The Case for Digital Brand Guidelines
In a world where we’re constantly inundated with new information, products, and services, creating a recognizable brand that you and your team can stand behind is essential. Audiences are adept at sensing authenticity and are quick to judge a business's value based on it. So, once your brand is established, you need to clearly and consistently integrate it with every facet of your company.
Q. How can you keep the brand at the forefront of business operations when there are so many other priorities?
A. Use a digital brand guide.
Branding guides are a map of your company’s marketing assets. Most companies have invested significant time and effort into creating a distinctive name, eye-catching logo, and impactful mission, vision, and value statements. Protecting that corporate identity with a brand style guide is an easy win that communicates core messaging and creates an invaluable resource for internal and external parties.
Of course, not all brand guidelines are created equal. For a long time, we delivered them as PDF reference decks. It got the job done but came with some inherent inconveniences, like having to remake the entire document for every update (which in turn created version control issues) and needing to communicate that update to all end users. Plus, the handoff felt a bit clunky and lackluster. Much like upgrading paper maps to a GPS app, digitizing our brand guidelines changed everything for the better.
Digital, Dynamic, and On-Demand
Tailfeather now uses Corebook as a platform to create custom, web-based digital brand books for our clients. This next-level resource solves the need for ease by hosting brand-related strategic direction and all of a company’s brand assets in one convenient online location. The ability to make frequent updates and fluidly relay relevant changes to everyone is a crucial part of the process and a big part of what excites us so much about this product.
Further, the guidelines themselves are visually branded in a customized digital environment. Our tool integrates with your company’s look and feel while housing marketing assets for direct download (e.g., logos, fonts, letterhead). This comprehensive brand guide is easy to navigate and share with employees, media, and interested third parties, keeping everyone on the same page with your brand front and center.
Audience First Upgrade
Consider, for a moment, a new real estate firm. They come to us for support with naming, logo, identity, and tone of voice. After working with them to develop relevant materials through our iterative process, we deliver their final assets with application instructions through a custom digital brand guide. This way, it’s easy for their team to access and understand how to use the new brand, creating a unified image and approach from the start.
Digital brand guidelines can also be helpful for recruitment, as they demonstrate a firm’s forward-thinking strategy and willingness to invest in its identity and growth. This simple tool goes beyond organizing brand assets and speaks to the functionality and intentionality of the company itself. Including mission, vision, and value statements in your digital brand guide will emphasize this to great effect, showing current and potential hires that you know what you stand for and have a plan for the future.
One of Haystack’s core tenets is Audience First. We believe content is only as good as its ability to reach and influence the perceptions or behaviors of a target audience, and that’s true even when the audience is internal. Digital brand guidelines make sharing your message and brand assets easier, more efficient, and more effective than ever.
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