Styles or brand guides are truly helpful documents. They set the rules for how the visual, messaging, and other elements appear to the world.

But when is the right time to create one for your business?

In our opinion, you don’t need to look for an exact date, but instead, keep an eye out for some of the following warning signs.

Businesses need style guides to maintain brand consistency

Many companies have a set of existing brand guidelines. It’s one tool businesses should have — and follow — to keep their brands consistent. But for those with a style guide, 27% of these businesses don’t enforce their use regularly.

Small details get overlooked — or ignored — leading to more significant problems maintaining brand consistency.

And with 77% of company’s reporting off-brand content going out into the world, it’s a big deal.

Some of the most egregious issues we’ve seen with brand inconsistency are with logos and font usage, and include:

Incorrect color usage

Often, color shifts occur when someone is unfamiliar with the various formats (RGB, HEX, CMYK, and PMS) and how to use them (in print or digitally). Changing these color conversions, even slightly, can cause your final design to look wildly different from what you expected.

Unapproved changes to the logo

When there are multiple versions of the logo floating around without use case documentation, it’s a recipe for unauthorized changes to get pushed out onto different marketing pieces and internal documents.

Improper font treatments

For those creating materials on the fly who aren’t professional designers or work with them regularly, it’s not unusual to wing it. Instead of using a branded font, it’s easier to choose a nice-looking one and slap it on a brochure or flyer. This lack of attention to detail makes businesses appear erratic with their brands.

These transgressions might sound like minor nitpicking, but they’re jarring to audiences who expect the companies they buy from to have a solid, consistent presence.

Brand style guides mitigate the issues mentioned above. They give people without any formal design knowledge guidance about using their company’s assets.

But this isn’t the only indicator of needing to create brand standards.

You need a brand guide when your messaging is “off”

Brands have a specific personality, voice, and purpose they express to the world. And when the company goes off-script in its messaging, it sounds like a painfully sharp record scratch to your audience.

There’s such a thing as going too far in one direction, and when this happens, it can feel like your company isn’t, well, the same one your audience knows and loves.

To stop this from happening in the first place, you’ll need good messaging standards to show content writers and copywriters the correct tone and cadence to use. Mozilla is a company that has an established brand personality, and its incredibly detailed style guide tells you exactly what the company represents.

But the internet browsing corporation also explains what this looks like in reality. Marketing teams and writers have real-world examples showing what they should and shouldn’t do with the Mozilla brand.

Businesses need brand standards as they grow

Brand consistency contributes to around 10-20% of revenue growth. As companies produce more digital and printed marketing content, it becomes challenging to maintain quality control without a style guide.

And since we’ve talked about a few of the problems affecting external campaigns, let’s talk about the internal ones. Some of the most common issues we’ve seen due to a lack of guidelines – or improper usage – are:

– Inconsistent email signatures
– Incorrect email headers and logos
– Wrong assets on company intranets

These internal oversights will ultimately seep into other parts of the business, affecting future earnings for the company. And it’s why your company needs to have brand standards that are accessible and easy to reference as it grows.

Brand guidelines also increase efficiency with external contractors
As more people work on the brand, keeping things cohesive becomes even more important. Businesses with a set of brand guidelines reduce friction with outside contractors.

Once they have them in hand, designers, developers, social media managers, and others can efficiently produce what you want without a ton of back and forth about colors, fonts, or photography usage.

Stay consistent & save time with brand style guides.

People build perceptions about companies based on their interactions with them. And naturally, you want those first, second, and third impressions to be positive.

As more channels open up, making it easier for businesses to reach audiences, brands need to deliver the same experience each time, especially as marketers produce more content than ever before.

Businesses need to use style guides to keep their brand voice and visual identity consistent. Incorporating these guidelines into your marketing workflow reduces the number of hours it takes for teams to crank out campaigns and keeps the brand unified — online and off.