Why Brand Guidelines Are Vital For Global Growth

When your company is small, your team gets the brand, because they’re immersed in it. As you gain customers and markets, it becomes harder to grow your business without diluting your brand. Multi-market brand guidelines will help.

You want to wow your customers, because you know this is the key to driving sales. If they love your brand, they’ll buy from you regularly. As customer journeys are increasingly online, to achieve this you need a strong pipeline of engaging content that’s on-brand and on-budget. In multiple languages, across multiple markets and channels, with multiple teams.

All of which means an efficient multi-market content creation process is essential. You don’t want to waste time on content reworks that can derail the process. They’re often due to avoidable terminological or stylistic issues. And after hours of corrections and difficult conversations with local-market offices, you can still be left with content that’s behind schedule, over budget and underwhelming.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Brand guidelines smooth communication and save time. They help your team understand your brand, prevent mistakes and make your content easily scalable. Here are four tools that will protect your brand and help you engage customers more effectively.

TONE OF VOICE GUIDE

WHAT IS IT?

A tone of voice guide illustrates how your brand should sound – and how to adapt this for different audiences and channels. It can also address topics like how (and if) your brand uses humour.

WHY DO I NEED IT?

People buy from people. And an inconsistent tone is the verbal equivalent of a mood swing. It undermines trust and makes it harder for customers to engage. Unengaged customers are more inclined to look elsewhere, hurting your sales.

A multi-market tone of voice guide allows you to protect your unique brand voice, while adapting to cultural attitudes and specific target country requirements. Making key decisions upfront will help your team get it right first time around.

For more on the business case for tone of voice, read our blog.

HOW DO I MAKE THE MOST OF MY TONE OF VOICE GUIDE?

1. Be practical. Include lots of before-and-after examples to drive your points home.
2. Get specific. Each new market and channel is different, so they’ll need tailored guidelines.

STYLE GUIDE

WHAT IS IT?

A style guide drills down into the details: measurement units, date formats, punctuation, preferred expressions and so on.

WHY DO I NEED IT?

A style guide improves readability, because it stops readers from being distracted by inconsistencies.

Readability matters. It matters for SEO, as Google have stated they want to rank content offering visitors a good experience. And it matters to your customers, who want to find information fast. A style guide improves readability by eliminating distracting inconsistencies, while allowing your team to grow with your brand.

HOW DO I MAKE THE MOST OF MY STYLE GUIDE?

1. Localize it for each market. Different languages have non-English grammatical features, which you’ll need to consider, like formal and informal registers.
2. Be TM-friendly. Taking care of the details will result in more consistent source texts, which are easier for translation memories to reuse.

GLOSSARY

WHAT IS IT?

A glossary is a definitive guide to your company’s vocabulary. It can include proprietary words, such as product features or industry-specific terms.

WHY DO I NEED IT?

A glossary protects your brand from inconsistencies and errors that can confuse your customers. There are almost always a few ways to say the same thing, but variations are distracting. By keeping terminology consistent, you encourage readers to concentrate on what you’re saying, which could contribute towards higher conversions. You’ll also save valuable time and money on corrections.

The more your brand grows over time, the more reference material you’ll have, which can make finding the correct version of a term more difficult. And as team members join (or leave), human memory is not enough to keep track. In fact, human error is a substantial cause of quality issues. A glossary will give your team members the support they need.

Here’s an example of a glossary in action:

This text has been run through a translation memory (which stores previous segment and sentence translations – see below for more). It’s been marked as “new” because the text is dissimilar from previous source copy, so the translator would have to translate it from scratch.

However, the glossary shows approved translations for relevant terms the translator can use. This will immediately improve brand consistency, creating a better customer experience across touchpoints. Time spent on local review will also be reduced, as these terms will not need to be checked each time.

HOW DO I MAKE THE MOST OF MY GLOSSARY?

1. Start early. The more content you create, the more difficult it will be to keep an overview and stay consistent.
2. Share access. Glossaries help everyone writing for your brand: copywriters, translators and reviewers.
3. Stay involved. Appoint a glossary advocate for your company. Consensus is easier to achieve when someone has the final say.
4. Centralize. Work with a localization partner to manage multi-market glossaries under one roof. This will allow you to benefit from economies of scale and make the most of entreprise-level glossary management software.

TRANSLATION MEMORY

WHAT IS IT?

A translation memory (TM) automatically stores translated sentences in source and target-language pairs. These sentences can then be reused in future translations, so you don’t have to translate them from scratch each time.

WHY DO I NEED IT?

Less text for translation means lower costs. But this isn’t the only reason.

Consistency in communication builds trust and rapport. It can also increase revenues by up to 15%.

However, with more channels available than ever, it’s increasingly difficult to pull off. A translation memory doesn’t only help you to keep costs under control, it helps to build sentence-level consistency throughout the customer journey.

HOW DO I MAKE THE MOST OF MY TM?

1. Centralize your translations and feed everything into the TM. The more content you add, the more you’ll save. As with glossaries, working with a localization provider can help you ensure accuracy while making the most of industry software and economies of scale.
2. Send all your changes through at the same time. Drip-fed comments and post-delivery changes must be manually added to the TM – with a higher margin of error. And the longer the old content is available, the higher the chances a translator will reuse the wrong version.

FINAL THOUGHTS

These global brand guidelines complement each other. And they all have a distinct role to play in controlling cost and creating quality content across your target markets.

But ultimately, tools are only as good as the people behind them. Do you need help boosting the effectiveness of your brand’s international marketing with quality brand guidelines? Click here to read about our approach, then get in touch. Our specialist team has decades of collective experience – and they’d love to hear from you.

Photo by Geoff Scott on Unsplash