What’s a Content Style Guide, and Why Do You Need One?

You know when you see a piece of writing, and you think, “Yes! I love this. What is this business?” 

That’s how you know that business understands their brand voice and you as a customer. They also know how to communicate that brand voice to their team in a way that all of the content they produce harnesses it.

What’s a content style guide? It’s how businesses communicate their vibe with anyone who’s creating content for them.

This post delves further into what a content style guide is and why you need one. Then we explain how to create a content style guide for your organization or for a client.

What’s a Content Style Guide?

A content style guide is an essential document for maintaining consistency across various platforms. It provides guidelines on brand voice, tone, grammar usage, best practices, and examples to help your team create on-brand content that resonates with the target audience. 

A well-crafted content style guide can significantly improve your content marketing efforts by ensuring that all written materials adhere to the same standards and effectively communicate your company’s message.

Why Your Business Needs a Content Style Guide

So, why can’t you just communicate your brand voice with your team and explain the vibe to them? Why is all the documentation necessary? Doesn’t a documented content style guide dampen your team’s creativity?

Your business needs a style guide to:

• Maintain Brand Consistency. With multiple content creators working on different projects, it’s crucial to have specific guidelines in place to ensure consistent messaging throughout all channels. A content style guide is essential for keeping all output uniform, whether it’s blogs, newsletters, or social media posts.
• Increase Efficiency. Having an established set of rules helps streamline the content creation process by providing clear instructions for writers and editors. If they have a question, all they have to do is look up the rule.
• Elevate Professionalism. Adhering to an editorial style guide demonstrates a commitment to producing high-quality work. It shows your team and your audience that you care about the details.
• Foster Collaboration. An accessible reference document allows team members to align their efforts when creating or reviewing content assets. In other words, it keeps everyone on the same page.
• Represent You. You want your audience to know immediately that a message is from your business. Unifying your brand voice and editorial decisions with a content style guide is key to making this happen.

How to Create a Content Style Guide for Your Business

Here’s the thing about style guides: they aren’t simple to create. They’re also never done, which may be why people shy away from creating them.

But it’s clear that a style guide is necessary to truly harness and communicate in your brand’s unique voice. And that voice is critical to helping your business stand out from the competition.

So, in the end, the style guide is worth the effort.

Never created a style guide before? Here’s how.

Document the Basics

All content style guides need to address basic components. Those items include:

• Business name
• What you do
• Who you serve
• Brand voice (You may want to include internal examples here or vibes you like.)
• Overarching language rules (ex: keep language simple and casual; use the Oxford comma)
• Formatting rules (ex: bulleted lists; upstyle all headers)
• Key competitors
• Special notes

It’s easier to know these basics when you’re creating an in-house style guide. After all, who knows your business and what you want better than you?

If you’re creating one for a client, you’ll want to ask them these basic questions during onboarding. You can then use the information you gather to make the guide.

Choose a Base Guide

Once you have the basic information documented, it’s time to create a dictionary-type word usage guide.

There’s absolutely no need to start from scratch. There are a lot of amazing style guides out there to use as a foundation. 

When I’m creating a new style guide for a writing team, I always start with the latest version of the AP Stylebook. I create a Google Doc with A-Z headers, then I begin filling in the entries that are applicable to the business.

How do I know what’s applicable? Part of it is based on experience. I’ve written and edited for decades, so I know usage that people tend to have problems with or disagree about. Those are areas that need to be documented for clarity. I’ve also created many of these guides, so I have a sort of feel for it. 

Beyond my personal experience, I look for things that make sense for the business. For example, if I’m writing for Content Journey, I’m going to need to know if it’s eBook, ebook, or e-book since we write e-books and write about them. So, that’s an entry to include in the guide.

Add Specifics

Once you’re done with the base guide as it applies to your organization, it’s time to add entries that are specific to your business. 

These entries may include:

• The company’s formal name
• Names and official titles of stakeholders
• Names of rooms, buildings, or locations you frequently write about
• Words they want to use in certain ways. For example, every e-commerce client we have uses the word differently (ecommerce, eCommerce, e-commerce, etc.).
• Words never to use. For example, our mental health clients don’t use the word “addict.” 
• Language rules. For example, use the singular they instead of gender-specific pronouns.
• Any words or phrases that are part of the business’s niche

In this part of guide creation, you’re building on the entries that you’ve created to date and making it more specific and applicable to the business it’s for. Add as many specific entries as you can to help guide your team, but don’t stress about getting everything. The truth is, you never will, and as soon as you think you’re done, a rule or usage will change as language adapts.

Gather Input

The style guide won’t be done. But, once the minimal shippable product is complete, gather input from your team. Are there any entries they don’t understand? Anything they disagree with? Entries they don’t see that should be included?

If we’re creating a style guide for a client, we ask for their review, input, and approval at this point.

Whether internal or external, make whatever changes or additions are needed.

Share Widely

Once the style guide is ready for use, you want to make sure everyone has access to it and is empowered to use it. 

We keep this as simple as possible at Content Journey. All of our style guides are in Google Docs. We include a link to the client’s style guide in every content brief. All writers have a link to our in-house guide.

You may want to consider having training sessions to familiarize writers with the style guide. You also want to lead them to it to answer their questions or reference entries as frequently as possible. In other words, get them accustomed to using the guide to find the answers they need.

Constantly Revise

I’ve mentioned several times how the style guide is never done. It’s one of the fabulous things about this process. A style guide is a living document. For it to be really effective, you have to update it when the need arises.

This means paying close attention to client and writer feedback, any rules that might be missing, and any usage debates that arise to document need entries for clarity. Have a single person (editor) in charge of altering the guides, if necessary, and encourage writers to let that person know if a change needs to be made or an entry addressed.

Content Journey Embraces Your Style

Creating a content style guide is an essential part of any successful content marketing strategy. A content style guide ensures that all of your content follows the same rules and standards, making it easier for readers to recognize your brand’s voice and approach to communication. 

At Content Journey, we embrace your style in all the work we do for your brand. We’ll learn your brand voice and usage preferences, then document them in a style guide for our team to follow. If you already have a style guide, that’s fabulous too! We’ll adhere to it in all of your content marketing services.
Ready for consistent, professional communication? Contact Content Journey today to learn how we can help.