You Need Content Guidelines

What makes a brand a brand? Is it a logo? Color palette? Fonts? Sure, a clearly-defined visual identity is important. But what about the words? What words are you using to articulate your brand? How are you using language to tell your story? What is your unique and special voice? And where have you documented this information so your teams can speak with consistency and precision?

Content guidelines should be a part of every brand book – full stop. At a minimum, they should include your brand statement, articulate voice and tone, and provide copy dos and don’ts. But they can be much more elaborate with sections on grammar, accessibility, inclusion, specific copy patterns, and more. 

Either way, every business should have some form of content guidelines as a valuable resource for their teams. Here’s why:

Consistency

At many businesses, content comes from a variety of sources. Product managers may write product and UX copy. Marketing often handles emails, social media, blog posts, newsletters, and the website. Instructional designers develop content for video scripts and elearnings. And support generates help resources for customers. That’s a lot of writers, with varying perspectives and writing expertise, generating a lot of content for your brand.

To ensure consistency of grammar and voice, they need to be able to refer back to a primary source. This should be your company’s content guidelines. Whether or not they should use Oxford commas, exclamation points, humor, or hyperbole should all be covered in your content guidelines. 

Similarly, with so many writers, you need to make sure everyone is writing with the same voice. Is your brand serious, chipper, helpful, or cool? Without guidance, writers tend to write in their own voice by default and this may or may not jibe with your brand. Well-intentioned writers may actually undo some of the work you’ve done establishing and differentiating your brand in the marketplace, by writing in a style that clashes with your brand voice. 

User Experience

When it comes to user experience, copy often takes a back seat to design. Really, the two should go hand-in-hand. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen beautiful designs dragged down by sub-par copy that is overly wordy, too vague, or just plain bad. We’ve all experienced it, and you feel it intuitively even before you identify the problem. You’ll read some copy in an app or on a website that makes you go, “Ugh.” And we all know, there is no scenario where we want our customers to think, “Ugh,” in reaction to our copy. 

In fact, in a perfect world, people “experience” your copy, they don’t “read” it. By that I mean, they’re focused on the message in the context of the designs and as part of a greater end-to-end experience. They’re not getting tripped up by awkward sentence structures or radical shifts in tone of voice. For the best possible user experience, you have to ensure quality and consistency in copy as well as designs, and content guidelines are the way to do it.

Efficiency

As you can imagine, there are efficiencies to be gained from creating content guidelines just as there are with visual brand guidelines. When onboarding new employees, you can hand them a resource that helps them ramp up more quickly. Managers can spend less time copyediting to ensure consistency. And, you’re less likely to waste time on damage control after a customer calls you out on social media for an inscrutable push notification or long-winded tutorial.

Getting Started

Ok, so let’s say you’re sold on creating content guidelines. How do you get started? You may want to look at some best-of examples. Mailchimp’s Content Style Guide and Intuit’s Content Design System are two examples of thorough, well-respected, and frequently-cited content style guides.

You should then approach your content style guidelines like you would any product. You will need to do some research, spend time developing your guidelines, test it with your internal teams, and iterate. As your organization grows, your content guidelines will grow and change with you.

If you need a helping hand, Mutti can consult with your team or even develop your content guidelines for you. (As with visual branding, an outside perspective can often be helpful.) If you’re interested in exploring the possibility, just shoot us an email. We’re happy to chat!