Make your advertising more effective – When you research and build your different branding strategies, you should be saying and presenting things the way your customers want to see and hear them. By enforcing and sticking to standards, you can be sure that your messaging across all the different channels, from your website to your social posts, is positioned and written the correct way. The result is that your advertising will be more effective.
Create loyal customers – With effective brand development, you can give your company more of a human side, which will help customers and prospects feel more connected to you. By building a relationship with them, they are more likely to remain your customers over the long term.
Create a brand guide
To ensure your employees understand and follow your standards, you should outline all of them in what’s called a brand guide. It will clearly explain all the different visual, voice, and identity aspects of your company and your branding strategies. Anyone at your company can look at the guide to see which primary and secondary colors to use, how to display the logo correctly, which fonts to choose, as well as what types of words and ideas to emphasize in sales, marketing, and advertising materials.
A well done brand guide will ensure your brand standards are followed, and you’ll reap all the benefits for an effective brand!
If you have any questions about brand development, branding strategies, or creating a brand guide, contact our team today!