Depending on the season of business you’re in, running a company requires you to wear many different hats at any particular moment.
You may find yourself wearing the content creator hat one month, writing all the blog posts, emails, and social media captions. While the next month you’re wearing the designer hat when launching your next offer.
Unless you’re delegating or outsourcing most of your business tasks, these different hats can become a heavy weight to carry.
The very last thing you want to add to your plate is another time-sucking task that makes your business seem unprofessional in the eyes of those you want to build trust and connection with.
This is exactly why your business needs a brandboard – a document holding all your brand assets, serving as a guide on exactly how your brand needs to be applied to all areas of your online business.
Here are 6 reasons your business needs a brandboard:
6 reasons your business needs a brandboard
1. It helps you remain consistent when building your brand
If design is not your strong suit (and it’s really okay if it’s not, that’s where I come in to help you!) then you’re going to find that having a brandboard will help you cut back on so much time when doing any sort of design related task. Whether you’re creating graphics, social media posts, business collateral, or even making simple changes to your website, your brandboard is going to be your go-to resource to keep everything consistent and cohesive.
The reason you want this is to maintain a consistent brand aesthetic that allows you to build trust with your audience which is the first (and most important step) towards investing in you. And, the more you build your brand visuals with a specific look, the more memorable you’ll become among your audience.
2. Your overall business visuals will feel more aligned with your vision
The foundations upon which your brand is built, and the principles you want your brand to represent will come through more prominently when you remain consistent with that brand. A brandboard will help you do this because it keeps you within the boundaries of your aesthetics – the aesthetics designed to make your business look and feel aligned with your vision.
When these things work well together you’ll soon find that you’ll feel more confident in expressing and actively pursuing that vision of your business. This is when the magic happens!
It’s not just about how your business looks to other people, it’s about how it will make people feel and how it will make you, the source of your business development, feel. When you feel good about your business, that energy will quickly be picked up on, and your audience will feel good about your business too.
3. Design becomes less time consuming
Design tasks can be extremely time consuming if you still need to figure things out. A brandboard gives you a very specific guide to stick to, making design tasks much easier to complete.
When you have a colour palette you need to use, a font hierarchy to apply and a specific look you need to uphold, the guesswork gets taken away which allows you to get things done much faster.
This means less time being spent on figuring out what looks good, and more productivity when it comes to design tasks while still building a brand that communicates your business vision.
4. Outsourcing design tasks will be a lot smoother
An online business will always require some kind of design work to be done, and any design project must stick to your brand guidelines. A brandboard can help make the process so much easier because you can provide this document to the service provider and they can pull your brand assets so they can apply it the way it needs to be used so you can get results – e.g. a website, sales page, course workbook, etc.
Not having a brandboard will make any design project a pain for both you and the person you’ve chosen to outsource the work to. There will be lots of confusion, back and forth, and at the end of the day you’ll most likely end up really disappointed by the final result. This will happen because you and the designer are not on the same page. A brandboard ensures that whatever tasks are being completed, the integrity of your brand remains intact.
5. Finding stock images becomes easier
If you’re not creating your own visual content (ie photos and videos) then stock photos and video plays a big role in helping you put out content for your business. It’s almost a given that at some point you’ll use stock photos in your business. A brandboard will save you a lot of time when searching for on-brand images because you will have a very specific vibe to stick to and the overwhelming choice of images out there will drastically be cut down.
Having a clear understanding of the type of photography or videography you should be using to uphold your brand identity will ensure that you keep the consistency of the look of your business. This way, when a member of your audience spots an image you’ve used, they’ll immediately know that you’re the business behind it.
6. Customizing Canva templates becomes a breeze
As business owners we are always looking for ways to save time and make things easier. One of the ways to do both of these is to use Canva templates.
However, if you are using the wrong templates or if you’re applying your brand incorrectly, those templates might do more harm than good. This is where your brandboard is crucial – it will make the process of customizing your Canva templates a whole lot smoother.
What this means for you is that you’ll have beautiful, on-brand graphics for your business in a fraction of the time! And, what’s more is that you could easily outsource this task to someone else later down the road without worrying that things won’t turn out the way it needs to.
Now that you know why a brandboard is so important to have, I’m sure you’re ready to learn all about how to create one for your business…
You’ll be delighted to know that I’ve gone and done most of the work for you – all YOU need to do is answer a few quick questions. Take the quiz below to discover the dreamy brand for your biz and get a brandboard template which you can customize for your business right in Canva!
