If you’ve worked with Crafted by Carly on your branding, you know how much we emphasize the importance of a Brand Style Guide (sometimes also known as Brand Guidelines). You can see your Brand Style Guide as your brand’s “dictionary”—it pulls together all the elements of your branding as a way to help you stay on-brand wherever you show up.
A Brand Style guide first + foremost helps you to stay consistent + cohesive across everything you do, which in turn builds an element of trust amont your audience and potential clients. And when you have a simple + easy-to-use Style Guide, you won’t have to hire a designer to do every little thing for you, because you’ll have the clarity to do some of the simpler tasks—like creating a social media post—by yourself.
As your business grows, you’ll inevitably need to outsource certain tasks that you don’t have time to do, aren’t an expert at, or simply don’t like doing. Whether you’re giving tasks to a virtual assistant, a designer, social media manager, copywriter, etc.—they won’t be able to create on-brand work for you if they don’t have a clear view of the brand. A Style Guide cuts out a lot of questions + confusion for your team by giving them a one-stop-shop for how you want to come across.
When you have a Brand Style Guide, and therefore that level of cohesiveness (like we talked about in the first point), you’re going to start becoming more + more recognizable because whether someone sees you on Instagram, email, Pinterest, IRL, etc., they will know it’s you. And over time that level of recognition leads to brand loyalty, so you’re more likely to get repeat clients, word of mouth referrals, and overall just remind your dream audience that you’re out there.
The event is taking place September 20-22nd over on my Close Friends list, and a recap will be available if you can’t catch it on those days.