Maintaining a consistent brand image is crucial. Guidelines aid your content creators to produce content reflecting your brand’s mission and vision, and avert confusion. Discover key recommendations to define your first guidelines.
Specify guideline goals
Before setting guidelines for your content creators, you set goals to make your brand’s voice and tone stand out. When defining your guideline goals, here are some guiding questions to kick-start:
Who is your audience?
What does your brand stand for?
How do you ensure there’s value and relevancy in your content?
What prominent keywords can you use that make your brand memorable?
What kind of content is appropriate in channels like social media or blog posts?
You may have more questions to specify your guideline goals further. The objective is to maintain consistency, efficiency, and clarity.
Audit your existing content
If you have current content in place for your brand, now is a great time to take a step back and evaluate its effectiveness. Get overview of your content’s strengths and weaknesses through content audits – inspect your content inventory, metrics, and analytics of your content performance.This assessment will help you identify gaps in relevancy, clarity, and accuracy. You’ll determine whether your current content aligns with the brand’s style guide and maintains consistency. The questions outlined in the previous section can further enhance your understanding during this assessment.
Set the standards
Now, it’s time to lay down the rules for your content creators to maintain content standards. With the guidelines in place, you can be assured that the content delivered will be cohesive in style and quality.
Your content’s objectives need to echo your target audience’s aspirations and values to create a powerful connection with them.For example, the persona of a young, active adult who appreciates concise, informative content and prioritizes sustainability and transparency. In this case, your content objectives may focus on brief sustainability-related topics and deliver trustworthy information.
Since formatting is vital to written content, here are some inspirations for best practices to help define your guidelines for your content creators:
Elaborate on using typography to organize the structure of written content, such as titles, topics, sub-topics, and paragraphs.
Guide them on what to summarize and when to highlight a part of what they write. For instance, suggest writing short paragraphs, using bullet points, and highlighting content with bold or italic styling.
When linking topics related to your content, suggest reusing your brand’s existing content. This keeps your audience engaged with your brand instead of redirecting them elsewhere.
As your content gets pushed to the world, your content is likely coming across to people of different backgrounds, cultures, and locations. Inclusivity is a must. The language of your content should be concise, simple, and relatable to your audience. Encourage a sense of belonging with your brand to the people.Here are also some suggestions to follow:
Avoid jargon – too technical industry-related words may confuse your audience.
Minimize clichés – refrain from using overused words such as “state-of-the-art”, “unique”, “industry-leading”, or “immersive”, to name a few.
Reduce using filler words or phrases – words such as “kind of”, or “in terms of” don’t always add value to your content.
Avert confusing the reader – reduce using the word “it” as it may confuse the audience when you’re trying to refer to a subject in more complex sentences.
Don’t use words that diminish readers’ confidence – avoid words like “simply” and “easily”; they may not reflect readers’ abilities. Ensure your content doesn’t make your audience feel incompetent.
When setting standards on multimedia usage, you can outline crucial specifications in your guidelines, which cover images, videos, color schemes, typography, logo usage, etc. This is so that your brand image remains consistent throughout every content posted. You can decide if your content creators need to follow a specific type of image or image styles they can and cannot use for content. In addition, your guidelines should also recommend adding alternative text (alt text) to images and closed captions to videos for improved accessibility. You can also recommend what specific formats to apply, like minimum image and video dimensions.
A naming convention is a set of rules to maintain naming consistency and clear organization of your inventory and content model. Naming convention come into play when you or your team need to find the right content types, content items, taxonomies, or assets. This also ensures that your content creators don’t overlook or duplicate existing items.
The ongoing AI boom has impacted vast amounts of businesses worldwide. While the effects of using AI are significant, it may go awry without proper knowledge of how to use it. Here are some general principles:
Maintain the content quality and accuracy – AI can help generate content for you, but it’s not always accurate. Human intervention is required to fill in content gaps, ensure accuracy, and fact-check the results.
Use AI systems that comply with legal and security policies – make sure to do due diligence on the AI systems’ compliance with legal and security policies, including copyright regulations and handling sensitive information.
Use AI mindfully – there’s a chance your content is generated with potential bias or plagiarised from copyrighted content. Review and edit the generated content.
Improve your content with detailed prompts – provide detailed prompts with clear specific goals and how the content can be shaped for best results. For more refined results, provide content to start with or contextual information to task your AI tool. For example:
Improve this content for {target audience} who are interested in {audience’s interests} within {number of paragraphs} using {target language or tone}.
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Keep guidelines up to dateImprove and update guidelines regularly to align with evolving content standards, audience preferences, and brand goals. It helps maintain the effectiveness and accuracy of your content.
Our AI-powered assistant can generate content for you without copyright issues and sensitive information leakage. We fully comply with GDPR and follow strict security policies.
How we use naming conventionsWe organize our content model using icons with proper naming. The icons categorize the content types based on their purpose. In this case, we put ✏️ before the name as a written content type for our lessons, learning paths, documentation, and product updates. It helps our content creators to know which content type to use to create their content.
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