Importance of brand guidelines: three party payments paytm in India

The ultimate goal of every brand is to motivate consumers to buy into their message and ultimately complete the purchase. Unfortunately, however, most online businesses today still rely on advertising to achieve this goal. They fail to understand that in this day and age, engaging customers is more strategic than just communicating a message.

Therefore, you need to understand that implementing a strong, unified and coherent approach requires strong brand communication at different levels.

This is where a strong brand guide is essential. A brand guide essentially is a set of rules that defines your brand identity and explains how to use it internally and externally. It connects with your audience in a consistent way.

Why is the Brand Guide so important?

Setting the standard: brand guidelines define the tone of the brand and how it interacts with its audience base. It maintains a consistent tone and ensures that your online presence is more easily recognisable based on set standards.

Define specific rules: at a core level, the brand guide sets and details specific rules for running your brand. It defines how your business interacts with users while focusing on customer needs.

For example, your brand guidelines will instruct on the different versions of the logo and will also include examples of how not to use them. Even the spacing of the logo will be strategically defined by your brand guidelines.

Provide tools: In addition to defining and setting rules, your brand guidelines provide tools for consistency and harmonisation across channels. The elements defined in your brand guidelines work together to communicate a coherent message. Setting elements makes it easier to plan marketing across channels.

Elements of the brand guide include:

Visual Identity: these elements define what your brand expresses and what it stands for. It is one of the main elements you need to define through your brand guidelines. The visual identity helps you maintain consistency.

Brand Tone: Brand tone includes the content of communications that are disseminated across channels - both internally and externally. It includes content that expresses the tone of your brand. Having strong written brand guidelines must be coordinated with all visual elements.

STRATEGY: Visual identity and communication cannot interact without knowing the brand's intent. You need to define your brand's vision in order to instil belief in your employees and the market segments in which you operate. Your brand's strategy sets your position in the market and differentiates you from your competitors.

What should your brand guidelines contain?

You need to make your brand guidelines inclusive in order to define all major and minor elements.

Business overview: vision, mission and values

Colour palette: colours used across channels

Brand Tone: Your Brand Tone

Font styles: fonts, headings and footers

Templates: specific templates for internal and external communications

Today, your company interacts and spreads its communication messages through various channels, both online and offline. Therefore, brand guides play an important role in maintaining visual and communication consistency across all communication platforms. This explains why having a brand guide makes it easy, simple and hassle-free for everyone to interact with your brand.

Read also our blog post, 'How to make your brand communications more impactful'. Follow the PayUmoney Knowledge Platform to keep your brand consistent.