Brand Templates

What Are Brand Templates?

Brand Templates in Marq serve as pre-designed, customizable layouts that help ensure brand consistency across your organization. They are specifically designed to align with your company’s brand guidelines, including colors, fonts, logos, and other visual elements. With Brand Templates, you can empower your team or clients to create on-brand materials quickly and efficiently while maintaining a cohesive look and feel across all content.

Key Benefits of Brand Templates

Brand Consistency: By locking specific elements within a template, you ensure that users adhere to brand standards, preserving the look and feel of your brand across all documents.
Efficiency: Templates streamline the content creation process, enabling users to start with a ready-made structure and focus on customization rather than building from scratch.
Control: Template creators can set specific permissions, restricting certain changes to core brand elements while allowing flexibility in other areas.
Scalability: Once set up, Brand Templates allow teams of any size to create on-brand content without requiring extensive oversight, which is essential for organizations with distributed teams or large content needs.

Core Components of Brand Templates

Marq’s Brand Templates are structured to provide flexibility for the end-user while safeguarding key brand elements. Here are some of the core components that you can use within Brand Templates:

Locked and Editable Elements: Template creators can lock specific design elements (such as logos, fonts, or colors) to prevent changes, ensuring brand consistency. Other elements may be left editable to allow customization as needed.
Brand Assets: Include logos, images, and icons specific to your brand within the template. These assets are typically locked or controlled to maintain brand identity across content.
Preset Layouts and Styles: Common layouts for various types of documents—such as reports, presentations, and social media posts—are available as starting points to help streamline content creation.
Brand-Specific Fonts and Colors: Use brand-approved fonts and colors to maintain visual consistency. You can lock these so that all text aligns with brand guidelines.

How to Create a Brand Template

If you're setting up a Brand Template within Marq, here’s a quick overview of the steps:

Start with a Blank Document or Existing Template: Begin by creating a new document in Marq or duplicating an existing template that aligns with your brand needs.
Add Brand Elements: Include essential brand assets like logos, brand colors, and fonts. These elements can be added from your asset library or uploaded directly.
Define Editable and Locked Areas: Use Marq’s locking feature to control which parts of the template can be edited by end-users. For instance, you might lock the header and footer sections to ensure consistent branding while leaving the body text and images editable.
Set Permissions: Determine who can edit the template itself and who can only create new documents from it. This control helps prevent unauthorized changes to brand elements.
Save and Share: Once the template is ready, save it in your Brand Templates library. Share it with your team or organization as needed, giving them access to create on-brand materials directly from the template.

Editing and Managing Brand Templates

Managing Brand Templates in Marq is straightforward, with options to update, duplicate, and delete templates as needed. Here are some of the primary management tasks:

Editing a Template: If you need to update a template to reflect new brand guidelines or refresh its design, simply edit the original template and save the changes. All users will see the updated version when they access it.
Duplicating a Template: Create variations by duplicating a template and making adjustments. This is particularly useful for seasonal campaigns or targeted marketing materials.
Deleting a Template: Remove outdated or unnecessary templates to keep your library organized and easy to navigate.

Common Use Cases for Brand Templates

Brand Templates are versatile and can be tailored for various types of branded materials. Here are some common examples:

Marketing Collateral: Design templates for social media graphics, email headers, and ads that keep branding consistent across marketing channels.
Sales Presentations: Create standardized templates for sales decks to ensure every presentation aligns with your brand’s professional look and tone.
Internal Documentation: Set up templates for reports, project updates, and internal memos, promoting a uniform brand style across internal communication.
Event Materials: For conferences and events, create templates for banners, name tags, and other print materials, making it easy to produce on-brand materials at scale.

Best Practices for Using Brand Templates

Update Regularly: As your brand evolves, revisit your templates to ensure they still reflect current brand standards.
Leverage Locking Features: Carefully choose which elements to lock to strike the right balance between brand control and user flexibility.
Provide Usage Guidelines: Include notes or guidelines within the template itself or as separate documentation to guide users on proper use.
Monitor Usage: Check how templates are being used and gather feedback from users to improve template design and usability over time.

Helpful Links for Getting Started with Brand Templates in Marq

What is a Brand Template?: Understand the purpose and advantages of Brand Templates.
Intro to Brand Templating: Get a comprehensive introduction to Marq's brand templating tools.
Creating and Editing Templates: Learn how to set up and modify templates in Marq.
Defining Templates in Marq: Get a deeper dive into the different aspects of template configuration.

Using Marq APIs with Brand Templates

For developers looking to automate or integrate Brand Templates within their applications, Marq offers several APIs to interact with templates programmatically:

The Template Object: Understand the structure of a template object within Marq and how to manipulate it programmatically.
List Templates: Retrieve a list of templates associated with your organization, allowing you to quickly access templates programmatically.
Template Created Webhook: Set up webhooks to receive notifications when a new template is created, keeping your application in sync with Marq.
Template Updated Webhook: Receive notifications when a template is updated, ensuring your integration reflects the latest changes.

These API references will guide you through the methods, endpoints, and event hooks available for managing templates within Marq. Integrate these capabilities to keep your organization’s templates up-to-date, automate workflows, and further customize template experiences.