Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Ep. 9: Creating a Brand Guide for Your Small Business
22 Plays1 year ago
Join hosts Chloe and Darci as they chat about the value of having clear brand guidelines, even if you’re a business of one. Bringing together insights from the last 8 episodes, they lay out how to combine visual elements with key aspects of brand voice and messaging to create a comprehensive guide for keeping your brand identity clear, consistent, and easily accessible.
For small business owners who struggle with feeling confident in their brand presence, this episode is a can’t miss.
Follow Brand Jam:
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/brandjampod/
Threads https://www.threads.net/@brandjampod
Website https://www.brandjampod.com
Follow Chloe at Chloe Arielle Design:
Website https://www.chloearielle.com/
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/chloearielle
Threads https://www.threads.net/@chloearielle
Follow Darci at Sweet Tooth Creative
Website https://sweettoothcreative.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Brand Jam
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to Brand Jam, the brand strategy podcast for colorful and compassionate brands. I'm Darcy, the candy-fueled copywriter behind Sweet Tooth Creative. And I'm Chloe, owner of Conscious Design Studio, Chloe Ariel Design. On the show, we'll be talking about what it's really like to build a brand from scratch when you're a business of one.
Building a Sustainable Brand
00:00:20
Speaker
And how to find what works for you so you can create a brand that grows with your business without burning yourself out. At Brand Jam, we believe there's no one right way to be and embracing our differences enhances the experience for everyone. So if you're a fan of bold flavored branding and are trying to do business better, come hang out. We're so glad you're here.
Role and Importance of Brand Guides
00:00:40
Speaker
I think your brain will feel a little more clear once you get everything out of it and into some kind of document. You don't have to over stuff it. You don't have to overthink it. You're just trying to make something that really works for you.
00:00:58
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Brand Jam. Today, we are talking about brand guides. You may have heard them called brand style guides, brand guidelines. They're basically in what we're talking about. They're basically all the same thing. Yeah, basically, whatever you want to call it, we're talking about creating an internal document that outlines the different aspects of your brand's identity and how they should be used to present your brand to its audience.
00:01:22
Speaker
ah Brand guide is super helpful even when you're only a business of one to help keep everything consistent and always have something to reference back to and then maybe down the road if you ever want to hire a contractor or employees or even if you wanted to sell your business it makes it a lot easier to have everything in one place for other people to look at as well.
00:01:41
Speaker
yeah brand guides really help with consistency and of course that's huge if you have different people writing as your brand creating for your brand but it's still helpful when you're on your own even though like you may think you understand your brand if you're Just starting out, you're just building it. Like we've said before, it's easy to get pulled in a bunch of different directions and your brand is going to
Creating Simplified Brand Guides
00:02:04
Speaker
evolve. But if you have a brand guide that outlines things in a very clear way, it helps you be consistent as it's evolving instead of being scattered and kind of all over the place.
00:02:17
Speaker
Exactly the brand guide we're gonna talk about you making today it doesn't need to look like a professional brand style guide that you'd pay a designer a lot of money for or One of my brand voice guides that you know, I spend hours and hours creating for clients What we were talking about is just a very pared down internal document that you can come back to and kind of have a like an overview of your brand at the ready that you can look at for whenever you need a reminder. If you need inspiration, if you're you know going over your strategy and you're like, do I want to do that? Well, look at where you're at now. Does it make sense to make that change? consult your brand guide. And it doesn't have to be anything super fancy. Like it can literally you can find a Canva template, you can make your own Canva template, you can do it in a Google Doc, whatever works for you. We don't want you to get hung up on the format of it. Just having it exist is the goal. Yeah. I mean, to some extent we do, you want it to be scannable. You don't want to overstuff it because it is designed to be quick, like a vaster way to like taking your brand, then going back through everything you've ever made. But yeah, we definitely don't want you getting hung up on like how it would look to someone that's not you. That's not who it's for right now. Don't stress about it. Right.
00:03:36
Speaker
and This doesn't have to be in a museum. Right now, it's for your eyes only. Yeah, it's internal. Your you know audience isn't going to be judging you on it. You're the only one that needs to use it.
Integrating Brand Voice into Guides
00:03:45
Speaker
So if it works for you, then it's doing its job. So however you decide to create it, then, Chloe, what do we want them to do with it? Basically, whenever you sit down to design or write something, just quickly glance over it and that can immediately like put you into your brand's aesthetic, your voice.
00:04:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's also a great thing to consult when you're stuck or need inspiration, just kind of a way to go back to it it kind of becomes your brand's home base. Like I i love it for what we mentioned about getting into your brand's voice like really quickly or getting into the like aesthetic if you're sitting down to design it's just a much faster way than trying to be like oh what do i do i don't know it just works really well for my brain but it also works really well when i'm like you know i just i'm feeling blood but i need to post something today or you know i the times you're just not.
00:04:44
Speaker
like you need a little push, sometimes lancing over your brand guide is all you need to kind of get the creative juices flowing. So I love it for that. Yeah, I mean, when I'm designing for like other businesses, if they have a brand guide, it's always probably helpful. And it's the first place I go when I'm starting to design to look for the inspiration to immediately understand, you know, what their brand looks like.
00:05:05
Speaker
really helpful. Yeah, as a copywriter, they're invaluable to me. i Like most, unfortunately, brand voice guides tend to get kind of the shaft compared to the visual brand guides. um Sometimes I get lucky and a client will have both, like there will be voice elements in their brand style guide, but I don't meet many new brands that have have been able to like build out a brand voice guide for them.
00:05:32
Speaker
That's fine. I love doing it. I actually started creating them for myself. Like they it they it became part of my client work and I didn't necessarily like share it with the client. But when I was trying to write different copy for different brands on the same day, I it would just take me.
00:05:49
Speaker
a while to like get into the voice and you got to figure out a way around that as a copywriter. The way I figured out was to make little mini brand voice guides for each client and from there it became something that I offered and you know at this point now I think it has like 22 different facets of the brand's voice but the best thing about them is that they're a shortcut for me.
Key Elements of Brand Guides
00:06:10
Speaker
to be able to I can go from writing about one client in one industry to the next client in a completely different industry with a completely different voice and I can shift like that. So I love them as just like this like shortcut to immersing yourself in the brand.
00:06:26
Speaker
All right, so Chloe, what are we putting in it? A lot of the things that are going to be in your brand guides we have been touching on throughout this whole season. So we're going to kind of tie everything together with this episode. Love that. Don't do new work if you have old work that can serve the purpose.
00:06:46
Speaker
Okay, so going all the way back to episode one, our day one brand basics from the visual side, things they want you to have is a basic color palette, one to two fonts, and then your basic visual aesthetic. Right. And your communications day one brand basics were brand position, key messages, and core values. Now, some of these things have evolved since, you know, that point where you're like, you're on day one of your brand.
00:07:13
Speaker
you know what you had then might not be what you have now and that's fine we want that um but you don't need to include the whole evolution whatever it is currently is what we want you to have like we went deeper on core values in episode six we went deeper on key messages in episode seven if you expanded on those things from where you were at on day one great but the most up-to-date version in the brand guide we're talking about making now And in episode four, we talked about accessibility. I would recommend including an accessibility guideline in your brand guidelines. Starting with the color palette is really important. So basically running all of your colors through a color contrast checker and noting which color combinations of text backgrounds can work together, which ones cannot, which ones can only be used for accent elements, things like that to make sure that when you go to create content,
00:08:07
Speaker
you know exactly which colors you can use together and have a more cohesive time. ah Yeah, definitely put a cheat sheet for that in there. Don't be like me and just constantly having to check it again and again. he Yeah, and if you haven't, go back and listen to episode four and we talk a lot more about it there as well.
00:08:27
Speaker
Yeah, if if we lost you a little bit, it we go more in depth in it in episode four. But in that episode, Chloe blew my mind and was like, yeah, there's a you can run them all together and like it'll create it for you. I like painstakingly went through and created my own like cheat sheet. And she's like, oh, there's an app for that.
Understanding Brand Voice vs. Tone
00:08:45
Speaker
I was like, of course there is. I should have asked Chloe. But yeah, put definitely like any rules for that are specific to your brand about accessibility, like put them in there.
00:08:55
Speaker
you know, like guidelines for how you use things. If you are aware of them, like don't don't feel like you have to have those things if you're like, I don't really know. But if you have it, put it in there. You know, why not put it all in one place? Yeah. And if you've been creating content between then and now and your style has developed or evolved differently than you thought it was going to go ahead and make those updates. If there's certain graphics on Canva that you've been using a lot, throw them in there.
00:09:21
Speaker
Yeah, like little decorative elements and stuff. Like for the longest time, I would have to go back and search through and be like, where' where's that star I used in that one post? And I was like, I can't find it. Put them all in one place. This is the place for that. like super helpful. And then the one thing I would encourage you to add that we haven't really talked about yet, and one day we will do a full episode on this because I could certainly talk about it for at least one episode, is your brand voice. So because as much as like, yes, you're, like I said, often the style guides focus on the visual presentation of the brand, it's so, so helpful to have the written side represented there as well.
00:10:07
Speaker
And the written side can inform the visual side as well. Yeah, they work. They work together. You really as much as people really want to just have to worry about the visual side like you can't avoid the written side of things that were even like the verbal side of things. The communication side. Super important.
00:10:26
Speaker
it's easy to push it off and be like it all get to it but the sooner you get to it the more confident you're gonna feel in everything you put out so it's worth you know kind of pushing past that discomfort being like i'm gonna try this i'm gonna experiment with this even if you feel a little less confident in that part of things than in the visual side but i should you know.
00:10:46
Speaker
So for anyone that is not sure, brand voice is the unique flavor, like that recognizable quality in your communications that makes your audience like sit up and be like, oh, I want more of that. It's the personality and the character behind your brand and how it talks to its audience.
00:11:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's I was just reading something from a a client sent me the other day. And they knew I mean, I'm not a copywriter, but sometimes I dabble. um But there was an example of something and it sounded just like it could have been any other store that they were talking about. And I was like, you need to incorporate something in this that feels like your store. And they were like, Oh, right, I didn't include any of my brand boys. And I was like, There you go. And it made a huge but Yeah, definitely. I love that. I always want people to be, you know, thinking about their brand voice, not stressing about it, but thinking about it. I mean, I know for people who are on the earlier side of building brands, a lot of people get hung up on voice versus tone because you'll
00:11:47
Speaker
kind of hear those terms thrown around and they seem interchangeable but it's kind of confusing. They are different things like the voice, your voice is constant, it's that personality. The tone is more fluid and is more tied into like the context of the specific interaction or like the emotion of the moment. But for the purposes of DIYing your brand and you know just finding your brand identity over time. Like don't get too hung up on voice versus tone. If you're not a copywriter, not the most important distinction to worry about. So just treat them as one thing.
00:12:21
Speaker
Hey Darcy, so for the guide, how are we going to put the brand voice into it? Can you walk us through? Sure. So I, like I said, I'm not going to make you put all 22 brand voice facets that I do in my like guides. This is a meant to be a more accessible, easier to create version. So we're just going to hit a couple of main ones and you can do all of them or you can just do a couple, don't feel like do whatever is going to move you forward the fastest. If any of them feel like a sticking point for you, just skip it. But first I would start off with like a brief description. So think of your brand as a character and describe that character in one to three sentences, like something like, you know, the brand jam brand voice is the voice of a true friend. It's always there for a laugh.
00:13:15
Speaker
or to lend a listening ear like this, this kind of cheesy and not actually what the brand voices, but it goes like that. So you just want to spit out a couple of sentences that paint a picture of the overall personality. An alternative to that, or you can do it in conjunction with that, would be to just pick like your top three adjectives that describe your brand's voice.
00:13:39
Speaker
Like, fun, encouraging, you know, sarcastic, silly, you know, a writer and suddenly can't think of any adjectives, but you get the idea. Just pick your top three if you, you know, if that feels easier than being like, I've got to make it into a character and I'm not a writer. Like, don't stress.
Perspective in Brand Communication
00:14:01
Speaker
pick three adjectives. Thesaurus.com is your friend. Word Hippo is great too. You know, choose whatever gets you there the fastest. Another one that I would, I think it's worth putting in there for consistency's sake and it's not, shouldn't, shouldn't hang too many people up, but I don't know because people really do struggle with this decision is the point of view. So usually that's either going to be first person singular I, me, my, or first person plural, we, us, ours, like when you're talking about your brand or, you know, your offers like here at Brand Jam, we, because it's me and Chloe, at Sweet Tooth Creative, I use first person singular because it is just me. Sometimes people who are businesses of one will use we, me,
00:14:51
Speaker
Yeah, and that's fine too. I'm one of those people that go back and forth, which may or may not be a good strategy. I think that's very normal, because sometimes I do hire contractors, and I want people to be used to the wee language. um If I were to expand in the future, or not always have it being just me doing the work, i don't I don't want that to be like a super new concept. But at the same time, most of the time, it is just me. So I will use me for your singular person language.
00:15:20
Speaker
a lot of the time. Yeah, and I think that's fine too. I don't think you always have to use one or the other. I i do generally think like it can simplify things to pick one, but some people are like, well, am I lying if I say we? I mean, if you're like, we are a team of, you know and it's really just you, I don't and don't recommend doing that. But if you are building something that you want to expand and have a team I know I'm going to be a business of one forever. And while I may hire contractors to manage certain aspects of my business, I have no intention of ever hiring contractors that manage the actual client services of my business. So I stick with I, you know, it's me, you work with me, that's what you get. But I think it's very normal
00:16:09
Speaker
ah for small businesses when they're starting out to kind of like waffle and go back and forth. So sometimes putting it down in your brand guide as we're going to do this is kind of like the little push you need to just be consistent with it. But then sometimes like in Chloe's case, I do think there is a reason to kind of judge based on the moment and the context of what you're creating. Yeah, exactly.
Building a Brand Lexicon
00:16:34
Speaker
I think switching back and forth regardless of context is not great. like you want to be it It needs to be intentional yeah that you're like, oh, this makes more sense than this. If you're just like, well, I'm just picking one at random all the time, don't do that. You're going to confuse your audience. But again, like try not to get hung up on the little details. like If you really can't pick one, it's OK. Yeah, if it's going to keep you from moving forward, worry about it later, like bookmark it, come back to it and see what you naturally do. Yeah. But if you can pick one or want to try and be more consistent with it, put that in your brand guide, helpful to just have that little reminder. And then the last thing I'm going to recommend for your DIY brand guide is
00:17:17
Speaker
adding in a lexicon. This is especially good if you have existing content that you can go back and kind of look over and be like, what language am I using? I love this. I don't have one for my brand, but I need one. But I i love this concept. Yeah, this one. I mean, people are kind of like, do I really need that? But it's one of the things that tends to give my brain the most inspiration, just like looking at a lexicon and you can do it as a list. You can do it as a word cloud because there's like free word cloud generators. um Chloe hates word clouds. I have baggage with word clouds.
00:17:51
Speaker
there. So I mean, hey, if you have baggage with work clouds, do a list or you know, I do a table with like columns and whatever in certain scenarios. So whatever you want, you want it to be scannable, you don't want it to be like this tiny little like all these tiny words that you can't see, but make the random adjectives and verbs and phrases that you use in your business communications. Like the ones that have that personality in them, put them all in one place. And sometimes just like letting your eyes run across that is all you need to get into the right mindset to write for your business. And like I was saying, if you have existing content, go back through.
00:18:33
Speaker
What keeps popping up? What do you, you know, say a lot? What really feels like you in things that you've already put out? Okay. Put that in your lexicon. Yeah. And this might actually be a decent application to, you you know, use chat GBT or something similar. If you don't feel like combing through everything yourself, copy and paste a bunch of your stuff into there and ask it to create a table of commonly used words and phrases. Maybe there's a better way to ask it, but Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, be specific that you want in that prompt that you want it to only pull from there, but um that is a good idea. If you do use AI like to have it kind of do that
Creating a Basic Brand Guide
00:19:13
Speaker
work for you. I love that idea. So yeah, basically.
00:19:16
Speaker
For the brand voice portion of your brand guide, you want to have a description or three adjectives or both your point of view and a lexicon. So there's other things you can add in. So if you feel really called to anything and you're like, this is this really embodies the brand voice added in there. But like we said, and you know, you don't have to over stuff it. You don't have to overthink it. You're just trying to make something that really works for you and is a shortcut to getting into your brand voice and identity.
00:19:44
Speaker
And if it sounds a little daunting to put together your own brand guide, make it one step at a time. If you just do the basic version that we've outlined here, you know, go back through some of the episodes and listen to those and and slowly put it together. If you want to do episode by episode and just do what you can do and it'll give you so much time in the long run. Once you have something like this together, it's invaluable to your business.
00:20:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's very easy to get overwhelmed and just kind of let things stay disorganized. And I don't I'm definitely not mean of keeping everything organized in my business. But for, you know, the cohesiveness of your brand and to save you time and energy, it's worth taking a little bit out to make this and have that to
Engagement and Conclusion
00:20:34
Speaker
console. Yeah, I think your brain will feel little more clear once you get everything out of it and into some kind of document where it's all together in one place, easy to scan through and easy to work from.
00:20:49
Speaker
That's it for this episode of Brand Jam. Check out the show notes for links to the resources we talked about. If this episode hits the spot, be sure to subscribe and leave us a review. It helps Brand Jam reach more listeners, so we really appreciate it. Thanks so much for joining us. We'll see you next time.