Unless you consciously think about your branding, it’s very easy to let the style and design of your marketing materials go in several unrelated directions.  Without realising, you could have a website that doesn’t quite match your brochure which doesn’t quite match your stationery which doesn’t quite match your quote and invoice templates.  An unrelated group of items that when seen together by your customers, might make you appear less professional than you could.

So here’s a quick tip for making sure your branding stays consistent…

Firstly, start by identifying something within your marketing materials that you do like the style and design for, such as your website or brochure (if you don’t have anything you like, then do consider having one of those items re-designed until you have a style you like).

For argument’s sake, let’s say you like the design of your website – this now becomes your branding benchmark.  Now pick out between 4 and 8 specific elements of that benchmark design that you like.  These could be colours, fonts, a style of shading, the style of certain graphics, perhaps elements of your logo… the choice is yours.

This list of items now become the design anchors that should run across all your marketing materials.  In other words, if you then produce a brochure, that brochure should include the majority of those design anchors within the design, so even at a glance, the reader can see the subtle similarities across your website and the new brochure.  In fact, without even realising it, the reader will see that the website and brochure are related – even without seeing your logo – but won’t necessarily know why.  This is because you have defined a specific list of anchors (fonts, colours, certain graphics etc) that are all transferable from one marketing medium to another without looking out of place.

NB.  I did say ‘include the majority of design anchors’ earlier, this is because for some marketing materials, such as an invoice design, you may want to just pick out some of the more subtle design anchors to use on the invoice so it retains a slightly more formal feel.

And that’s it.  If you like, it’s always good to write down some simple guidelines about how your logo should be used – e.g. it’s position on the page, the colour/s that are allowed to appear behind the logo and how much free space should surround it.

So in short, decide on your branding benchmark, then list your preferred brand anchors and define how the logo should be displayed.

If you stick to this approach, every marketing item you produce will feel part of the same family.

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