Why Content Style Guides Are an Essential Brand Asset (Free Template)

One of the first things I do to kick off any content marketing client engagement or when I join an organization as its fractional content officer is draft (or review and refine) the team’s content style guide. 

Why? Because it is a vital tool for ensuring consistency across all brand content, regardless of who is writing. 

Content style guides empower every content creator—human or AI—to emulate the brand’s unique voice, style, and tone. And they’re a lot more effective than telling a writer to “just go read a few posts” to understand what the desired brand voice should sound like.

Just like your company’s brand guidelines for your logo, branding, and trademarks, a comprehensive style guide becomes a layer of protection to ensure consistency across the content and communications your company creates.

Why a Content Style Guide is Essential

Content teams rely on a mix of in-house and external content creators. Forward-looking teams are also experimenting with AI for content repurposing and accelerating new content creation.

Without a content style guide, organizations will encounter significant inefficiencies:

• Content teams will spend more time creating and editing content because there are no guardrails for its creation
• Internal and external writers will inevitably stray from the brand voice and miss opportunities to reinforce key brand concepts
• AI will draw from general content from across the web, which won’t reflect your unique value proposition

A content style guide addresses these issues and unlocks ongoing content marketing efficiencies. 

Customers expect a consistent experience across all your customer touchpoints. Yet, the 2024 CMI and MarketingProfs B2B content research found only 19% of content marketers strongly agreed with the statement, “Our organization provides customers with a consistent experience across their engagement journey.” That makes the content style guide and its associated templates a foundational component of a successful content strategy.

What Should A Content Style Guide Include?

A content style guide explains your brand’s unique voice, tone, and language considerations. It helps organizations stand out from peers and competition, and it results in content that should resonate with your ideal buyers.

From a content marketing and communications perspective, the content style guide includes all the details to enable anyone to create on-brand content in any format—including blog content, video scripts, social media posts, internal communications, customer communications, sales enablement messaging, and more. 

To give you an idea of how organizations present their style guides, check out these content style guide examples from Mailchimp, Search Engine Journal, and BuzzFeed. We explored 18 elements of a truly useful content style guide in this post, which I walked MarketingProfs B2B Forum members through in my hands-on session last year.

Content Style Guide Support

Despite its incredible value, many teams fail to take the time to document their content style guide. I get it. It’s another item on the to-do list that can feel like a distraction from current priorities. 

While it will take time to create the style guide, it’s a small investment that primes your content team for success now and in the future. And you don’t have to start from scratch! Copy my team’s free brand content style guide template to use as a starting point. 

Even with a template and examples, it’s common for teams to struggle when building their content style guide. Much like defining an organization’s brand voice, it’s a skill that is built over time—but often overrun by other organizational priorities.

I’ve partnered with countless organizations to define their unique brand voice, create a content style guide to empower all brand content creators and introduce AI tools to streamline their work.

If you’d like support defining your content governance essentials to deliver on-brand content at scale, reach out to me today.