One of the trickiest parts of making any marketing initiative work is being completely in sync with everything every member of your team is doing. Since so many business owners and entrepreneurs are opting to outsource aspects of their marking plans, quite often that team can be spread out over several continents.
The easiest way to bridge the gap is to develop a content style guide that lays out, in black and white, what your expectations are, so there is no ambiguity about what your brand represents and what it has to say. Today, I would like to give you a few ideas that, as a copywriting professional and owner of a successful copywriting company, I believe will help you up your content game significantly. While my main focus is, not surprisingly, on copy creation, these steps will help you more clearly communicate the direction you want to take all of your content.
Style Guides vs. Creative Briefs
Let’s first clarify one point: A style guide is much different from a creative brief. The creative brief is typically presented to the client by the copywriter and encompasses a single project (a blog post or series of posts, an email sequence, etc.). I’m talking about a document you prepare and share with the freelancers and agencies that are helping you build your business.
With that in mind, we always love it when clients deliver both. If there are holes in the brief we get from the client, we can (and do) ask him or her to complete ours to be sure we’re covering all the bases.
Elements of a Good Style Guide
When preparing your style guide, it is a good idea to make sure that all the following elements are present:
A Company Bio
• What products or services you offer
• Why you started your company
• What sets your product or service apart from your competitors’
• What problems your product or service solve for the customer
A Customer Profile
• Who the customer is*
• Why the customer needs the product or service
• Why the customer should only buy this product or service from you
Parameters for Content Presentation
• Information about your logo
• Acceptable fonts
• Required colors in visuals
• Tone of voice (particularly in copy)
• Guides for photos and other visual elements
• Any additional information you deem relevant
* If you have developed an ideal avatar or buyer persona, include a copy of it with the guide.
A Few Dos and Don’ts
There is a difference between a “complete” style guide and one that is too rigid to follow. You do not want to scare good writers, graphic designers, VPAs, etc., away by making the task of pleasing you look insurmountable. With that in mind, here are a few things to consider while developing your style guide:
1. DO leave a bit of wiggle room in your expectations. Remember that a style “guide” is just that: It exists to guide content creators in the right direction. Keep in mind that part of what you hire content creators to do is lend their creativity to your project. Keep an open mind and leave room in your style guide for a little creative license.
2. DO NOT try to micro-manage through your style guide. It only makes you look like a control freak. In fact, you run the risk of becoming one. The more intricate and exacting the details you expect in your content creation, the less happy everyone involved in the process will be, especially you. You aren’t looking for perfection, just wide appeal within your target demo. If your content is well-developed, well-researched, well-presented, and well-managed, it will be successful.
3. DO feel free to make your personal likes and dislikes known. If there is something that peeves you about the way your competition does things, be sure that your creatives know it so they don’t use it. If something slides through the cracks, however, DO NOT dismiss it in a knee-jerk response. Ask yourself why it found its way in and whether that might mean it’s a point the market expects you to cover. If you decide to give it a try and it works, great. If not, be sure it finds its way into the next version of your style guide, which brings me to my next point…
4. DO evaluate and revise your style guide regularly. By “regularly,” I mean, “as needed.” Please DO NOT change your guide every few days or few weeks. Let your creatives develop a rhythm to creating content for your brand.
5. DO include examples. For all types of content, you want to give visual representations of how you want things to look. In terms of copy, show the formatting you want for things like blog posts, press releases, social media posts, etc. Show your writer what fonts to use, how to segment articles, etc. If a creative has an exact representation of what you want and fails to deliver, keep searching. This should foolproof the process adequately enough for you to not need to request revisions (at least over how the page looks).
Final Takeaway
Create a style guide that you think you could follow. Be reasonable. Be flexible when it comes to reviewing other people’s work, and tweak your style guide until you have one that gets the right results from the majority of your content creators. It is well worth the effort and will serve as an anchor that keeps your brand message in the same place regardless of what type of content you develop.