Founders series: Top tips for creating a brand book

Welcome to our Founders Series, where we aim to give advice, answer questions and provide solutions for people starting their own businesses. If this sounds like you, read on! We've got plenty of content on a wide range of topics, all to help you grow and succeed as a founder.

When first starting your business, it’s a good idea to put together a brand book. This is a document that contains everything someone would need to know when writing or creating content for your business. The brand book can be displayed in any way you like, but it’s important that you cover off all the key things that an agency or employee might need to know about your brand style, tone of voice, fonts, image style and more.

In this blog, we’ll go over some of the things we think are the most vital to include, and how you can display these.

Tell your story

Who are you? 

We don’t expect you to write out your whole life story starting from day dot, but explaining a bit about how the business began gives the reader context behind what’s to follow in your brand book. 

For example, in our brand book, we say:

“In 1998, when 17-year-old Andrew Michael couldn’t find a trusted hosting service for his A-level IT project, he created his own. And Fasthosts was born!”

It also pays to give a bit of an insight into who’s behind the business. It humanises your business and puts a face to the work you do. 

This is also an opportunity to play around with layout and design. In ours we’ve displayed our company history in a timeline format, so it makes it more digestible and fun for the reader. It also means they aren’t hit with a big wall of text on every page. It breaks up the information and makes it more memorable.

What are your values?

What matters to you?

Tell your reader why you do what you do. What are the most important things that drive your business and you’re passionate about? This could be being sustainable, providing top quality customer support, being there 24/7 or even being proud of where you’re from. Whatever it is, shout about it. 

In our values section, we say:

“We’re a proud UK-based company.”

We want our customers to know where we’re from and where their data is being held, so they can trust that we’re a local hosting provider who’s all about bringing the best services to our UK-based customers.

Another thing we like to shout about is that our data centres run on 100% renewable energy. With saving the planet and being more environmentally conscious being a huge topic of conversation, we want to show our customers and anyone that we work with that we’re keeping the planet right at the top of our priority list (with our customers, of course!). Because without our planet, we wouldn’t be here to do what we do best. So if this is also one of your foundations, definitely give it a mention!

Products and services

It may seem like an obvious one, but including what you sell or what services you provide in your brand book is a must. Imagine you’re working with a new content agency. They have little to no knowledge of what your business does. What are the important bits you need them to know about in order for them to write content for you? 

Giving a brief overview of the kinds of products you sell or services you offer helps them to understand what they’re writing about, straight from the horse's mouth. You don’t need to delve into every single detail, but a small paragraph or list of bullet points to cover the main bits should do the job.

Positioning in the industry

Where you sit in your industry shows anyone looking at your brand book what kind of company you are. It also ties into our next point about who your customers are. Is it that you cater to a more creative clientele? Or is your customer base purely professionals who look at things from a technical perspective? 

Either way, highlighting where you sit on this scale against your competitors not only shows what other businesses you’re up against, but also gives a good idea of where you sit in comparison. Are you affordable and beginner friendly, or high end and technical?

Again, displaying this in a graph format or finding a fun way to portray your positioning can make the information more digestible and dynamic.

Who are your customers?

Anyone reading your brand book needs to know who you target – whether they’re writing content for you, a new hire, or designing a component for your website. This will dictate the kind of tone of voice, the language used and what your site, social media and advertising looks like. If you’re a company targeting professionals, you may cater to that audience with sleeker designs and more serious language, for example.

Include customer profiles for each type that you target. If you’re B2B, state the size of the business, what their goals might be and what pain points you’re trying to solve with your business or service.

It may seem obvious to you what your audience is, for example if you’re a company that sells wedding decorations you’re likely to target newly engaged couples. But to an outsider, the kind of person they think you’re targeting could be completely different to what you have in mind. So be as specific as you can.

Customer journey

Once you’ve nailed down who you’re targeting, show how that customer might go about purchasing your products or services. Start from when they land on your website, right up until they hit ‘checkout’ and beyond. Do you provide any kind of customer care after purchase? How do your support teams play a part in the journey a customer goes on?

This can also include any advertising you do on social media, news platforms or any other sites that a customer might come across your business. You may attend events, if so which ones and why? How does this aid their journey and promote you?

Be as clear as possible when crafting this. You want it to be easy to follow and understand.

Employee culture

This point is especially important if it’s a new hire or new agency reading your brand book. Tell them what it’s like to work for you. Are there any employee benefits? Do you offer hybrid working? Try and give a real sense for what daily life is like and why you’re a company people should want to work for.

This could include staff parties, mental health support, cycle to work schemes or even free food and drinks at the office. As with your values, shout about why you’re proud to work for your business. 

Branding

This part of your brand book can be used to have some real fun with visuals. Show off how you design pages, social posts and ads, give an overview of your brand colour palette and fonts used, and above all, keep it consistent! If you’re giving someone brand new to your company an overview of what your branding looks like, you don’t want to confuse them with too many different styles and designs. Keep to a set selection of colours, a couple of font options depending on whether it’s a title or body text, and maybe a brand device. 

Your brand device can be a specific illustration style or image, but it should be something that people see and say ‘that’s Fasthosts’ (for example).

Tone of voice

You’ve nailed down the ‘who’, but now you need to find the ‘how’ – as in ‘how do you talk to your audience?’. Like with your branding, you want to show that you’re keeping it consistent. If you’ve decided to only use en-dashes, for example, stick to it in every piece of content you produce and make that clear in your brand book.

If you have a set list of rules, whether that be grammatically, tonally, or anything in between, lay that out here. These are your golden rules that people need to follow for your business, so make sure you’re certain what you want to sound like. 

Are you playful and fun, or serious and straight to the point? Can puns and jokes be allowed in your content, or is it strictly informative? And think about your audience. If you were them, how would you want to be spoken to?

You’re not in it alone

As a founder just starting out, or even if you’ve been in it for a while, it can be a stressful and sometimes lonely place to be. There’s so much to think about, plan and organise, so you need support from someone who knows what they’re talking about.

Our Founders Hub is full of tips and tricks for a founder, from what products to use to how to manage your work/life balance. And if you need any advice on setting up your first website, marketing your business or any other related products, give our team of experts a call. 

Call us on 0800 0612 153 or message us via live chat. We’ll be happy to help.