The Importance of Brand Style Guides For VARs

Most IT resellers understand the concept of a brand style guide, but do they understand the impact it can have on their business?  As a reseller, you are connected to multiple vendors and they in turn are connected to other resellers and partners. Amid all of those connections, your company could be lost in the mix. It’s important to establish yourself and remain consistent across all your business channels.

Furthermore, how you market the products for each of your technology partners should remain consistent with their standards. Are you correctly representing their brand as well? Utilizing a brand style guide is a must for your company and the clients and partners you work with.

Here are three benefits of having a thorough brand style guide.

Create style standards for your brand

Most businesses will hire different designers, marketing agencies, and internal team members from time to time.  Having a set of rules or standards to work from, with regards to the utilization of your brand’s unique colors, styles, fonts and imagery, will ensure that nothing is lost regardless of who’s contributing.

The goal is to set yourself up in a way that if someone comes in with zero knowledge of your clients or your business positioning, they would have a clear-cut guide to remove any confusion. Having a standardized set of attributes governing style and usage of your brand’s assets, will ensure seamless delivery each and every time.

Build credibility for your brand

If you’re publishing content and your clients and audience can’t immediately identify the source, this is a sign of incomplete branding and it can have negative impacts to your business. The importance of being consistent ensures a quality final product, establishes trust, and communicates a clear message to the end user.

On everything from websites to marketing collateral, you want to make sure that any piece of content you send out, correctly reflects the values of your brand as well as your client. Improper representation of your clients, vendors, or partners can result in diminished quality of your deliverables, poor audience engagement, and lack of credibility to your business. Just as your brand’s style guide is created to ensure a seamless experience, the same goes for any business you work with as well.

Avoid wasted time and excess costs

No one likes to redo work or re-edit content multiple times because of something small like changes to fonts or colors. These things may seem insignificant, but they play a large role in representing a company’s brand. End of the day, a lot of time and resources could have been saved by having a brand style guide to refer to.

Almost every business can agree, “time is money”.  The less time editing and reviewing, the more time can be spent on profit-generating activities. More importantly, it can save you from some costly mistakes down the line. Ignoring well established, even copyrighted brand regulations, can impact your brand’s credibility and even your bottom line.

As your company and client base continues to grow, it’s important to maintain a solid brand style guide to reflect any changes that may occur. Once you have one, make sure it’s published either in print or electronic format, ready for anybody to use or refer to. Have all of your assets including logos, pictures, and documents all stored safely and easily accessible for your team or contractors to use.

Remember, a brand style guide not only helps you communicate consistently across all your marketing channels, it defines the values your company stands for.

Want to learn more? Download our marketing playbook for IT VARs and MSPs.