The Importance of a Style Guide and How to Create One - Contentools
For a content marketing campaign to be successful, it’s important to start with an outline of expectations and parameters.
This outline is commonly referred to as a style guide.
A style guide helps a company clarify expectations and distinct branding requirements for various marketing initiatives. It’s a critical tool for developing a uniform brand identity across different mediums and helps companies avoid erroneous branding mishaps.
Style guides are becoming increasingly important with many marketers choosing to outsource production to freelancers, vendors, or remote employees. Because it’s difficult to maintain control when outsourcing, a document like a style guide can be used to give distinct direction and rules. These rules are especially important when working on creative projects because it helps minimize the need for stylistic revisions.
Content can be very subjective, so using a style guide helps better outline the constraints of creative freedom and increases the likelihood that the content matches your expectations.
Effective style guides must be living documents that your branding team updates on a regular basis.
The best ones include over-arching branding requirements like logos, colors, and typeface as well as more granular requirements based on the specific campaign or department. For instance, if you’re creating a style guide for your blogging team, you might also want to include word count expectations, internal/external linking requirements, and targeted keywords to include.
If you want to set yourself up for success, it is important that you take the time to document marketing style guides.
To learn more about why style guides are important and how you can create one, check out the infographic below created by CopyPress.
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Writing Rules > Exceptions to the rules could be expanded. For example, does the organization prefer “health care” or “healthcare”? “Data centers” or “datacenters”? “Cybercrime” or “cyber crime”?
Also, there are many more style guides than just AP and CMS. For example, academia uses APA. And medical writers have their own as well. And then there are several guides for those who write about computer hardware and software.