Brand guidelines are the easiest ways for companies to establish and market themselves. By having an established set of rules and guidelines related to brand voice, image, and style, marketers can readily create content that is designed for the marketplace, which guarantees a business’s brand is readily recognizable at all times.
Companies that rely on marketing strategies like affiliate marketing can get the most out of their campaigns by creating and following a set of internal brand guidelines. With Refersion’s affiliate management software, it’s easy to share developed content directly with affiliates for promotional use, providing content designed around your brand and with audiences in mind. Here are some considerations to keep in mind when it comes to developing your company’s brand guidelines.
What a Brand Style Guide Looks like
A brand guideline is a rulebook a company follows in the creation of all branding materials. This includes the company’s use of language and grammar, its logo, the font and colors used in marketing materials, types of photography used, and more. At its core, it is a reference tool that helps brands maintain consistency within the marketplace, ensuring that all outward material feels, sounds, and looks the same to consumers.
It’s important to have an established brand guideline, especially when working with other business partners. This is true for affiliate marketers who will be sharing branded content with their affiliate partners regularly. Content must remain consistent when being promoted by affiliates, as you want to create a relationship with consumers that will drive engagement. Having an instantaneously recognizable brand is just one of the ways to achieve this. Companies often develop brand books that contain their brand guidelines. This book can be referenced when creating a blog for your website or developing a new campaign for an Instagram affiliate marketing strategy. The following should be contained in your company’s brand guidelines:
- Mission Statement — This outlines what your brand stands for: who it serves, what it’s primary goal is, and what values make it tick.
- Buyer Persona — This is your average customer — the person to whom you aim to speak whenever producing content, whether that is a 50-year-old Texan man who lives a simple life and likes driving his truck or a suburban, middle-class family that enjoys summertime recreational activities.
- Written Style Guide — Based on your company’s mission statement and buyer persona, you’ll want to develop a written style guide concerning the language used to speak to your audience. This will include language choices, agreeable use of slang, and grammar choices.
- Visual Style Guide — This will include color palettes, photography, brand logo, fonts, and more. Your visual style guide will consist of all those things that give your company its definitive look.
Let’s consider some popular modern visual style guides to see just what a set of brand guidelines looks like in action.
Notable Examples of Popular Brand Guidelines
- Skype
One of the most-used video chatting platforms, Skype gets its clean, modern look from its equally sleek brand style guide. The company’s guidelines focus mostly on how to present its products to market and how its logo is meant to be used in the content.
- Spotify
Spotify’s lime green and white logo is easily identifiable, and the company’s style guide can be thanked for that. Moreover, its style guide provides the means to utilize logo variations and how to best produce album artwork for its site, helping artists in the process.
- Netflix
Netflix is another company with a logo and website design that is expertly crafted. Their brand style guide focuses on the use of typeface, color coding, and sets of rules for the sizing of graphics and photos.
Incorporating Brand Guidelines into Your Affiliate Marketing Strategy
For affiliate marketers, utilizing brand guidelines is a must. Promoting your business through affiliates and influencers requires developing content that is branded — and easily identifiable. Brand guidelines are necessary to help your company create an aesthetic that is immediately noticeable across the marketplace. If you’re not sure where to start, especially with developing branded content for your affiliate marketing campaigns, consider reaching out to our Refersion staff for help.
