The landscape for marketing and brands is constantly evolving, with market shifts that require your teams to operate with agility. The ecosystem for design and creative requests has stayed relatively consistent, resulting in more work for design teams in desperate need of a straightforward way to scale easily. The term “brand template” has been kicked around a bit; we talk about it a lot. But we won’t pretend like this is standard terminology. It’s relatively new, and when we talk about it, we are often asked, what is a template?
This article answers the big question: What is a Brand Template?
You will also learn
- What are the benefits of Brand Templates?
- See examples of brand templates.
- Discover if brand templating is right for your business.
It’s time to modernize, and your brand (and organization) will be thanking you for introducing the next best thing since _________. We were going to say sliced bread, but we’ve since developed things like electric vehicles and knives made to cut avocados in perfect slices, so we’ll let you fill in the blanks as you see fit.
Let’s dive in!
What is a Brand Template?
A brand template is a design file created to brand standards by designers for cross-functional partners to customize for their intended use. Powerpoint and Keynote templates were among the first, allowing organizations to create brand-consistent presentations without importing the design elements and taking liberties with animations or word-art title slides. Jokes aside, the ability to create an audience-ready presentation that represented your brand well was magic.
The expansion of brand template use across organizations is growing. The social media coordinators no longer need to design their own posts but instead can leverage a pre-designed template from their design team to ensure brand consistency.
The success of brand template use and the ability for teams to build their own content from a template increases the potential for more template creation. If brand templates work well when the use case is considered in the design, cross-functional teams can iterate more quickly on projects and initiatives, and design time is reduced significantly.
With the use of brand templates, copy changes are easily made by non-designers, rather than submitting design requests to personalize messages or adjust changes in data on a form.
What are the benefits of Brand Templates?
Time-saving is certainly one of the more obvious benefits of brand templates for designers and those who typically rely on creative requests to fulfill their project needs. But, beyond time savings, there are so many larger benefits to the organization as a whole.
A list of key benefits of brand templates:
- Ensure brand consistency
- Automation
- Easy to find and use when localized
- Compliance
- Allows for reallocation of time towards strategic initiatives
Let’s discuss each of these benefits in a bit more detail.
Brand templates ensure brand consistency.
A brand template is a completed design that leaves certain areas of the document to be customized. This means the brand colors, logo placement, character sizing, and length are all input into the brand template. When brand template users customize the template for their intended use, all of the brand guidelines are already implemented for them. This leads to brand consistency no matter who is distributing the content and eliminates concerns about whether the brand guidelines are easily interpreted by individuals who are not trained in design.
Brand templates allow you to automate design creation.
There are varying levels of automation, but when most of the design work is completed aside from copy or data customization, the process of creating content is expedited. Some brand template solutions have even more sophisticated automation tools allowing you to input the data rather than manually entering it into the document. Automation with brand templates is a clear benefit and immediately saves your team precious hours on content creation.
Brand templates can be localized with speed.
Brand templates made available for your team means speed and ease of use. Teams already have what they need when you rely on templates to support them, and they can quickly personalize for their intended audience. This means you can scale content production easily because everyone builds content, not just designers.
Brand templates support compliance standards.
When you can include compliance-related requirements in your brand templates, you immediately reduce risk for your organization. Legal language or required logos and disclaimers can be built into the brand template, ensuring that the end-user doesn’t make a mistake or forget to include this crucial information in their document.
Brand templates allow for the reallocation of time toward strategic initiatives.
Time savings also means time can be spent on other projects when you use brand templates. Designers will have more time to focus on strategic work because they are not required to make small copy changes or personalize assets for their team. Template users can move on to their initiatives more quickly with the help of templates, giving them time back for strategic work as well. No one is waiting on anyone, and overall, time is treated more valuably when brand templates are leveraged to help meet objectives.
Examples of Brand Templates
So much of the content and collateral that you use daily can be templatized for your organization. Flyers, brochures, social posts, one-sheets, proposals, business cards, etc. The list is endless. The added benefit of brand templates is you can provide multiple options for each content piece to give your team the power of choice. While all of them would be designed to brand standards, you can provide various layouts and design options, which ensures better template adoption within your organization.
Below are just a few examples of brand templates so you can think about which assets your business should consider templatizing.
Social media template
Employee Report Template
Flyer Template
Template Library
Is Brand Templating Right For Your Brand?
If your organization creates content of any kind, brand templates are likely a great way for you to save your team time and produce quality content more efficiently. The benefits of brand templates are clear and often hang up on implementation is, typically due to resistance to a change in process or concern that no one will use them. We have partnered with hundreds of customers, helping them implement brand template use across their organizations. Our customers are better able to build content quickly and find that their design teams operate more effectively when production design work is offloaded with the help of brand template use.
If you want to learn how Marq can help you implement a brand template solution at your organization, you can schedule a 1:1 with one of our brand templating experts today.
