How To Write Brand Guidelines (In 5 Steps or Less)

Building a strong brand isn’t just for big business. For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), brand guidelines can be the difference between an unforgettable presence and one that gets lost in the crowd. Without clear guidelines, logos get stretched, colors vary, and messaging feels inconsistent. This is your brand, it should be respected, just like you. 

A well-defined brand identity helps small businesses attract customers and compete in crowded markets. Whether you’re starting from scratch or refining an existing brand, this guide walks you through the process of creating brand guidelines for growing businesses that bring consistency, professionalism, and impact — without breaking your budget.

What you’ll learn:

• What are brand guidelines?
• Preparing your brand guidelines
• A beginner’s guide to crafting brand guidelines
• Creating brand guidelines to scale
• FAQs

What are brand guidelines?

Brand guidelines serve as a business resource for current teams, new employees, and external partners. These guidelines define rules for using brand assets such as logos, colors, and slogans, and describe how these rules should be implemented around promoting your brand.

When applied at scale, brand guidelines deliver two key outcomes:

Consistency: Brand guidelines help ensure that no matter how customers interact with you, they have a consistent experience. Consider emails, blogs, and social media posts. By establishing guidelines around tone — you might choose professional, down-to-earth, or humorous — users can easily recognize your brand voice and point of view.

Professionalism: Guidelines both remove uncertainty and improve professionalism. If staff members have questions about content creation or distribution, they can find direction in your guidelines. Communication is key and can take the form of a dedicated email address for any questions, a ticket-and-response system, or a small business collaboration channel.

Core components of small business brand guidelines

While every SMB will have a unique set of brand guidelines, several components are common. They include:

• Logos: Your logo is a visual representation of your brand. Great logos are instantly recognizable — think about Google, Apple, or McDonald’s. Key elements of your logo design include size, shape, and color. Some businesses use their whole name in the logo, others just a few letters, and some opt for stylized designs.
• Typography: Characteristics such as typeface, letter size, and spacing are all covered under typography. This guideline also defines rules for headings, capitalization, and acronyms. (Pro tip: Typefaces are also known as “font families.” Selecting the right typeface gives you access to multiple fonts that include similar letter shapes, width, and spacing.)
• Color palettes: Color is a powerful force in brand guidelines and is often used to evoke emotion. Brand guidelines include color palettes for website content, logos, and icons, to name a few. While these palettes don’t need to be identical, they should be in the same color family.
• Tone of voice: It’s not just about what you say — it’s how you say it. Inconsistent tone of voice can create customer confusion and dilute your brand identity. To create your tone of voice, consider your products, your audience, and how you want to position yourself in the market.

Benefits of brand guidelines for small businesses

Consistently-applied brand guidelines offer several benefits for small businesses.

When marketing efforts all draw from the same brand playbook, content is considerably more uniform. Advertisements, newsletters, and emails created using brand guidelines deliver a consistent message to customers. Use resources such as the Ultimate SMB Marketing Guide to streamline the process.

The more consistent your brand guidelines, the more recognizable your logo and content becomes. By establishing a clear point of view and tone of voice, your SMB can stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

For consumers, trust is confidence that your business will deliver what it promises, whether that’s a quality product, fast shipping, or great customer service. Implementation of brand guidelines demonstrates the ability of your brand to maintain shared standards, in turn laying the groundwork for consumer trust.

Brand identity vs. brand guidelines: What’s the difference?

Brand identity and brand guidelines are similar, but not identical concepts. The division is similar to that of small business marketing and small business sales. While both are important for success, an SMB sales guide isn’t much use to marketers, and vice versa.

Identity is what you want your brand to be — what you want customers to think when they see your logo, or how you want them to respond when they connect with your content. Guidelines describe how to achieve this goal.

Preparing your brand guidelines

Brand guidelines are the result of carefully considered choices that account for multiple factors including current market conditions, evolving consumer preferences, and where your brand fits into this landscape. The following tips can help you streamline the preparation process.

Start by setting your goals. What are your aspirations? Your values? Your culture? Defining where you’re headed establishes a framework for brand guidelines. Next, identify your vision. What do you want customers to think when they see your logo? How do you want them to feel about your content or products? What action do you want them to take?

See what other companies — big and small — are doing in your industry or vertical. Study their logos and content to see what makes them effective. Strong brand guidelines begin with a well-defined business goal and the right technology — such as CRM for startups or advanced solutions for growing companies — to keep branding consistent across your business.

Instead of starting from scratch, use trusted providers to help expedite the process. AI-powered branding tools, customer data insights, and industry-specific CRM solutions can reveal patterns in branding success, helping you shape a more cohesive identity. Solutions such as AI CRM can also help refine your brand strategy, with tools like Agentforce interacting with various business systems to uncover key brand data and define consistent guidelines.

Now it’s time to find inspiration. Stock photography sites are a great place to start, as are social media sites. Once you’ve explored design inspiration, take advantage of free brand guideline templates available from online design platforms and marketing resource hubs. These templates help structure your brand elements, making it easier to document colors, fonts, and logo usage while keeping everything consistent.

Before committing to a brand identity, try out multiple options. Explore different logos, colors, and font types. Ask staff and prospective customers for their feedback, and refine your identity before moving forward. For example, you can customize your brand with Salesforce themes to see which approach offers the biggest impact.

A beginner’s guide to crafting brand guidelines

Here are the five steps that you need to craft the winning brand guidelines that will carry you through a lifetime of sucess. Let’s dig in.

Step 1: Define your brand’s personality

Two components are critical to help define your personality: How you want customers to perceive your brand, and what makes your brand unique. For example, you may want buyers to see your brand as knowledgeable and trustworthy. By understanding what makes your product special, and clearly communicating this information, you can establish a consistent personality.

Step 2: Select authentic colors and fonts

Colors and fonts are next. Here, the goal is finding something that “feels” like your business. This is a naturally subjective process, but as noted above, certain colors tend to evoke specific emotions and different fonts can carry different meanings. Consider a logo with a bright red background and strong, angular text. Now think of a lighter blue design with cursive writing. The first is powerful and immediate, the second is calming.

Step 3: Design your logo and set rules for its use

Your logo represents your brand. It’s often the first thing customers see on a social media post, search result, or your ecommerce store. This means it must be instantly recognizable. Simplicity is your first priority — if your logo requires explanation, it’s not doing its job. Consistency is next. Your brand guidelines should include everything from the size and shape of your logo to its approved colors, fonts, and use cases.

Step 4: Establish your brand’s voice and tone

With colors selected and logos designed, it’s time to find your voice. Here, CRM solutions can help. By comparing customer data from across your organization, CRMs for SMBs help you get a sense of what customers want from your brand. Are they looking for relatable content, or do they need expertise? Use audience data to build a voice and tone program for your brand.

If you’re just getting started, consider Salesforce as a partner to help you succeed. The benefits of CRM include actionable analytics and dashboards, increased productivity, and simplified collaboration.

Step 5: Compile imagery, written, and visual style guidelines

The final step in building brand guidelines is creating a compilation document that lays out clear expectations and provides examples. This can be a complex and time-intensive process. As a result, companies often benefit from AI small business tools that are purpose-built to help collect, curate, and compile large amounts of data.

According to our Small and Medium Business Trends Report 90% of SMBs now say that AI helps make their operations more efficient. We are all ready for the assistance AI provides, so we can focus on what’s important to business. The people.

Creating brand guidelines to scale

Brand guidelines are both a roadmap and a resource, helping your business stay recognizable and consistent. The key to making them work? Keep them clear, practical, and easy to use.

When your team has a solid guide to follow, they don’t have to second-guess every design or message. Instead, they can focus on what really matters — creating content that feels authentic, building connections with customers, and growing your brand with confidence.

Start your journey with a free trial of Starter today. Looking for more customization? Explore Pro Suite. Already a Salesforce customer? Activate Foundations today to try out Agentforce.

FAQs

Why are brand guidelines important for a small business?

Brand guidelines codify and solidify your brand’s identity. This is especially critical for small businesses looking to expand their market impact and make more sales — logos, icons, images, and content that are consistent help get your brand noticed.

How often should brand guidelines be updated?

Regularly review your brand guidelines to ensure they align with current business goals. Common schedules are once per quarter or once every six months. It’s also important to update guidelines if your business undergoes a significant change, such as a merger or acquisition, or a change in your primary product or small business service.

Can small businesses create effective brand guidelines on a budget?

Yes, branding doesn’t have to be expensive. Small businesses can create high-quality logos and brand assets without hiring a professional designer. Free and low-cost design tools allow business owners to generate logos, select color palettes, and experiment with fonts — all without a large investment. AI-powered design assistants can also help streamline the process, suggesting branding elements that align with your business values and industry.

AI supported the writers and editors who created this article.