The Importance of a Style Guide

Content editing is more than a quick glance for errors. While that's important, it also involves following your company's guidelines, often referred to as a style guide, to ensure the content meets their standards. A style guide is a set of standards for the writing, formatting, and design of content. It's a document that indicates the basic rules of writing you and your team agree to follow to ensure consistency across all your content. This includes things, like topics, voice, tone, product and persona positioning, grammar and punctuation, capitalization, fonts, colors, and logo design — to name a few.​

​Your company may already have a style guide, but don't worry if they don't. You can work with a designer and your marketing team to establish one, or create one based on your company's brand, and ensure it's implemented throughout their content. Check the resources section for a free guide and template.​

​Now you may be wondering, "Do we really need to have all of this outlined?" The short answer is yes. Why? Let's think about what may happen if you don't. Imagine you're editing content from a variety of contributors and you have a few blog posts and an ebook to read through. As you work through them, you start to notice their subtle — but important — differences, like how each piece of content uses different fonts and colors, or how some of the content contains contractions while the other content doesn't. You may even notice that the tone differs, with one blog post sounding conversational while the other sounds academic. All in all, the pieces don't sound like your brand is supposed to and they don't align.​

​This misalignment can lead to a multitude of problems. Internally, not having a style guide allows your content contributors to go rogue. Meaning, they have the freedom to create content in any way that they please. This can get tricky when it comes time to edit and provide feedback. As much as you'll probably want to revamp a variety of elements within their content, you won't have a resource to reference in order to support your feedback. This can lead to a lot of pushback from the contributors, and a lot of lost time trying to justify your edits and align the differences. ​

​It can also hinder opportunities for cross collaboration among creators. For example, if you're on the blog team and are asked to step in to edit content for the social media team, and both teams have developed their own undocumented guidelines to follow, your edits likely won't be up to par with their expectations, and they’ll have to train you on their style. Learning a brand new set of undocumented guidelines to edit a single piece of content takes time and effort that most teams don't have.​

​All of this can be avoided by having a style guide that communicates your company's design standards to your whole group. Having this document to reference for expected standards will make the lives of your designers, writers, and developers much easier, giving them a solid framework to use as a starting point for their work.​

​Externally, misalignment within your content can cause confusion among your audience and hurt your authority within your industry. People return to the brands they love and trust over and over again. Whether they're shopping or looking to learn a new skill, people develop trust with companies based on the content offered. If you can't guarantee a similar experience for your users across your content, they'll go elsewhere and lose trust in your voice and industry expertise. The last thing you want is for a user to question your content — or worse your brand — because it sounds different from the rest.​

​That's why a style guide is essential to keeping your brand identity consistent, recognizable, and ownable. Referencing a brand style guide ensures your content distinguishes your brand from your competitors, and is cohesive. This cohesion is important because it helps establish a strong brand voice that resonates with your audience, which is essential for building brand awareness. Over time, that awareness and consistency builds trust.​

​To further establish cohesion, many companies will provide templates for their teams to use when creating blog posts, case studies, slide decks, press releases, and more. Templates make it easier to create content, since they already follow your brand's style guide and are ready to use. But, don't worry if your company doesn't provide templates. You can either create them yourself to share with your team or work with a designer to help create them.​

​Remember, you're not responsible for establishing your company's design guidelines. That belongs to a designer or the marketing team. But you can compile them into a document to share with your team, since it's your role to communicate the guidelines with your content creators, make sure their content follows the guidelines set, and to enforce the guidelines. ​

​If you're still unsure about whether your company has a style guide, or if you're hesitant to encourage them to create one, the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook is a great resource to reference, since many companies follow it.​

​In all, a style guide helps to ensure a continuous brand experience. It means that no matter how, when, or where a customer engages with a brand, they're experiencing the same underlying traits. It's this consistency across every touch-point that helps build a brand and brand loyalty. And with the use of a style guide, editors have the power to drive their company's messaging forward.