to make brand style guidelines and why they are important

Your brand will likely be like many others, creating different types of content on multiple channels.

There might be more than one person on your content marketing team.

How can you make sure that the content you post online stays consistent in appearance, sound, and feel? How can you ensure that it remains consistent with your brand’s voice and style, no matter who it is created?

You should create consistency in brand content and branding presence. You need to establish brand style guidelines. This guide will show you how.

What are the brand style guidelines?

These guidelines will guide how your content looks and feels. Standards are your brand voice, color palette, grammar rules and how to spell your brand name.

These guidelines should be kept in a common document that everyone can access. To ensure consistency, each creator must follow your guidelines.

How brand style guidelines can be helpful in content strategy

One of the most important ways to cement your brand identity is by having a well-planned, thoughtful set of brand style guidelines.

These guidelines ensure that every piece of content you create is consistent with your overall reputation on the internet.

This is no easy feat as brand consistency can increase revenue by 10%-20%.

What happens, however?

People who come into contact with your brand may find it confusing or jarring.

Let’s take, for example, a blog that is serious and fact-driven but your brand voice, which is casual and light-hearted. This is a huge disconnect that will send mixed messages to your audience.

If your content and platforms are different in style, tone, voice, and stylistic choice, the same thing will happen. Your brand identity will look like a moving sea, but a solid, stable pillar that people can trust.

That’s all we care about at the end of it all. Trust.

Trust is built on consistency. Inconsistency can destroy trust. Brand style guidelines can help you maintain consistency .

How to make brand style guidelines

Before you can develop brand style guidelines, it is important to have a solid understanding of your brand’s identity. This includes your mission, values and goals. These are the foundations on which your guidelines will be built.

A brand style guide serves the purpose of cementing your identity. To do this, you need to identify each piece and then document them. Do not continue until you have completed this.

1. Brand identity: Mission, vision, and ‘About Us’

Start your brand style guidelines by recording your company’s mission statement, vision, and values.

You can include your brand’s story, or ” About Us” (how it was founded). What was the reason it was started? ).

Here is a list of definitions.

• Mission statement – A brief statement explaining why your business exists. Who do you serve? What are your methods of serving them? How do you serve them?
• Vision statement – A brief statement that summarizes your brand’s vision of the future. What are you aiming to accomplish? Instead, consider your greater impact on the world than just revenue and customer goals.
• Values – What brand values are most important? Which values are important to the brand?
• Story – How did this brand start? What was the origin of it? What has your life been like since then? What have you achieved?

These elements should be included in your guidelines as they will directly influence your brand’s style, personality, and voice. These elements can help you to approach content creation.

Imagine that your brand was founded in the basement of your founder. Imagine that the idea was born from a group friends spitballing. Creators can use this story to inform your content, if it is relevant. This story might help you to define your brand voice, which could be casual, friendly and down-to-earth. This story is an integral part of the brand’s personality and should be included in the brand style guidelines.

Bottom line: Create a picture of your brand that is universally understood by all who read and follow your guidelines.

2. Audience

Next, give an overview of your audience. This section must be based audience research. If you haven’t done this yet, now is the time.

Add business personas you have already created based on segments of your audience. Mozilla Firefox’s brand guidelines contain written descriptions of the two personas, caring confidentials and adventurous amplifiers.

This is a crucial piece for content creators working with your brand. Without understanding your target audience, you can’t create or write targeted content.

3. Visual elements: Logo, color palette, and typography

You can include guidelines for visuals in your brand style guidelines, such as how your logo appears within content, your brand colors palette, and preferred fonts.

This information is crucial when working with web developers or graphic designers. Standard visual rules can help you make your content consistent across all channels. This applies to whether you are posting on your blog, social media, building ads, creating presentations, sharing videos on YouTube, or any other medium.

Medium, for example, has clear guidelines about how its logo should be used.

Starbucks also has guidelines that show their favorite fonts and how they should be used.

4. Tone, style, and voice of the brand

Next, create rules that guide creators in how they present your brand to the rest of the world via content. You can keep your message consistent across channels by defining brand voice, tone, style.

Brand voice

Your brand voice is your brand personality.

This determines how customers perceive you when you communicate with them through writing or spoken communication.

Perhaps your brand is quirky and funny, mysterious and sophisticated, or intelligent and nerdy.

Your guidelines should also explain how your brand voice will be displayed in content.

A brand might use jokes and puns to make their content more fun. You might see GIFs or emojis.

Although their sentences may be a bit short, their explanations will be concise and clear.

Brand tone

How you speak is determined by your brand tone

You might, for example, come up with a great promotional offer that customers will love.

If you are required to give bad news, your tone could be subdued or apologetic.

Your brand voice is consistent because it is associated with your brand personality. Your tone can be changed to suit different situations. Your brand style guidelines can specify which tones should be used for different situations.

Style of writing

Your brand style includes your preferred word usage, grammar and formatting rules.

• Word usage – What words should creators be avoiding? They might avoid words such as “gonna” and “shoulda.” How should they refer to or talk about your products/services. How should they refer to and use your brand name?
• Grammar and spelling rules – Does your brand use Oxford quotation marks? How can writers approach abbreviated terms in a logical way? Can they use contractions, i.e. don’t versus don’t? Do numbers need to be written or spelled in English? Etc.
• Formatting guidelines: What rules do you have for bulleted and numbered lists? Are there any rules that govern the use of headers? How about links?

Mailchimp offers a great example of brand writing style guidelines that you can check out to get some inspiration. These guidelines go so far, they are a separate guide.

Mailchimp, for example, has specific rules regarding their voice and tone and how they use certain web elements (such headings and subtitles) in their content. They also have a detailed grammar guide.

Here are some tips for this section of your brand’s style guidelines.

Tip 1 If your writing guidelines are so detailed, you might consider creating a separate resource/document for writers like Mailchimp did. The rest of your team will need to go through endless pages of irrelevant information.

Tip2: Don’t waste time creating an encyclopedia with writing style rules. You might find it helpful to use a standard style manual that is already in place to help you base yours.

Large publishing companies have already created style guides you can use as a foundation for your own. These can be used as a foundation, and then you can add your brand voice guidelines. You will find subtle differences in each manual, so make sure you carefully review them to determine the right match for your brand.

5. You can also refer to these guidelines

These sections can be added to your brand’s style guidelines.

Guidelines for visuals in content

You might consider adding rules to control how images are sourced for blogs and other content. Are they allowed to use stock photos? All images should be custom graphics Are screenshots permitted? Are there any visuals that you would like to see?

Guidelines for sourcing and citing statistics and research

It is important to be consistent in blog content, such as how bloggers source and cite research, like expert quotes, data, and surveys.

Are there any sources that are not allowed (e.g. Wikipedia, low DA websites) What should creators do to link to and mention sources in their content?

Use Cases

Show people who are using your guidelines examples and do’s and don’ts in writing and creating brand assets.

Show your logo in its correct and incorrect usages, examples of brand voice, visual and verbal use, and the right and wrong ways to link to content sources.

Mozilla Firefox’s guidelines provide specific examples of correct use of the brand voice/tone.

Are you ready to design your brand’s style guidelines?

Building a Content Strategy is only one part.

Although it might not be the most exciting, it is crucial to maintain consistency across all platforms.

Consistency is more important than you might think. Because your audience trusts you, consistency is key because consistent voice and presence build credibility.

An unwavering presence is better than a steady one. It will always be reliable and true no matter what the situation.

The question is: Are you looking for your brand to be reliable, trustworthy, consistent, or scattered, confusing, and unreliable?

A clear set of brand style guidelines can help you determine what category you belong to.

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