How to create brand guidelines for your plumbing company

Help consumers easily identify your plumbing company in a competitive market, and remember your name when they need you most.

Let’s face it, there are likely dozens of plumbing companies that service the same geographic areas you do. Consumers have lots of options and you’ve got lots of competition. One thing you can do to help your plumbing business stand out in a competitive market is to create brand guidelines.

The purpose of creating brand guidelines is to establish a set of rules for how your plumbing company is presented in the marketplace. Having brand guidelines helps ensure your plumbing business is portrayed in a clear, concise and consistent manner. This makes it easier for consumers to identify and recall your plumbing company when they need a plumber.

While brand guidelines can become as complicated as you let them, we’re going to keep things simple. After all, you’re busy running a plumbing company. Creating brand guidelines is probably one of the last things on your mind, but they are very important. The good news is that creating brand guidelines is a one-time process. Once you’ve created your brand guidelines, they’ll serve you for years to come.

While there are many items you can include in your brand guidelines, we’re going to look at three elements every plumbing business needs:

1. Brand Colours: The colours you use to represent your plumbing company in the marketplace.
2. Brand Fonts: The fonts you use to represent your plumbing company in the marketplace.
3. Logo / Wordmark: The logo or wordmark you use to identify your plumbing company in the marketplace.

Defining brand guidelines for your plumbing business may not seem like a priority, but it should be, because it affects how you present your plumbing business to the marketplace. The sooner you do it, the better. Take time to do it properly, as you want to get it right the first time- rebranding later can be costly and time consuming.

Let’s get started by looking at brand colours.

Brand Colours

When considering how you’ll present your plumbing business to the marketplace, one of the first things you should do is consider what colours you want to use to represent your organization.

As a plumber, selecting brand colours may seem like a waste of time. You want to help customers resolve their plumbing problems, so why do you need to concern yourself with colours? 

Well, the colours you select and how you use them will help differentiate your business from the competition. You’ll want to select colours that will help build a recognizable brand over time.

You should select colours that compliment each other. Popular colours in the plumbing industry are blue, green, red, and yellow. Take a look at your local competitor websites where you’ll be sure to find these colours being used.

Primary and secondary colours

Ideally, your brand guidelines should contain at least two colours- a primary colour and a secondary colour.

The primary colour is the main colour that represents your brand/business. The secondary colour is used as an accent- to provide contrast and help specific marketing elements stand out.

To provide additional creative flexibility, you can define shades of your primary and secondary colour. For example. if your primary colour is blue, you may also define a blue that is a lighter shade and a blue that is a darker shade.

Colour Harmony

If you’re thinking you need a degree in design to select the right colours, don’t worry- colour harmony makes this process easy.

Colour harmony are rules that ensure a harmonic balance of colours determined by a selected base colour. By selecting one colour as your base, colour harmony rules ensure that any additional colours you select complement that base.

There are numerous types of colour harmony rules including Analogous, Monochromatic, Triad, Complementary, Split, Compound, and Shades, to name a few. As you’ll see in a moment colour harmony can make it easy to create a unique colour palette for your plumbing business.

Let’s look at a couple of colour harmony examples, so you can see how it works and how you can quickly and easily use it for your plumbing company.

For the following examples, we are going to reference Adobe's colour website which you can visit at color.adobe.com

Monochromatic Colour Harmony

Monochromatic colour refers to a colour palette that is comprised of variations of one colour.

I love monochromatic colour palettes because they are simple, yet effective. Monochromatic colour schemes make it a lot easier to select brand colours, especially if you don’t have a degree in design. Try creating your own monochromatic colour palette on Adobe’s colour website. All you have to do is drag one of the coloured circles in the colour wheel, to create a monochromatic colour scheme that suits your plumbing business.

Complementary colour harmony

Complementary colours are colours that contrast, yet compliment one another. These are typically colours from opposite sides of the colour wheel.

Complimentary colour pallets can provide greater creative expression than a monochromatic colour scheme. Having two distinct colours in your palette is great for highlighting specific marketing elements. For example, on your website, you can use a contrasting colour to make important website elements stand out- such as buttons.

Complimentary colour schemes are also great for plumbing companies that provide more than just plumbing services. For example, a company that provides both plumbing and heating services may use blue to represent plumbing services and orange or red to represent heating services.

Now that you have a basic understanding of defining brand colours, it’s time to define your brand fonts.

Brand Fonts

Similar to brand colours, selecting brand fonts is equally important. Think of all the places you use fonts in your business. On signs, stationary, invoices, trucks, your website, and emails. Fonts are used in almost every aspect of your business.

You want to select fonts that represent your plumbing business and the industries or audiences you service.

You want to ensure you select fonts that are legible in all font sizes and colours. If a font is too hard to read, consumers won’t spend time trying to read it.

How many brand fonts do you need?

Your brand fonts should consist of at least two fonts or font styles - one for headings and one for body copy. You can define more fonts, but I am intentionally keeping things simple.

What are headings and body copy? Think of a book. Each chapter has a title or heading defining what the subsequent content is about. The content that follows the chapter title is the body copy- the long paragraphs of text.

You’ll use both your heading font and body font throughout your business- both online and offline. You’ll use them in print materials, signage, your website, email campaigns, promotional materials, and on and on.

As you’ll learn in a moment, headings and body copy each have an important role to play, which is why you need to define brand fonts for each.

Headings 

What’s the first thing you notice on the cover of a magazine or the front page of a newspaper? The heading. Headings are designed to grab consumer attention and engage with them. If your headings don’t engage consumers, the rest of your content won’t matter because no one will consume it.

Headings are important because they draw attention to your content, provide hierarchy, and make your content easier to consume.

Headings should stand out and contrast the body copy. Typically, your headings will be bigger and bolder than your body copy.

Body copy

Body copy is where you provide value. While your headings grab consumer attention, it’s your body copy that conveys whether you are the right plumbing company for them or not.

Understanding font styles

Fonts styles are typically grouped into one of a few categories, including:

1. Serif Fonts - Serif fonts include a decorative stroke that finishes off the end of a letters stem. Serif fonts are great for long paragraphs of text, as they are easy for the eyes to read.
2. Sans Serif Fonts - Unlike serif fonts, sans serif fonts do not include a decorate stroke at the end of a letters stem. Sans serif fonts are often modern looking, and are great for headings and short text. 
3. Display Fonts - Display fonts are often unique and creative. They can be used to support both formal and informal design. In most cases, they are best suited for headings.
4. Handwriting Fonts - Handwriting fonts reflect handwriting or printing, and add a sense of personalization. Typically you wouldn’t use these for either headings or body copy, however they can make for excellent accent fonts (that you use once in a while). They are also great for creating digital signatures. 
5. Monospace Fonts - A monospace font is a font with letters and characters that occupy the same amount of horizontal space.

Understanding font families

A font family is a font that contains multiple variations of the same font. The variations are typically comprised of various sizes and thicknesses of each letter. A few examples of popular font families are Open Sans and Montserrat. Both of these font families contain over ten variations including, light, regular, medium, semibold, bold, extra bold, and more.

Where can you find professional fonts?

While you can use any of the fonts installed on your computer, there are thousands of fonts available for you to explore. Some fonts cost money while others are free. For this post’s purpose, I’ll share free fonts with you. Don’t mistake the word free with cheap or unprofessional. The fonts I’ll share with you may be free, but they are professional fonts. In fact, some of them are the most popular fonts used in marketing.

A great place to begin your search for fonts is Google Fonts. Google Fonts offers hundreds of professional fonts for free. You can use them online and in print. Google Fonts makes it easy to discover and download fonts for your plumbing business.

If you don’t find a font you like on Google Fonts, and you are willing to invest a little money for the perfect font, you can explore other font providers such as Adobe Fonts. A search on Google for “Fonts” will open a world of font options.

10 Great fonts for plumbing companies:

Below are a list of ten fonts that are great for plumbing companies. Each font provides 10 or more fonts styles making them great for both headings and body copy. All of these fonts are available for free from Google Fonts.

1. Roboto - Roboto is a sans-serif typeface family developed by Google as the system font for its mobile operating system Android. Since its release in 2011, Robot has become a very popular font amongst marketers. With lots of styles to choose from, it’s great for both headings and body copy.
2. Open Sans - Open Sans is a sans-serif typeface commissioned by Google and released in 2011. With numerous styles, it’s great for both headings and body copy.
3. Montserrat - Montserrat offers numerous styles making it great for both headings and body copy. Montserrat pairs nicely with so many other fonts- it’s ideal to use for headings while using a different font for body copy.
4. Lato - Lato is a sans-serif font, and one of the most popular fonts in digital marketing. With all of its styles, it’s great for both headings and body copy. Lato makes a great front for body copy when paired with Montserrat for headings.
5. Railway - Railway is a sans-serif font. Because of its styling, it’s ideally suited for headings.
6. Playfair Display - Playfair Display is a serif that conveys a sense of professionalism. With numerous font styles, Playfair Display is great for both headings and body copy.
7. Work Sans - Work sans is a sans-serif font. With numerous styles, It’s ideal for both headings and body copy.
8. Merriweather - Merriweather is a serif font, that like Playfair Display, conveys a sense of professionalism. It can be used for both headings and body copy, but works well as a heading font when paired with a sans-serif font.
9. Jost - Jost is a sans-serif font. With its sharp lines it is ideally suited as a heading font.
10. Red Hat Display - Red Hat Display is a sans-serif font. While it can be used for both headings and body copy, it makes a great heading font.

The above fonts are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to font options. These fonts are intended to provide you with a starting point. If you happen to like one of the above fonts, use it. If you don’t like them, with a little investment of time, you are sure to find a font you do like.

Logo / Wordmark

Once you have clearly defined brand colours and fonts, its’ time to visually express them and/or support them with a logo or wordmark.

Logos and wordmarks are used to brand your organization in the minds of consumers. The idea is that over time, consumers will begin to recognize and remember your logo or wordmark. When they have a need for the services you offer, your brand will come to mind.

What’s the difference between a logo and a wordmark?

A logo is a graphic that represents your company, whereas a wordmark is the name of your organization written in a creative way. Let’s look at each in more detail.

Logos

Logos don’t mean anything to consumers until they’ve seen them enough times to associate them with a specific company. Think of Nike’s swoosh. It costs Nike millions of dollars every year to associate that image with the company and its products. If you had never heard of Nike before, you would have no idea what the swoosh represented- it would be meaningless. This is true of all great brands, such as Apple, Starbucks, and hundreds of others. You wouldn’t know what any of their logos meant if those organizations hadn’t spent millions of dollars promoting them.

I believe a lot of small businesses are in the habit of creating logos because they think they need one - they believe it’s one of the ingredients to create a business. While logos can be a great asset, you have to be prepared to spend a lot of money to create recognition in the minds of consumers- money small businesses just don’t have. If consumers can’t quickly and easily recognize your logo and associate it with your company and services, what’s the point in having one? The reality is, consumers need to be exposed to your logo on a regular and consistent basis for it to have the intended effect.

To be clear, I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a logo for your plumbing company, I just want you to make an informed decision as to the benefits it will provide to your business.

Wordmarks

On the other hand, wordmarks are a great choice, because they say or imply what your company is or does, and they enable you to put your own creative spin on them. One of the most famous wordmarks is Coca-Cola. It’s simply their name spelled using a unique font. Google is another great example of a wordmark. Instead of relying solely on the font to convey a unique perspective, they use four colours (red, yellow, blue, and green) for each letter in their name.

While both logos and wordmarks can be used together, I suggest using a wordmark for your plumbing business. Logos are far too expensive for small and medium businesses to derive meaningful value from.

3 tips for creating a great logo or wordmark:

Whether you decide to use a logo and/or a wordmark, you’ll need to keep the following three tips in mind.

• Legible: Your logo or wordmark needs to be legible. If consumers can’t easily make out what your logo is, or can’t easily read your wordmark, you’ve lost them. Legibility is affected by the fonts and colours you use, as well as the next two tips.
• Scalable: Your logo or wordmark needs to be scalable. Think of all the different places you’ll use your logo or wordmark. It will have to work in various sizes, such as a small logo on your invoice or a large logo on your truck. You should be able to resize your logo without affecting the legibility of it.
• Reversible: Your logo or wordmark needs to be reversible. I don’t mean you should be able to flip or rotate your logo or wordmark- I mean you should be able to easily reverse the colours or background. Your logo or wordmark should easily work on both a dark and light coloured backgrounds.

Brand guidelines documentation

Once you have defined your brand colours, fonts and a logo and/or wordmark, you need to document them in a format that is easily accessible and shareable with both internal and external stakeholders.

A brand guidelines document can be one page or dozens of pages. For most plumbing businesses, a simple one or two page marketing guidelines document will be more than enough.

Here is an example of a two-page marketing guidelines document:

Your marketing guidelines document should make it easy for stakeholders to understand which fonts, colours and logo or wordmark to use and how to use them, when representing your plumbing company in the marketplace.

Where should you implement your brand Guidelines?

Your brand guidelines should be used for everything you do. Below is a list of items where your brand guidelines should be applied.

• Online - Every online asset should follow your brand guidelines, including your website, content marketing, email campaigns, and social channels, to name a few.
• Print - Every print asset should follow your brand guidelines, including your business cards, letterhead, invoices, and print ads to name a few.
• Signage - All signage should follow your brand guidelines, including building signage, posters, and billboards to name a few.
• Vehicles - All vehicles that are wrapped or contain signage should follow your brand guidelines.

Your brand guidelines need to be used everywhere. Remember, the purpose of your brand guidelines is to ensure your plumbing company is represented in the marketplace in a consistent manner. Consistency is what is going to help you build a plumbing company that is recognizable to consumers over time.

Summary

Creating brand guidelines is a one-time investment that should be part of your overall long-term marketing strategy. Your brand guidelines document should be one of the first marketing assets you create, because it will affect all other marketing assets. The sooner you create brand guidelines, the better.

If you are an established plumbing company that has not established brand guidelines, now is the time to do it. It’s never too late. Start now by defining your brand guidelines and incorporating them into your existing marketing initiatives. It will take time and cost money, but it will be worth it in the long-run.

Key insights and takeaways

• Define brand colours - Define a primary and secondary (or accent colour) to represent your plumbing business in the marketplace.
• Define brand fonts - Define both a heading font and body font for use in all marketing and communications.
• Create a logo or wordmark - Create a logo or wordmark that is simple, legible, and easy to repurpose in various sizes and colours.
• Document and share your brand guidelines - Document all of your marketing colours, fonts, and logo or wordmark in a format that is easily accessible and sharable with both internal and external stakeholders.

Want help creating Brand guidelines for your plumbing company?

If you are a new plumbing company just starting out, or an established plumbing company that wants to “rebrand”, the Advisors at PlumberMarketing.ca can help you create brand guidelines and implement them into your plumbing business. Contact us today to learn how we can help.