5 min read
One of the most challenging things for content authors who are tasked with creating engaging content for their product users is keeping the content consistent while enforcing brand standards. This is especially true for service team members who have to write content but aren’t professional writers.
This is where having a solid content style guide may come in handy. Style guides document rules of writing such as voice, tone, and word choice. It improves communication consistency and can aid in creating and publishing content quickly and effectively.
A style guide may not be the most riveting piece of content you create, but it just might be the most important. It is not something your fellow coworkers, or audience, will sit down on Sunday morning with a cup of tea to enjoy reading, but something that everyone in the future of your company will use as a fundamental frame of reference. In this article we will walk you through a few essential steps you can take to get started.
A style guide is a living document containing a manual of your company’s style—setting a writing, formatting, and design standard for all future content that is created. It is a place for all of your company’s current or future creators to congregate in—resolving any possible questions and ensuring consistency.
Your technical and visual guidelines are the tangible ways you can deliver on your company’s foundations. Your company’s foundational outline provides a layout of voice, tone, audience, and core values, to present the style of content you represent. And finally, the content style guide, as a whole, is the realistic deployment of your brand.
A style guide helps bring consistency to your writing across all types of content. It is especially crucial when writing content for your self-service knowledge base. This is a place that may not seem as brand-conscious, but in fact, should still carry that cohesive voice as the rest of the website. This is where customers turn when they need help, are looking for answers or resources, or are just trying to be successful with the product and services. So in order to provide that success, content should speak to your brand that was initially promised to the customer when they chose you.
Carrying this strong voice will allow your company to expand brand awareness, which coupled with consistency, will build customer trust. Once you can achieve substantial customer trust, you will see improvements in a multitude of areas including customer adoption, retention, and expansion, ROI, CSAT, engagement, loyalty, conversion rates, and more. Overall, when your customer has a successful experience in trusting your company, then your company succeeds as well.
Possibly one of the strongest style guides you can find is MailChimp’s. While many sites do a great job outlining their visual guidelines, they tend to leave out a crucial portion of what makes up the guide—the technical content guidelines, and the overall backbone of company foundations. MailChimp does an excellent job going above and beyond describing their regulations and values in all of these sections.
Another writing style guide we really love is Microsoft Style Guide. This guide is one of the main resources of style guidelines for technical writers but is useful for content developers, marketers, journalists, communicators, and editors beyond the software industry. It addresses topics such as content planning, design, publishing process, product documentation, developer content UI elements, accessibility, and global content best practices.
As you can see from the table of contents on the left of their style guide, it encompasses a lot of important subjects and goes into depth in each one. This may seem a bit overwhelming, but remember that starting somewhere with a style guide is better than starting nowhere. It is a living document, which means you will always be able to go back, update, and add more. The best thing to do is to choose some key topics and get started.
The first thing you should do when creating a style guide is to choose an existing one as a basis. For example, at ServiceTarget, we used AP Style as our most basic rule of thumb, then built our style guide up from that, with our own personal specifications. AP is great for easy-to-read and consistent writing, created for journalism. It is widely used by many organizations. But if AP isn’t your thing, there are tons of options. When choosing, just remember what your main goal is in your content, and that whatever you choose can be personalized to your unique company.
This portion of your style guide is super important to nail down, as it should portray your brand accurately to anyone who will be creating content in the future of your company. To succeed in doing this, you should make sure to include all of these components:
Creating relevant, accessible, and effective content that answers your customer questions and helps them be more successful with your products and services starts with empathy. So it is important to briefly describe who your target audience is in your style guide in order to evoke the right tone in your future content creators. It is recommended to develop in-depth buyer personas at some point to fully understand your audience, but in your style-guide, just briefly cover who your main audience groups are, what they want from your company, and how you provide that.
This might be the more boring aspect of your style guide, but it is a very important one. This is where you outline all of the nitty-gritty grammatical, language, capitalization, spelling, and structural rules. You don’t need to cover everything here, because the style guide you are choosing to follow already does. But, if your company is particular about following the Oxford comma, or spelling color with the U, then this is where you should mention that. This is crucial to maintaining consistency in your content across all platforms. Checkout ServiceTarget’s technical content guide for ideas of what to include.
Finally, the fun stuff! This is where you get to outline all things visual, including:
Visual elements are essential to bringing self-service content to life and helping users follow it with ease. Outlining basic rules around the creation and use of visual elements will help your teams save time while creating beautiful, on-brand media and other visual elements.
This is where you can outline all things social media. You can include anything from acceptable profile pictures and handles, to proper comment response etiquette, to formatting posts. You should also include basic guidelines for other communication platforms, such as email.
Once you’ve finally completed your wonderfully in-depth style guide, don’t forget your table of contents! You will probably have a ton of important sections, so remember to add this table of contents in the beginning to help guide anyone who uses it.
Now that you’ve completed your style guide, you can start creating some great effective content that will hold true to the consistent guidelines you have set for your company. Remember that even though your style guide is complete, it is a living document, which means you can always go back, update, and add more to it. Your company is continuously renovating, upgrading, and evolving, so your style guide should too!
Once your style guide is together, it's time to learn about the key elements of a great kb article and how to write one.
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