If you’re an alternative health practitioner, an energy healer, or a holistic medicine professional, it can be hard to see why you might need something as formal as a brand style guide. After all, your brand is YOU! You’re with your clients face-to-face (sometimes discussing rather intimate subjects) and your clients know you well. But even for the smallest, most hands-on health practices, a brand style guide is a valuable resource and a helpful tool.
Here’s what a Brand Style Guide Can Do for You
1. It can Produce Confidence in Your Business
Having consistent guidelines for design helps to show your target audience that you are professional, and that you are a reliable solution to their problems. When you forget to use brand guides, the content and products you create can end up looking very different from one another.
You probably have experienced this… you have blue business cards from Vistaprint, a reddish-orange brochure you made yourself, and letterhead that includes an image on it that you can’t find any longer. This kind of inconsistency can lead to confusion or cause a potential client to simply not comprehend the whole picture that you’re offering.
With brand guides in place, your content will more readily speak for itself, offering a consistent and compelling story.
2. It can help you stay organized
As a healer and business owner, you’ll have a thousand “to-dos” on your plate, from keeping up your social accounts, to creating a brochure, to scheduling, to writing a new blog post. Each of these elements contributes to your brand, and each should share commonalities of voice, imagery, and colors. The brand style guide is a repository to store these common elements and remind you of them when you’re in the midst of a brand-related task. After all, do you remember the exact shade of green you used in your last brochure? If not… create a brand style guide. Prevent needless frustration and poor design.
3. Most Important: It creates Consistency for Clients and Potential Clients
The point of branding is really about keeping your materials consistent.
Your audience expects you to lead them through their healing journey with content that is consistently branded. This means that your brochures match your website, which matches your emails, which look like that letter you snail-mail to your clients each year.
With a consistent brand experience, potential clients can gain a clear understanding of who you are and what you offer. They’ll never confuse you with some other practitioner from down the street, and they can make an informed decision to be treated by you.
So…what if you don’t have a Brand Style Guide
If you don’t have a brand style guide and want to invest in your business and your brand, let us help. We offer a brand style guide as part of our website-building process because we think it is so important. Even if you already have a website, we’re happy to brainstorm your brand with you. Let’s make sure you’re telling a consistent and compelling story to grow your business.
