The Key to Brand Success
Your brand is the defined version of your customer experience. Physically, it’s how your customers identify you. Emotionally, it’s how they connect with you. But good brands don’t just happen, they are created. It is imperative for businesses to be aware of the brand experience they desire customers to have and a well-thought-out plan to make it happen.
Because your online community is an extension of your business, the same standards that apply to the rest of your brand should apply to your community. One key to success that we’ve seen time and again in our most successful community implementations is a defined set of brand guidelines.
Whether you call it a brand style guide, brand book, or brand kit, this gathered set of assets act as a guide for how to communicate your brand consistently to your audience across all channels and for anyone who uses your brand and its components in their work, including employees, channel partners, designers and marketing agencies.
The Benefits of a Strong Brand
Besides the traditional benefits that come with setting up a Salesforce community (self-service, communication, collaboration, etc.), when you look at it like a branding tool, there are even more benefits.
- Trust: If your branding is consistent and easy to recognize, it can help people feel more at ease when engaging with your products or services. Over time, that awareness and consistency build trust (which is especially crucial for self-service communities).
- Faster Results: A defined brand guide not only make the lives of the people who work with your brand easier, it makes projects go by faster and provides a solid framework for where to start when designing your community.
- Better Outcomes: When there is a framework in place, there is less guessing from a design perspective and teams are able to deliver more on-brand results.
- Ability to Collaborate: Brand guidelines help demonstrate relationships between your company and other parties or websites associated with you (like a community). If you operate a network of distributors, provide them with guidelines on using your brand as part of their identity.
How to Create a Salesforce Community Brand Kit
To create a brand kit for the Customer Service Template for a Salesforce Community, we recommend the following assets be on-hand when creating your community.
- High-resolution image of your company logo
- Fonts and typeface usage guidelines
- Color scheme (Did You Know: Color increases brand recognition by up to 80% – University of Loyola)
- Image to use as a header
- Thumbnail images (if you’re using Featured Topic)
We explain this in more detail in the interactive workbook below in the section on Crafting Your Rollout Strategy.
Tools to Help You Brand Your Community
If you do not have all the defined assets, then you have a little room to play!
- Photos: We recommend royalty-free websites like Pexels, Unsplash, Pikwizard, or Pixabay.
- Fonts: Choose from hundred in Google Fonts, DaFont, or selective fonts on Creative Market.
- Customizing: If you need to size photos, add textual elements, or logos, Canva is a great, free tool that allows you to drag-and-drop create your own graphic design solutions.
- Experts: You can always let the experts at Perficient take over your community branding. We’ve built hundreds of communities including Gigamon, GoPro, and HULU.
We break down all the steps to design and rollout a branded community in the free workbook below. If you are serious about creating a self-service site for customers, it will give you the steps to make a business case for your community, in addition to helpful tips we’ve learned from our extensive Salesforce Community rollouts.
