The Link Between Content Style Guidelines and Great Business Outcomes

Style guidelines don’t get the recognition they deserve.

And no, we’re not talking about a branding style guide — the document that outlines your brand guidelines for your logo, font, and brand colors, among other design elements and formats. We’re talking about a content style guide — your best tool to make sure all your company’s content maintains a consistent voice and brand personality, regardless of department or location.

What’s a content style guide?

A content style guide serves as a cornerstone of your organization’s content strategy. It ideally brings together all content creators—regardless of their department or location—and assists them in standardizing their writing style and tone. This ensures that writers remain consistent with the brand and use the appropriate company-specific language.

Just as your brand style guide is used to ensure uniformity in how your company presents its visual identity, a content style guide provides writing guidelines specific to your company. These guidelines shape your content and help maintain brand consistency across all platforms.

Effective content style guides achieve several goals simultaneously:

• Distill your tone of voice and unify all enterprise content.
• Align your content creation workflows to your brand standards.
• Adapt as your brand identity evolves.

So, how do content style guidelines work?

You might be wondering what the fuss is all about with content style guides. How do they lead to awesome business outcomes?

Well, they play a vital role in creating engaging and effective customer experiences.

Don’t believe us? Here are some statistics to consider:

Marketing messaging volume will increase by 40 percent in 2021  Forrester Research

Typical Fortune 2000 companies average 30+ million web visits per year – totaling 700 million minutes! Similar Web

Internet traffic in some countries increased 60 percent following the pandemic outbreak OECD

Now, more than ever, customers and prospects are meeting and primarily engaging with your company digitally. As customer experiences increasingly take place online, regardless of industry or sector, you need to realize the value of your content asset. 

Though you might not have thought of content as an asset before, it’s actually one of your business’s biggest assets. It speaks on behalf of your brand when people can’t, and it guides people through every stage of the customer journey. Although it might not end up on your balance sheet, content is the fuel that keeps your organization moving. 

So that’s why it’s critical to have a well-defined content style guide (not just a brand style guide) that’s used at scale across your enterprise. Through a unique and consistent voice, your content creates parallel positive experiences for your target audience, and builds relationships with them as they get to know your brand.

Most companies focus on visual brand consistency by developing brand guidelines. And although that’s important for recognition, it’s just as important that your content uses a consistent brand voice. Plus, consistency in your communications makes your brand voice recognizable. Meaning it’s also a vital part of your brand strategy.

The top 5 reasons your company needs a content style guide

When you think about it (almost) everyone creates content for your organization. From support articles, and white papers, to blog posts and website microcopy, content is produced in all departments and needs to be governed by a content style guide. Which means your entire organization should adopt your style guide — not just your content marketing team. So we recommend storing it in a central location where it has the best chance of getting used. And keep it current and reflective of any changes in your naming conventions or other rules. Here’s five top reasons your company needs a content style guide.

1. Evolving content guidelines

A content style guide serves as a central repository for current content guidelines. As your brand evolves, updating the guide ensures all creators have access to the latest information, eliminating confusion and outdated practices. This enables consistent content creation that is aligned with your current brand voice and messaging objectives.

2. Consistent, better quality content

A comprehensive content style guide sets tone, voice, grammar, and formatting standards across all content types and channels. This consistency reinforces brand identity and enhances content quality. When creators follow the same editorial guidelines, it eliminates discrepancies and improves readability and engagement, increasing trust, loyalty, and conversions.

3. Uniform messaging and communications 

The content style guide creates a unified brand voice across all customer touchpoints. It provides guidelines on how to consistently communicate core values, mission, and unique selling propositions. This uniformity reinforces your brand identity and strengthens your market position.

4. Consistent names, abbreviations, and taglines 

An editorial style guide provides clear instructions on correctly using your company name, approved abbreviations, and tagline. This prevents confusion and ensures accurate brand presentation across all platforms. Consistent branding reinforces company identity, increases brand recall, and builds trust, which can improve customer loyalty and engagement.

5. Well equipped content creators 

A comprehensive style guide can be a resource for all content creators, regardless of their primary role or department, in-company or outsourced. By providing clear content guidelines for everyone, you ensure all content aligns with your brand voice and quality standards. Cross-departmental consistency unifies the customer experience and improves business performance across various metrics.

Creating your own content style guidelines

It’s time to start outlining your content style guidelines. Unsure where to start? Well, all enterprise style guidelines harness the basic formatting rules for one of the major editorial style guides. Adopting an established editorial style guide provides the foundation for standardizing spelling, grammar, formatting, word usage, and other variations of the English language — so you don’t have to! And you get more time to focus on company-specific guidance.

Best editorial style guides

1. The Chicago Manual of Style. This set of writing standards is used in commercial and academic publishing — so it’s one of the most widely used style guides and beloved by writers, academics, editors, and publishers.
2. The Associated Press (AP) Stylebook. The AP Stylebook is a set of writing standards for news media, and one of the most comprehensive and ubiquitous style guides. AP style contains commonly accepted journalistic standards for usage, spelling, grammar, and punctuation. 
3. The Modern Language Association (MLA) Style Manual. The MLA Style Manual is  used mostly in the academic world and is primarily a set of guidelines for formatting and citation, in scholarly writing and manuscripts. It’s often used in teaching and lays out the principles behind citing and documenting sources.
4. The Elements of Style. Written in 1918 and revised decades later by EB White, The Elements of Style is short and to the point. With an emphasis on clarity and simplicity, the rules are hard and fast — but set out simply.

If you want more details about what these style guides have to offer, make sure to check out our four style guides that every writer should know about blog. But of course, there are other editorial manuals you could chose from. Guides like the Diversity Style Guide and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. It matters less which one you chose, and more that you consistently uphold those standards across all enterprise content. 

The next step is including company-specific guidance for your content writers. These guidelines should focus on different elements of language and writing style, such as:

• Tone of voice
• Product and service-related terminology
• Grammar guidelines (or your lack of them)
• Accessibility standards
• Inclusive language

This part of the process is the most challenging. It’s difficult to know where to start and what’s important to include in your company-specific guidelines. That’s why we created the guide Content Style Guides: The Path to Creating Consistent and Engaging Customer Experiences. This guide walks you through the process of outlining the guidelines that make your style guide unique. It also discusses what role technology must play in helping to enforce and maintain your guidelines across the enterprise. Download your copy today and start creating compelling customer experiences, fueled by effective, on-brand content.

Bringing your content style guide to life

Most companies underestimate the power of using and enforcing a content style guide. And because of that they often under-deliver when it comes to customer experience. Our platform, Acrolinx, is here to help you unleash the power of your style guidelines. We can help you outline, enforce, and maintain your content guidelines by capturing and digitizing your content style guide and aligning all content creators (regardless of department or location) to meet your standards.

Acrolinx gives your writers immediate in-depth feedback on the clarity and style of their writing — making sure it’s aligned to your brand. This means that large teams, with different language skills, across different locations, can be guided to meet your content strategy and goals. Automation carries the burden of time-consuming editing for quality control, and integrates into your content creation process to deliver automatic alignment. And this fuels efficiency. From day one, Acrolinx maximizes the value of your content, by boosting its overall quality and effectiveness, and giving you time and money back to reinvest in other higher value activities.

Want to learn more about how Acrolinx can bring your content style guide to life? Let’s talk.