Hubspot-Inspired Guide to Building a Brand Identity
Hubspot has become a benchmark for consistent, memorable branding, and its approach offers a practical blueprint any company can adapt to create a strong brand identity.
This guide breaks down the core steps you can follow to define how your brand looks, sounds, and behaves across every channel.
Why a Hubspot-Style Brand Identity Matters
A clear brand identity does more than choose colors and logos. It creates a system that helps you:
- Stand out from competitors
- Communicate your value quickly
- Build trust and recognition over time
- Align marketing, sales, and service teams
By studying how established companies structure branding, you can design guidelines that scale with your business.
Step 1: Research Like Hubspot Before You Design
Before any visual decisions, perform focused research. This front-loaded work keeps your identity grounded in strategy, not personal taste.
Clarify Your Brand Foundations
Start by defining the core of your business in simple, specific terms:
- Mission: Why your company exists
- Vision: The future you want to help create
- Values: Principles that guide how you operate
- Positioning: The unique space you want to own in the market
Write these out in plain language that anyone on your team can understand and repeat.
Analyze Your Audience and Competitors
Research the people you want to reach and the brands they already know:
- Identify key audience segments and their problems
- Capture exact phrases your audience uses to describe challenges
- Audit competitors’ messaging and visuals
- Note what feels overused or generic in your category
This helps you avoid blending in and gives you clues about how to differentiate, much like large platforms do with clear category positioning.
Step 2: Develop a Hubspot-Like Brand Personality and Voice
A strong brand identity includes a recognizable personality that shapes your tone and language across content, sales, and support.
Create a Personality Profile
Describe your brand as if it were a person. Capture traits in a short list, such as:
- Approachable, expert, honest
- Practical, data-driven, optimistic
- Bold, playful, energetic
Refine this list to three to five traits. These become your filter for future communication decisions.
Build a Voice and Tone Guide
Next, turn personality traits into practical writing rules. Document:
- Words and phrases you use often
- Words you avoid because they feel off-brand
- Sentence length and level of formality
- How tone shifts in different contexts (blog vs. legal vs. support)
Include a few “before and after” examples to show the difference between on-brand and off-brand writing.
Step 3: Design Visual Identity with a Hubspot-Level System
Visual identity is more than a logo. It is a flexible system that can grow with your content, campaigns, and channels.
Core Visual Elements
Document the essentials that define your brand at a glance:
- Logo: Main logo, variations, and clear-space rules
- Color palette: Primary and secondary colors with hex or RGB codes
- Typography: Heading, subheading, and body fonts
- Imagery: Illustration style, photography rules, icon style
Make sure each choice supports your positioning and personality.
Usage Rules and Do/Don’t Examples
Turn your visuals into a repeatable system by including:
- Minimum logo sizes for web and print
- Correct and incorrect color combinations
- Spacing rules for layouts and buttons
- Examples of approved imagery vs. off-brand visuals
These details make it easier for designers, agencies, or partners to stay consistent.
Step 4: Create Hubspot-Style Messaging Frameworks
A strong brand identity needs clear, reusable messaging blocks that keep your story aligned in every campaign.
Define Your Core Story Elements
Codify the key pieces of your brand story in a short internal document:
- Brand promise: The main outcome you deliver
- Elevator pitch: One or two sentences explaining what you do and for whom
- Tagline or slogan: A short, memorable phrase, if relevant
- Proof points: Data, testimonials, or results that back up your claims
These elements should map directly to the needs and language of your audience segments.
Message Variations by Audience and Channel
Adapt your core story without losing consistency:
- Create tailored messages for different buyer roles
- Adjust length and detail for ads, landing pages, and email
- Keep a shared library of approved headlines and value statements
Use this library as a reference whenever you or your team launch new assets.
Step 5: Document Guidelines in a Hubspot-Like Brand Kit
Once strategy, messaging, and visuals are defined, bring them into a centralized brand kit that everyone can access.
What to Include in Your Brand Kit
Your kit can be a PDF, slide deck, or online hub. At minimum, include:
- Brand foundations: mission, vision, values, positioning
- Personality and voice guidelines with examples
- Logo files and usage rules
- Color and typography systems
- Imagery and icon guidelines
- Messaging framework and key examples
Link this kit in onboarding materials, creative briefs, and internal documentation.
How to Keep Your Brand Kit Alive
To prevent your guidelines from going stale:
- Review them at least once a year
- Add new examples from successful campaigns
- Retire patterns that no longer match your strategy
- Invite feedback from sales, support, and leadership
Treat the brand kit as a living document that evolves with your business.
Step 6: Train Teams to Use a Hubspot-Quality Identity
Even the best guidelines fail if teams do not understand or use them. Practical training brings your identity to life.
Onboarding and Enablement
Integrate brand training into onboarding and ongoing education:
- Host short workshops walking through the brand kit
- Provide templates for decks, proposals, and one-pagers
- Share writing checklists that reflect your voice rules
- Record quick video walkthroughs for new hires
Make it easy for people to do the right thing with ready-to-use assets.
Governance and Quality Control
Assign ownership of brand consistency to a small group or committee that:
- Reviews major campaigns for alignment
- Answers questions about edge cases and new formats
- Updates the brand kit when decisions change
- Maintains a repository of approved assets
Clear ownership helps keep your brand coherent as you scale.
Step 7: Measure and Refine Your Brand Identity
Brand identity is not set-and-forget. Monitor how your market responds and refine over time.
Key Signals to Watch
Track both qualitative and quantitative indicators:
- Brand recall and recognition in surveys
- Engagement with branded content
- Direct traffic and branded search trends
- Feedback from sales conversations and customer interviews
Use these insights to strengthen your messaging, visuals, and positioning.
Next Steps and Helpful Resources
To study a real-world example of how a large company approaches brand identity, review the original article that inspired this guide on the HubSpot blog: Brand Identity Development Article.
If you want help translating these principles into a practical plan for your own organization, you can also explore strategic consulting support at Consultevo.
By combining structured research, clear guidelines, and ongoing governance, you can build a brand identity that stays consistent, scales with your growth, and resonates with the audiences you care about most.
Need Help With Hubspot?
If you want expert help building, automating, or scaling your Hubspot , work with ConsultEvo, a team who has a decade of Hubspot experience.
“`
