How can brand content guidelines improve customer engagement?

1 Why customer engagement matters

Customer engagement is the degree of interaction and connection that your customers have with your brand. It goes beyond transactions and conversions, and involves building trust, loyalty, and advocacy. Engaged customers are more likely to buy from you, recommend you, and stay with you. They also provide valuable feedback, insights, and ideas for your brand improvement. Customer engagement is a key indicator of your brand success and growth.

3 What to include in your brand content guidelines

Your brand content guidelines should encompass all aspects of your content creation and management, from your brand story to your content governance. Your brand story should define your mission, vision, values, and goals and connect with your audience emotionally. Your content strategy should align your content with your brand story and business goals. Your content style guide should specify the rules and standards for writing and editing, such as tone, voice, language, grammar, punctuation, spelling, capitalization, formatting, and citations. Additionally, your content design guide should define the visual elements of your content such as colors, fonts, images, icons, logos, layouts and animations. Finally, your content governance should control how your content is created, approved, published, distributed updated and archived; it should also assign roles and responsibilities for your team and stakeholders to ensure accuracy and compliance.

4 How to create your brand content guidelines

Creating your brand content guidelines is a collaborative and iterative process that involves auditing existing content, defining a brand story, developing a content strategy, crafting a content style guide, establishing a content design guide, and implementing content governance. Firstly, analyze current content across different channels and platforms and assess its performance, quality, and consistency. Afterwards, create a brand story based on brand identity, values, and goals. This should be done in a compelling and memorable way. Subsequently, set up objectives, audience, channels, formats, topics, themes, keywords, and metrics based on the brand story and business goals. Additionally, document the style guide with regards to tone, voice, language, grammar, punctuation, spelling, capitalization, formatting, and citations. Furthermore, document the design guide with regards to colors, fonts images icons logos layouts and animations. Finally set up roles responsibilities workflows processes and tools for content creation and management. Utilize technology and automation to make the process efficient and effective.

5 How to use your brand content guidelines

Using your brand content guidelines is an ongoing practice that requires regular review and revision. To effectively use your brand content guidelines, you should educate your content team and stakeholders on why they are important, and provide feedback and support. Additionally, monitor your content performance, quality, and consistency and collect feedback from your audience and stakeholders to update your brand content guidelines as needed. Lastly, audit your content periodically and check for any errors, inconsistencies, or deviations from your brand content guidelines. Make corrections and improvements to maintain content quality and consistency.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?