Brand Consistency

Start by adding the brand guidelines representing your brand standards. You can define guidelines for text styles (fonts), color palette, and brand voice (tone of voice). Guidelines apply to all sites in your account.  

Text Style

The text style guidelines specify the styles to be used for copy. You can add guidelines for each of the text elements such as Heading and Body with each guideline specifying the font family (required), size, weight (keyword or numeric), style (normal/italic/oblique), line height, and letter spacing. A best practice is to define the guidelines for all text styles in the brand book (heading, sub-heading, body/paragraph, etc.) to ensure coverage.  

Color

We recognize that color is fundamental to brand identity. That's why we offer full support for multiple color palettes, giving you the flexibility to perfectly match the palette structure outlined in your brand book. Note that the color can be specified in RGB, Hex, HSL or directly via a color picker. 

Brand Voice

You can create a brand voice profile that lists the tone words for your brand. A brand voice profile should be given a name and description for easier identification. Up to 4 tone words can be defined under a profile. A tone word definition has the following components: 

1. On-brand tone word: The tone word itself. E.g. Confident
2. Off-brand tone word: This is the tone that must be avoided. In effect, it sets the boundary of the on-brand tone word. For e.g. Pushy. Taken together, the on-brand and off-brand tone words provide guidance on the brand voice. In the above example, Confident but not Pushy is how the brand voice is represented. Up to 3 off-brand tone words can be specified.
3. Tone description: A formal definition of the tone word in your words. Typically, this is part of the brand book.
4. Tone examples: A list of examples that shows the correct use of the tone. Items i-iv are fed into Brand Consistency’s AI algorithm that assesses brand voice. It is, therefore, important to provide a clear description and a list of relevant examples in the definition.

Note: The brand voice functionality has been evaluated exclusively for English content at this time.

Improving brand voice definition 

You can further refine the tone word definition using AI-backed suggestions that evaluate the definition for consistency and correctness.

Run Content Assessment 

Once the guidelines are defined, you can run on-demand brand checks for a single page, or an entire website. Text style and color palette checks are always included in these scans. The brand voice assessment, on the other hand, is an optional check to avoid hitting the usage limits for the brand voice checks.

Review and remediate brand issues 

Results of the assessment are shown under “Brand Issues” in a tabulated form. Each page that has a brand issue is listed as a separate row.  

You can jump into a given page and get a contextualized view of the issue alongside the page content. 

1. Brand voice issues: The content of the page is assessed against each of the tone words. If the content doesn’t match a tone word it gets flagged as a brand voice issue. A short reasoning for this assessment followed by an actionable recommendation to update the paragraph to incorporate this tone is provided. 
2. Text style and color palette issues: If the text and color for the different sections on a page match none of the guidelines then that gets reported as an issue.

Refine content for brand voice 

You can use the brand voice checker in the page report to refine content pieces for alignment with your brand voice. Each brand voice occurrence in the page report has a “Check brand voice” button. Clicking this button opens a modal where you can make content revisions and get immediate feedback on brand voice of those revisions. Once you are satisfied with the results, you can copy the revised content into your clipboard and paste them into your CMS (Content Management System). If you have configured CMS deeplinking with Siteimprove, you can click on the "CMS" icon in the page report and land directly on the editing environment for that page in your CMS where the updates can be pasted.  

Manage issue occurrences 

Each issue occurrence has a default “Open” status. You can change its status in the page report where the issue is flagged. Issues that need further action or investigation can be set to “Acknowledged" with relevant reasons and comments. Similarly, issue occurrences that don’t need action or resolution can be marked as “Dismissed” with supporting comments. The status of an issue occurrence can be updated at any time. An issue occurrence and its status are preserved across brand checks on that page until that issue is no longer detected in a brand check. 

 You can filter on issues by status to focus your attention on items that are either new or still need action or attention. 

Permissions 

To limit access to Brand Consistency to specific roles, go to “Settings->Users->Roles” and find “Brand consistency” under the “Role permissions” section. Here, change Views for “Brand consistency” from “View” to “Hide” for roles that should not have access to this product.