You’ve probably heard a million times about how you should be cleverly positioning and creating content as a brand. It connects with your brand identity, and ensures that you have a consistent voice across all platforms where you’re communicating to Customers as you attempt to allure those potential Customers.
But with changing employees, new hires, and constant busy days, it’s easy for your brand’s identity to slip through the cracks. Inconsistent tone of voice, messaging and overall vibe can be jarring for Customers, and they’ll find it much more difficult to connect, and remember, who you are as a business.
This will drive away potential sales and push away Customers you already possess!
So how can you keep your messaging consistent, while successfully speaking in your brand’s voice, regardless of who’s creating the content?
The answer? Put together a style guide! Read on to find out why you’re missing out if your business doesn’t have one, and how to create it with ease.
Why Create a Style Guide?
So what makes a style guide worth pursuing? And, hold on one second, what even is one!?
Very valid questions, reader.
A style guide is a set of standards for writing, formatting and design that defines your business’ branding. It goes into areas such as grammar, tone of voice, colours, visuals and more! Whatever speaks for your brand will be in there.
Once created, this guide is extremely useful for everyone within your business! It not only means anyone will be able to create clear and connected content, but creating one with your whole team can assist with feeling closer and have a greater understanding of your brand as a whole and what you stand for.
In turn, your Customers are going to feel much more inclined to form personal connections with your brand.
So, now that you’re convinced on writing a style guide (you have to be at this point!), read on to see what needs to be included to begin your style guide journey.
What to Incorporate
The key to the ideal style guide is to fill it with the correct amount of content. Anything over five pages may be too excessive, ensure it’s not too long to digest! (Stomach problems aren’t fun, right?)
A good starting point is to look over any existing content and brand ideology. This could be your mission statement, any values your business holds, or past content that you feel reflects your brand’s voice.
You should also add in a brief introduction, and a table of contents for ease of use.
There are also two important sections that you should be including in your style guide, which we’ll be covering below for you.
Writing Component
The first area to begin to build is the writing section! Details really do matter when it comes to a consistent brand voice. Credibility can be almost impossible to retain if your written content changes day to day, even in little ways. Your Customers will notice.
- Have a section around formatting which helps you settle on a way to use bullet points, lists, dashes etc.
- Another important aspect is the tone and voice. This should have examples so you can see the kind of voice needed. Explain in detail what you mean if you want a ‘professional’ tone, etc.
- Another fantastic, but optional inclusion would be to create a character avatar. Write down personality traits that suit your brand as well as any characters that are synonymous with those traits.
Visual Component
The visual aspects of your brand are important too! Whether you’re creating designs with your logo or adding in an infographic to a blog, these all need to be included to help any new (or current) recruit.
- Cover every visual element your brand dabbles in! Videos, images, graphics. They all need to follow a style that works with your brand identity, so make sure you’re giving examples and instructions.
- Your logo should be included too! Keep it up to date with the current logo, and maybe have older versions of your logo as examples of what to stay away from.
- When creating images and other visual treats, create a list of the exact colours and the palette that can be used. They may be ones from your logo or just the colours that work with your brand.
- You may use all different kinds of fonts depending on the content, so list them in this section! Headings, paragraphs etc. may all differ, and it’s imperative that it’s uniform.
Now you know why you should create a style guide, and what to include, it’s time to get to it! A style guide will assist you in having a clear understanding of your business, while giving you new ways of connecting with Customers through your brand’s identity.