Everything a tech company should have in their brand book

The term brand book often brings people out in a hot sweat. The thought of having to compile a ‘bible’ of assets for your B2B tech company is a daunting task, especially if you're starting from scratch.

This article isn’t here to convince you that you need this to enhance your brand strength. We’ll leave that to Patrick Mork (former CMO at Google Play) with this insightful blog post here.

What this article will do, however, is help your tech company build a clear and actionable brand book. That’s why we’ve compiled this list of everything you should include in it.

You might find previous iterations gathering dust in various folders. So, it helps to first gather what you’ve got, put it all in one place, then work out what needs updating, what needs axing and what is good to go.

1)    Your 'why'

This is your company's reason for existence. Why are you doing what you’re doing? Why did your first employee join you? It’s the big, scary question, the one that gives CEOs the world over goosebumps.

After all, how do you quantify and explain this succinctly?

This question is important (which is why we’ve put it first) and will feed into every other aspect of your business; from creating your marketing strategy, to how you hire new employees.

2)    Your brand strategy

Brand can feel like a nebulous concept, but the way we describe it at Articulate is how customers feel about your business. This is important, because it's not just your logo, and it's not entirely in your control.

Your brand strategy, then, is your plan to get the right customers feeling the right way about your business to increase its perceived value and close more sales. Most brand strategies include these core components:

• Mission
• Vision
• Values
• Value proposition
• Brand positioning
• Messaging

Its purpose? Simply put, it provides focus. It enables you stay on track if too many ideas, plans and cooks threaten to derail the progress of your marketing activities.

You can learn more about the ROI of brand strategy and how to do brand strategy to differentiate with these articles.

3)    Personas

A persona (if you don’t know) is the detailed breakdown of your perfect fit customer. Your B2B tech marketing team uses them to target the people most likely to convert to paying customers.

If you don’t have any personas yet then you need to read this.

You can have as many personas as you feel you need for your brand, although we typically recommend three that really matter to your business. What you do need to make sure is that you are targeting the relevant persona for a specific audience. Don’t make it too broad: we write a lot of ‘Head of IT’, ‘B2B Tech Marketing Manager’, ‘Business Owner’ personas because they’re the specific roles we want to target in an organisation.

5)    Tone of voice (TOV)

Your TOV helps any team understand your brand's style of communication. As a B2B tech company do prefer a relaxed style, or something more formal?

Documenting this and ensuring every single employee understands it will ensure brand consistency in everything you do. Our CEO, Matthew Stibbe, wrote a handy guide to defining your tone of voice which is worth a read if you don't have anything written up yet.

6)    Brand assets

How many times have you been asked for a copy of your logo? Or bombarded with questions like, ‘Which font do we use?’ It can be infuriating!

That’s why listing your brand assets in your brand book saves so much time and hassle. If everyone knows where to find brand assets and how to use them properly, your team is less likely to use the wrong logo, image or colour and have to do the work again.

Brand assets to pull together include:

• Your logo (in as many file formats as possible)
• Your approved colours (with hex codes)
• Your fonts
• Any imagery/illustrations you’ve had designed

Brand strength for your tech company

There are common misconceptions in B2B tech that branding is for big companies. It’s expensive and not worthwhile if you’re not big enough. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Your brand book lays the foundation for your brand, values, culture and the big ‘why?’ which should inspire employees, partners and clients.

It’s the foundation of your brand strength. Keep in mind that products change, people change, markets change but great brands and the stories they inspire are constant.

Good companies build products. Great companies build brands.