You’ve probably heard of a brand voice guide, but have you heard of a content style guide? It’s just as important to create. Just like a brand is how the customer perceives your business, the content style is how your customers or clients perceive your content.
Plus, if you have a content style guide it makes it that much easier, faster, and less costly to hire an assistant or outsource parts of your content creation process. And sometimes you might need to hire out some of your content creation.
Essentially, it’s how you ensure everyone on the team is on the same page when it comes to content creation.On the flip side of that. If you’re brand new and still trying to create a brand that’s recognizable, then a content style guide will help you do so without sending out mixed signals to your audience.
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Table of Contents
- What is a Content Style Guide?
- Identifying Your Brand’s Voice and Tone
- Setting Guidelines for Grammar, Punctuation, and Formatting
- Developing Content Guidelines for Visual Elements
- Conclusion
What is a Content Style Guide?
A content style guide is a crucial tool for any brand looking to establish a strong and consistent voice across all channels, or even just one channel. It provides a set of rules and guides that ensure your brand’s message is communicated clearly and effectively to your audience.
Establishing Consistency Across Your Brand
Consistency is key when it comes to building a strong and recognizable brand. And it isn’t just for how consistently you post contnet. It’s also how consistent your content’s message and look and feel are. A content style guide helps you achieve this by creating standards that are applied across all channels and platforms.
This means that no matter where your content is being used, your brand message is consistent and recognizable. This also shows the importance of a content strategy that’s based on your business, not a social media platform.
For example, your brand’s logo and colors should be used consistently, and the tone and style of your content should reflect the same voice across all channels. This will help to build trust and recognition from your audience, leading to greater engagement and brand loyalty.
Enhancing Communication with Your Audience
A content style guide can also help to improve your communication with your audience. By establishing a clear and consistent tone, you can make sure that your message is understood and received as intended. This can help to build a stronger connection with your audience by creating a sense of familiarity and authenticity that they know can only be created by you.
Streamlining the Content Creation Process
Creating a content style guide helps streamline your overall content creation process. By having a guide to follow, you’re creating with rules rather than simply creating off a whim and ending up with contnet that doesn’t fit together. It isn’t cohesive.
A content style guide also helps align all members of your team on the same page. If you have a team of creators, you’ll reduce the number of revisions and edits saving tons of time.
And my favorite and of the highest importance, a content style guide helps you maintain a consistent level of quality across all of your content. By providing clear guidelines on grammar, punctuation, and formatting, you ensure your content is professional and error-free.
Identifying Your Brand’s Voice and Tone
The first step in creating a content style guide is to identify your brand’s voice and tone. Your brand’s voice should reflect its personality, while the tone should reflect the purpose of the content being created. For example, a brand that sells eco-friendly products may have a friendly and approachable voice, while the tone of its marketing materials may be educational and informative.
When identifying your brand’s voice, it’s important to consider the emotions you want to evoke in your audience. Do you want them to feel inspired, motivated, or informed? Understanding the emotions you want to convey can help you to create a voice that resonates with your audience.
Defining Your Brand’s Personality
Before you can create guidelines for your brand’s voice and tone, you need to have a clear understanding of your brand’s personality. Are you serious and professional, witty and creative, or playful and fun? Understanding the characteristics that make up your brand’s personality will help you to create guidelines that align with your brand’s identity.
For example, if your brand is focused on sustainability, you may want to create a voice that is passionate and enthusiastic about protecting the environment. On the other hand, if your brand is focused on luxury products, you may want to create a voice that is more elegant and sophisticated.
Another thing to consider is your authentic self, espeically if you’re a solopreneur. Or you are your brand, as in you’re the face of the brand and you’re the personality. Then you need to be authentic to yourself and let your personality shine through in your content. But how do you actually do that?
Well, for starters think of words and phrases that you say regularly. Not something you’ve said just once in your life. But things that you say over and over again. For example, I’ve found that I say a lot of things on memes about midwesterners. Like “ope!” I never realized how much I say it until I saw the meme… but that’s part of my personality. So my style guide would probably include the information that I’m basically a walking, talking, midwestern meme. Then, I would elaborate on that and add more phrases.
Determining Your Target Audience
It’s also important to consider your target audience when creating your content style guide. What language and tone will resonate most with your audience? What type of content will they be most likely to engage with?
By identifying your target audience, you can create content that is more relevant and effective in reaching your goals. This can all be done in your market research phase of creating your content strategy.
You’ll find that creating a content strategy seems like a lot of moving parts, but really you can simply it into 6 main steps. Learn more about my Content Strategy Framework: As Easy As ABC.
For example, if your target audience is young adults, you may want to create a voice that is casual and conversational. If your target audience is professionals, you may want to create a voice that is more formal and professional or authoritative.
Balancing Professionalism and Approachability
Your content style guide should strike a balance between professionalism and approachability. While you want to maintain a professional image for your brand, you also want to create content that feels personal and approachable.
Ultimately, your content should be accessible to your target audience while still reflecting your brand values and image.
One way to strike this balance is to use language that is clear and concise. But also being engaging and conversational. You can use humor or storytelling to make your content provide a connection for your audience. And then mix in some educational content that has a more professional tone. It’s this mix, or your content matrix that will keep your audience from getting bored and looking elsewhere.
Ultimately, creating a content style guide that reflects your brand’s voice and tone is essential for building a strong and consistent brand identity. By taking the time to define your brand’s personality, understand your target audience, and balance entertaining, educational, and motivational content, you can create content that resonates with your audience and helps you achieve more traffic and sales.
Setting Guidelines for Grammar, Punctuation, and Formatting
Now that you’ve identified your brand’s voice and tone, it’s time to create guidelines for grammar, punctuation, and formatting. Most people skip this step, but you’d be surprised how easy it is to notice that someone else created the content when these things change. It’ll stand out to your audience more than you know.
For example, every business that I’ve worked with throughout my decade-plus long career in marketing has had a different take on the oxford comma. Should a comma go before and in a list of items? Personally, I love the oxford comma, so I’m pro-comma before and. But I’ve worked for businesses that said no, we aren’t doing that. It’s their style.
Plus, having these guidelines and following them will ensure your content is consistent and easy to read, regardless of who’s creating it. Whether that’s a team of creators, an assistant, or you’re outsourcing some work while on maternity leave. It’s always the same, no matter who created it.
Establishing Preferred Spellings and Terminology
It’s also important to establish preferred spellings and terminology for your brand. This will help to avoid confusion and ensure that your message is communicated clearly. For example, if your brand has a specific product name, you may want to establish guidelines for how that name is spelled and capitalized in all content.
When establishing these guidelines, it’s important to consider any industry-specific terminology that your brand uses. You may want to provide a glossary of terms to ensure that everyone on your team is using the same language.
Outlining Formatting Standards for Headings, Lists, and Links
Your content style guide should also establish standards for formatting elements such as headings, lists, and links. For example, you may want to specify the font size and color for all headings, or dictate how lists and links should be formatted for consistency.
When outlining these formatting standards, it’s important to consider accessibility. For example, using a larger font size and high-contrast colors can make your content more accessible to people with visual impairments.
Following guidelines makes all of your content consistent across all channels. But it also makes you look more professional when you have things the same.
Developing Content Guidelines for Visual Elements
In addition to guidelines for written content, it’s important to establish guidelines for visual elements such as color schemes, fonts, and imagery. This will help to create a consistent visual identity for your brand, making it more recognizable and memorable to your audience.
Selecting Brand Colors and Fonts
When selecting brand colors and fonts, it’s important to consider your brand’s personality and target audience. Your colors and fonts should reflect your brand image while also being appealing to your audience. Once you’ve chosen your colors and fonts, establish guidelines for how they should be used across all channels and platforms.
If you’ve worked with a brand designer, you’ll just take the information that they give you to insert into your style guide.
Setting Standards for Images and Multimedia
Your content style guide should also establish standards for visual elements such as images and multimedia. Consider factors such as image quality and resolution, as well as file types and sizes.
Making your images the same type of file, resolution, sizes, colors, etc. makes your brand appear more put together.
Look at big name brands that you follow. I can guarantee they keep their images and all of their content looking the same. It makes their brand appear more polished.
It’s like taking a simple, white tee outfit and adding some jewelry, a statement belt, and fancy shoes. Always doing that means it’s your style.
Always sticking to the same type of images and designs is your content style.
Creating Templates for Consistent Design
Finally, consider creating templates for consistent design across all of your brand’s assets. This can include templates for social media graphics, blog post headers, and email newsletters. By using templates that adhere to your content style guide, you can ensure that all of your visual content is consistent and on-brand.
Conclusion
A content style guide is an essential tool to establish a strong and consistent voice across all channels. It helps your brand appear more professional and polished. You’ll be able to create content faster and easier, as well as having designs templatized to save time. Your messaging becomes more clear and less muddle. And it makes your brand easily recognizable. So, if you haven’t already, it’s time to create a content style guide for your brand!
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