Building a Content Strategy and Style Guide for Your Company

by | Jun 27, 2019 | Business Excellence

A chalkboard displays a crossword puzzle with the word "CONTENT" vertically and associated words horizontally, including "CREATE," "ENGAGE," "OPTIMIZE," "STRATEGY," "ANALYZE," and "PROMOTE." This intriguing setup visually captures the essence of a robust content strategy.

Every business requires a well-written style guide that defines its set of standards when branding. An ideal content style guide should include essential elements such as imagery, word usage, voice, and tone, among others.

Importance of building a content strategy and style guide for your business
The importance of having an outstanding style guide cannot be overlooked. For starters, it makes you unique, meaning your prospective customers can quickly tell the difference between you and your competitors. Also, creating a content strategy style guide fosters both brand and content consistency. Finally; it helps you stay current with the latest industry trends and saves time.

Why are content style guides vastly effective?

A successfully drafted content strategy style guide can be very effective. It helps communicate your company’s voice while putting emphasis on its value.

How do I produce a great content style guide?

Creating an effective content style guide can be a tad complicated particularly if you are clueless on where to start. Without much ado, here are easy guidelines on how to ensure that your content style guide achieves its purpose.

Identify your target audience.

The first thing you should consider doing when creating a content style guide is to identify your niche audience. You obviously have a specific target audience. Not everyone will embrace your brand. The best you can do is to familiarize yourself with your market audiences’ demographics and preferences for effective brand awareness.

Tone and voice

You need to be very careful with your voice and tone when creating a content strategy style guide. Your niche audiences need to have a clear picture of what you are all about. The language you choose to use can either make or break you. You can decide to be playful, enticing without being irrelevant. Consult branding professionals to help you identify the voice and tone that resonates with your brand.

Maintain consistency with your grammar, formatting, and styling
Consider working collaboratively with your marketers, content creators, or designers to come up with an appealing style guide. Your format, grammar, and styling should be up to standard. Otherwise, people will never take disjointed website content, sloppy and inconsistent content serious. Your content should be spellings or typos free if you want to entice your niche audience effectively.

Take advantage of references.

Take advantage of the internet to gather adequate information on your competitors. This gives you the chance to stand out from them through your unique content. Research extensively on the right images, visual aspects, brand color palette, and fonts. Don’t hesitate to put your content style guide designers or team to the task of getting it all right.

Final thoughts

There’s a need to be funny, clever, confident, and informal without being too cocky, bossy, inappropriate, and overbearing when communicating your brand needs through your content style guide.