Small businesses intent on adopting a meaningful brand identity can benefit from using a brand kit as well as a brand guide. Both can help you maximize your marketing return on investment (ROI). Think of these assets as the manifestation of your brand identity. They will be the essential source for all of your branding elements including your logo, overall aesthetic, and voice. Implementing an effective brand strategy—including these essential tools—will help to keep your communications in line with your brand identity ensuring a reliable ROI for all of your marketing efforts.

The Importance of Brand Consistency

A brand kit and brand guide are reference tools that work in tandem to create a unified aesthetic and voice for your brand, keeping it consistent each time you communicate with your audience and customers. Brand consistency helps you to get the most out of your marketing by making each connection stronger. Consistency helps your audience become familiar with your brand and begin to trust your brand. That feeling of reliability will encourage positive brand sentiment. Not only will that help convert leads into customers, but it helps to convert customers into repeat customers and loyal brand advocates.

Maintaining a consistent image and voice can assist in shaping the emotional response audiences have to your brand. Do you want your audience to associate your brand with happiness and excitement or seriousness and dependability? By reinforcing an idea with your audience, consistency allows you to take part in the perception of your brand. Another benefit is the ability to simply underscore the uniqueness of your brand, giving your audience a reason to prefer your brand over others. By routinely highlighting your particular competitive advantage, you can stand out in your industry.

Brand Kit Versus Brand Guide

Brand kits and brand guides are both helpful tools to preserve brand identity across all channels of communication. They differ in the form they take and how they are used.

A brand kit will mostly be used when dealing with partners outside of your business. For example, if your business sponsors a charity event, you might send your brand kit to the event organizers so they can include your logo on a banner and a statement about your business in the program. Brand kits are also used to quickly respond to opportunities with the press. Your brand kit will usually take the form of a file of brand elements. They are usually emailed as a zip file attachment or link to an online storage folder. Make sure to include high-resolution images and logos as printing may be required.

A brand guide (sometimes called a brand book, style guide, or brand guidelines) is more thorough than a brand kit. Rather than simply providing the brand elements themselves, it will include guidance for implementing brand elements. Think of it as an internal document, whereas a brand kit is generally shared with outside parties. Brand guides help those implementing your communications—whether that’s within your organization or handled by an outside party like a marketing firm—stay on the same page. It includes detailed rules like when to use which logos and in what contexts they should be used. Your guide can also include information about when and how to implement brand colors, language, fonts, and graphical elements important to your brand. It should be provided to anyone creating marketing or communications materials. Your brand guide will likely take the form of a single lengthy document.

Brand Elements To Include

While the brand kit and brand guide differ in usage, they will contain much of the same information. All of the elements essential to your brand should be included.

Think of the list below as a starting point. Not all elements are always necessary. If anything essential to your brand (like a video explaining your product, for example) is not included in the lists below, still make sure to include them! The goal is to be thorough so you and your team can quickly reference and rely on these tools.

Brand Kit

• Logos
• Boilerplate statement for your business
• Biographical statements for important members of your team like CEO, Founder, etc.
• Headshots for important members of your team
• Other important images and graphical elements

Brand Guide

• All of the above
• Guidelines for implementing logos including which logos can be used where and how logos can be incorporated in other designs
• Fonts and guidelines for using them
• Colors and guidelines for using them
• Graphical elements and guidelines for using them
• Guidelines about style and use of photography and imagery
• Particulars about language to use or not use
• Style guide for written works
• Brand story narrative
• Alternative boilerplates for specific contexts (You might have different statements tailored to different industries or lines of work.)

Get Your Brand Working for You

Outside of the benefits to marketing and communications ROI, implementing a brand kit and brand guide is simply a more organized and easier way to carry out your branding. It will keep all of your team members and partners on the same page. Even when projects are handled by different people or different departments with different driving goals, your communications will have the essential feel of your brand that makes you unique. This will cut down on editing time, endlessly searching for the right logo, verifying fonts, and keeping track of your most up-to-date boilerplate statement.

If the brand consistency argument didn’t convince you, perhaps the efficiency argument will! Using these assets is simply a better way to keep track of and shape your brand.

A Virtual Assistant Can assist You

If you want to hand over your branding strategy to a professional, our virtual digital marketers would be happy to assist you.

Learn more about how a Virtual Assistant can help you get there.