Content guidelines are essential for creating consistent, clear, and engaging content that aligns with your brand voice and goals. But how do you ensure that everyone in your company follows the same standards and best practices when producing and publishing content? Here are some tips to help you keep your content guidelines consistent across your company.
Before you create or update your content guidelines, you need to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve with your content and how you want to communicate with your audience. Your content goals and principles should reflect your brand identity, values, and mission, as well as your user needs, expectations, and pain points. They should also guide your content strategy, design, and evaluation.
Starting with a clear vision and well-defined goals is indeed crucial for crafting content that resonates with your audience and aligns with your brand's identity. By identifying your content goals and principles, you're setting a roadmap for your content strategy. These goals should be tightly linked to your brand's identity, values, and mission, ensuring that your content is a true reflection of what your brand stands for. Understanding user needs, expectations, and pain points is equally vital, as it enables you to tailor your content to address those specific concerns and create a more meaningful connection with your audience.
Brand identity comes from brand consistency, which is more than just logos and colors. It's about what you convey in your content. Having a clear understanding of your content goals and target audience will help you more effectively communicate and convert your target audience into buying audience. Coming from a journalism background, I am deeply interested in answering: who are you writing for and what/how to make sure your content resonates with them? You'll find that once you answer those questions, you can better align your content strategy to creating the effective content on the right content marketing channel(s).
Create a style guide. All stakeholders involved in content production should be involved in the creation of the style guide, which will define your company's tone of voice. Appoint an editor(s) who has final sign-off on content publication and who is responsible for content being in line with your style guide.
Ensuring the content guidelines are adhered to across the company can become messy at times. For my organisation, it is a 3-point approach ?? Content Approval Workflow - Clarity is provided to everyone as to how content flows for review, and who is the final authority to give clearance to content before it is posted. ?? Training new team members - Discussion sessions are held regularly. We help new team members understand real-life examples of content that align with our guidelines and clarify their doubts. ?? Consistency audits - Finally to make sure the team is adhering to the guidelines. We regularly audit the content being put out as well as the adherence level to the process of content approvals.
Setting content goals and principles isn't just an administrative step; it's central to ensuring your content resonates deeply with your audience. As I've engaged with a diverse group of content creators and audiences, it's evident that clarity in purpose leads to impactful content. These goals and principles should be more than just words on paper. They are your north star, guiding every piece of content you craft. While it's essential to align with your brand identity and values, it's equally crucial to be attuned to the evolving needs and aspirations of your audience.
Once you have defined your content goals and principles, you need to document them in a clear and concise way that covers all the aspects of content creation and management. Your content guidelines should include topics such as tone of voice, style, grammar, formatting, structure, accessibility, SEO, and governance. You should also provide examples, templates, and checklists to illustrate and reinforce your guidelines. To ensure that your content guidelines are easy to find and use, you should store them in a central and accessible location, such as a shared drive, a wiki, or a content management system.
My office recently went through a rebrand. We made sure to have the brand guidelines and FAQs easily accessible via Teams and in an email attachment. As an employee, I saved all the documents in my own folders where I can reference them at ease.
When documenting a content style guide, it's important to consider various elements that contribute to consistency. For example: *American or British English: Specify which variant of English to use. *Language and tone: Define whether it's formal, casual, professional, or conversational. *Headlines: Decide whether they should be in Title Case or Sentence case. *Space between numbers and units: Decide whether or not to include a space between numbers and units. 10am or 10 am. *Dates: Establish the preferred date format, 05 May 2023 or May 05, 2023. *Bullet points or bullet numbers: Determine whether they should always end with a full stop or not. Content creators should consistently apply these rules to ensure consistency in communication.
By including topics like tone of voice, style, grammar, formatting, structure, accessibility, SEO, and governance, you're ensuring that every aspect of content creation is considered and aligned with the brand's vision. These guidelines serve as a reliable reference point that keeps content creators on track and maintains a consistent brand identity across various communication channels. The inclusion of examples, templates, and checklists is a great way to reinforce the guidelines and provide practical guidance. Visualizing how principles translate into actual content helps content creators understand the application better.
From my experience, just creating these guidelines isn't enough. Even the most meticulously crafted document can lose its potency if it's buried in some folder. Making it easily accessible ensures that it's actively referred to and not just a one-time read. Also, it is important to remember that these guidelines aren't set in stone. As the digital landscape and audience preferences evolve, periodic reviews and updates will keep your content dynamic and relevant. Don't just think of this document as a rulebook, but rather as a living testament to your brand's commitment to quality and authenticity.
Maintaining a consistent brand presence is fundamental to build on a strong brand awareness. That is why you need a detailed brand guideline as part of a brand book. It will ensure everyone adheres to the same standards. Important: provide a Toolkit along with the documentation: templates, material along with the brand book so all can use the same material, follow the same communication, the same visuals. Documenting matters so you ensure a uniform brand voice and tone, define brand valuers and creates efficiency too (reduce production costs for communications). As important as creating it, documenting it, is to provide training and digital access to the brand book + toolkit.
Creating content guidelines is not enough; you also need to communicate them effectively and regularly to your team and stakeholders. You should introduce your content guidelines to your team and explain why they are important and how they can benefit them. You should also provide training and feedback sessions to help your team understand and apply your content guidelines. Additionally, you should update your team on any changes or revisions to your content guidelines and encourage them to ask questions and share feedback.
Having an open line of communication is a must, here are a few things I have adopted basis my learnings from working on cross functional projects - have a daily meeting (even if it’s for quick 15 minutes) with all stakeholders - there should be one owner of the project so that the work is not stuck in the game of passing the buck - set clear expectations along with timelines - Flag to seniors only when timelines are not met.
In order for the team to really understand why and follow the content guidelines, it is important that they understand why they are defined that way, and don't think that they were defined by someone without any basis. So no matter how obvious it may seem to you, take the time to explain why each decision was made and how it connects to the company's objectives and audience.
During our rebrand, we had a meeting to discuss the new branding, guidelines and expectations. We used this as a forum for people to get familiar with the changes, but to also ask questions. The session was incredibly helpful for everyone.
Introducing the guidelines to your team and providing context on their significance is key to garnering support and commitment. When team members understand the "why" behind the guidelines, they are more likely to embrace them as valuable tools rather than just rules to follow. Clearly conveying the benefits to the team reinforces the idea that the guidelines are there to support their efforts. Your suggestion to provide training and feedback sessions is an excellent way to ensure that team members not only understand the guidelines but also know how to apply them effectively. Hands-on training and constructive feedback sessions create opportunities for clarification and learning from practical examples.
Small things can indeed make a big impact, and following a content style guide is one of those. A well-crafted style guide ensures consistency in how people perceive and interact with a brand across owned media platforms. At my content agency, we work with multiple organisations from different industries. We understand the importance of tailoring style guides unique to their business and brand personality. The content style guide serves as the holy grail for all content writers, providing them with a comprehensive reference for writing, editing, and proofreading. By adhering to the guidelines outlined in the style guide, both our team and our clients are able to maintain a consistent and cohesive brand voice throughout all content.
To keep your content guidelines consistent across your company, you need to enforce them and monitor your content quality. You should establish a content review and approval process that ensures that all content meets your guidelines before it goes live. You should also use tools and metrics to measure and analyze your content performance and user satisfaction. Based on your findings, you should identify and address any content issues or gaps and update your content guidelines accordingly.
In a local government context two things are important to make sure that we get the message across in a just and inclusive way: language and accessibility. Our approach was to centralise our approval process for all comms assets. All requests for print or web publishing from across the organisation come through either to our team or the webteam, or, usually, to both. We make sure that the submission follows the brand guidelines and make any necessary corrections. If there are issues that require more time ie language, translation or tone of voice, we work with the service area to improve their text. We supply proofs in two versions, print ready and web (accessible).
My team is always monitoring social media and content requests to ensure the new branding is being implemented. We often provide guidance to others on how to use the proper branding when creating content.
You need to monitor specially if you are working with a global operation, like I did for many years, and there are offices in different places with different practices, sometimes parallel goals. Is essential to monitor but if you just became the bad cop, you may not gain trust and build relations which is fundamental to engage and enforce consistent brand presence. Approach with suggestions, on my experience is more successful then just pointing that it is incorrect and bad.
Content guidelines are not static; they need to evolve and adapt to changing user needs, market trends, and business goals. Therefore, you should review and update your content guidelines regularly to ensure that they are relevant, accurate, and effective. You should also solicit feedback from your team, stakeholders, and users to identify what works and what doesn't in your content guidelines and make improvements as needed.
The content guidelines might not be rigid; they can and need to be changed periodically. By monitoring which content has performed best, it is interesting to reinforce this type of content in your content guidelines. Similarly, content that has not been well received by the audience may be a sign that this type of approach needs to be modified in order for the content to be attractive and receive the desired engagement.
Keeping content guidelines consistent across your company is not an easy task; it requires commitment, collaboration, and continuous learning. Therefore, you should celebrate your content successes and acknowledge the efforts and achievements of your team. You should also learn from your mistakes and failures and use them as opportunities to improve your content guidelines and processes. By doing so, you can foster a positive and productive content culture in your company.
When measuring the metrics of the published content, it's interesting to highlight those that were successful and those that weren't so good and discuss them with the team. What was successful should be celebrated and replicated, including in different formats (articles, videos, and posts), and what didn't go down well can be discussed so that together we can understand why.
Every company should have a 'media hits' page that lives in a doc and on the website - and most do. Most also share their success on social media - BUT they do not actually take the time to tag the writer / publication. So for any success, just take that time to show some public gratitude - people notice! Also be sure to tag anyone you think may appreciate it and if you want to go the extra mile? Frame the newspaper article / item and put it up on your wall! Environment is everything!
It's important to note that each medium (social media, YouTube, and blog) can have different content guidelines, depending on the objective and the way the audience behaves in each one. And because it requires specific content strategy, content writing, and close monitoring, the more media you use, the more complex the work and the content strategy team become.
Leveraging the expertise and tools of your learning and development team can also be extremely helpful in rolling out companywide training on brand standards and making adoption a requirement that's easily achievable. I encourage anyone who has the benefit of L&D to pick their brains, at the very least, to see what knowledge they can share on how best to roll out these initiatives. Alternatively, consider looking at third-party vendors who specialize in providing branding and marketing training courses that can help kickstart your brand standard adoption process.