Maybe you’ve found yourself in this position: you’ve got your logo. You’ve got a beautifully designed social post ready to go, with the perfect place to add that logo you love. Aaaaand then you realize the background is the same shade of blue as your logo and you can’t seem to find the transparent white version you know must have existed at some point.

A complete brand toolkit is great, but a current, clear, accessible, USABLE brand kit is what makes the difference for busy marketers, creators, and business owners wearing too many hats. If you’ve been in business for a while, chances are you’ve got a lot of what you need. It’s just a matter of putting eyes and paws on all the pieces so you can deploy them at speed.

Step 1: Take stock

Think of your marketing toolkit in four major categories: brand (all things visual), messaging (what you say and how you say it), information and collateral. Work through your own marketing audit to nail down what you’ve got, what you need, what you’ve got and need to find, and what might be ready for an update.

[CHEAT SHEET: Download our free marketing audit checklist to make it easy.]

First thing’s first: you’ve got to have a logo. Not just any logo. A usable logo in a few basic formats:

• Main logo (horizontal)
• Secondary logo (vertical/stacked)
• Logomark (your visual icon, or the part of your logo that’s not your name. This works great for tasteful swag, social media, and any use case that would be too small or busy for your name to be legible)

For each logo variation, make sure you’ve got your complete toolbox of file types and color variations: 

• Color, white only, black only
• .eps
• .pdf
• .svg
• .jpg
• .png

You and your team might primarily use the .png and .jpg images, but future partners may require some other formats for specific designs or print. A vector logo is required, for example, for large-scale printing such as billboards or precision work like embroidery. Colors, typography, photography guidelines and accessory design elements round out your visual brand kit. Read more about how a solid design foundation helps you maintain consistency as you grow.

Beyond the visuals, clarify your brand messaging in your toolkit so you’re not reinventing the wheel every time. Define your elevator pitch, audiences, key messages, and brand voice once so you can build it with every piece of communication you publish. 

Imagine if every time you talked to a new friend they acted completely differently. Wild swings in personality, mannerisms and speech patterns would throw anyone off. You’d never build trust or intimacy. And trust me, you want your audience to build trust and intimacy with your brand. So let them get to know you by consistently being who you are! 

Current, accurate, relevant information is central to any brand toolkit, but it’s often overlooked (and easily outdated). You’ll want to have info handy about your team, your work and your impact. This is great material for social posts, web content and newsletters, but it also saves you a lot of time when opportunity strikes. (If a reporter calls or a new client has unexpected questions, you don’t really want to say “let me call you back,” while you track down your answers.)

Review the information you’ve got on record and update periodically.

Step 2. Clear the clutter

Spring cleaning isn’t just a time to add. It’s a time to take a hard look at your closet full of (possibly ancient) assets and make Marie Condo proud. If it’s no longer serving your brand, it’s time to let it go.

There might be secondary colors, fonts, design elements or templates that just don’t fit your brand any more. They may be starting to look dated or just maxed out their usefulness. Part of keeping your brand fresh is clearing out what has started to get stale.

Like any good closet cleanup, that doesn’t mean everything goes in the trash. Make a toss pile (to archive, not delete–you never know when the nostalgia cycle will turn) and an update pile (think old templates that need a new look, outdated assets still rocking an old logo, anything that could benefit from a little refresh). 

Step 3. Update core collateral

Now that you’ve dusted off your logo, colors, fonts, visuals, and messaging, decluttered the brand closet and identified what you need to update, it’s time to turn to your core collateral. These are the hardworking evergreen assets that get your brand story out there.

• Business cards
  • Leave a paw print that sticks with snazzy, current, memorable business cards.
• Organization-wide flyer or brochure
  • Communicate your brand identity, ethos and offerings in style.
• One-sheets
  • More specific than brochures, you’ll want one-sheets for each of your highest-priority products or programs. One-sheets are great to share in printed form, but also saved as pdfs to share with leads via email.
• Templates
  • Use precious design resources wisely! Invest in professionally designed templates that you can populate and repurpose over and over again for social posts, emails and even ads.
• Signage and banners
  • Critical for physical locations, events or trade shows, banners provide high visibility and create immediate brand recognition.

• Stickers
  • Small-but-mighty print marketing superstars, stickers are unobtrusive and always a hit. Stick them on your shipping orders, pass them out at trade shows,  networking events, even at your local coffee shop.

Remember–you’re not creating an entire brand from scratch in a day. You’ve probably got a lot of this floating around, and we’re not recommending that you do it all at once. We are inviting you to look at what you’ve got and start taking intentional care of your living, breathing brand. An annual brand cleanup helps you get the most out of what you’ve got and efficiently build what you need.

Use what you’ve got. Build what you need. Update, refresh and evolve as you. That’s how your brand stays both familiar and vibrant.

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Organization hot tips: 

• Add dates to updated items! Remove outdated versions from shared folders. 
• Keep your brand guide up to date as a single source of truth everyone can refer back to.
• Build your updated brand kit into your tools! If you’re using Canva, you can save your colors, fonts, assets, templates and even brand voice in one place your whole team can easily access and apply to designs in progress.