What do you know about brand guidelines? When we start working with a childcare setting it is one of the first things we ask for, but not everyone has them (and that’s fine too!)
Brand guidelines, in their most basic form, are a set of colours and fonts you use for all your marketing, signage and basically anything digitial or printed that comes from your business. They are a set of rules, standards if you like, for how anything related to your nursery should look.
It doesn’t have to be over complicated though. When a company doesn’t have them we simply take our cue’s from the company logo, using the colours from that to ensure when we create your content, the branding makes it instantly recognisable as a post from you, as well as keeping your social media pages looking professional and polished.
Consistency is key on social media, and marketing in general, and it is important that you create a clear and strong brand identity that doesn’t just take into consideration the look of your posts, but also the message you are sending out by your tone.
We work for a number of different sectors and the ‘voice’ we use for a financial institution is very different from the voice we use with most nurseries we work with, because you want to appeal to different audiences and portray yourself in a different way.
As a nursery, parents and potential families will, of course, want to know you are fully up to date with the latest safeguarding information and learning discoveries, but they will also want to ensure you are a warm and welcoming environment for their little ones. They want to know the people behind the social media pages, this is why meet the team posts do particularly well. They need to see a more personal, nurturing environment with content that appeals to their needs. Not corporate, formal sales posts you might expect from a solicitor or similar.
So, our advice this month is to have a think about who you are writing these posts for and how you can engage them with your tone of voice. Also, take a look at your brand guidelines and see if they still fit with your business, or need an update. And, in the absence of brand guidelines, see if your logo accurately reflects you and use this to draw up your first set!
