Your content team publishes 20 pieces monthly. Each writer interprets your brand voice differently.
Your blog sounds professional. Your social media sounds casual. Your emails sound corporate. Customers can't tell it's all the same company.
That's what happens without a content marketing style guide.
A style guide documents exactly how your brand communicates—voice, tone, grammar, visuals, formatting - so every piece of content feels unmistakably yours.
The best style guides liberate teams by answering common questions upfront, reducing revision cycles by 30%, and enabling seamless scaling.
This guide shows you how to create a content marketing style guide in five steps with real examples from Mailchimp, Skype, and Ollo.
What is a content marketing style guide?
A content marketing style guide is a documented set of standards defining how your brand communicates. It covers voice, tone, grammar, formatting, visuals, and messaging to ensure consistency across all content.
Style guides help teams create on-brand content efficiently, strengthen brand recognition, and scale content production without sacrificing quality or losing brand identity.
Why your business needs a content marketing style guide
Putting out a well-defined marketing style guide makes it easier for your team to create consistent content. All things considered, one question remains: Is it worth creating a marketing style guide for your brand?
Here’s how a marketing style guide helps your organization:
- Speaks to the audience through your brand, influencing their decision to interact with your brand.
- Provides a consistent experience for your customers, helping them stay loyal.
- incorporates the best practices present in the industry with brand-specific alterations.
- Enhances the overall content you release for the audience while also providing a reliable way to document your approach.
5 steps to create your content marketing style guide
Perhaps the most critical part of your entire process, a marketing style guide can make or break your campaign. As a result, brands often bring experienced professionals on board to create an effective guide.
Here are some ways in which you can create your own content marketing style guide:
Step 1: Define your target audience
As the market becomes more diverse, your buyer personas are bound to change and become complex. It is not possible to market to multiple groups at once with this inconsistency.
So, you need to accurately define your target audience before you begin with your content. To achieve this, you can study groups based on specific criteria and conduct some light research to get an idea of their spending habits. You can go also deeper and analyze studies on individual personas.
For instance, Nike specializes in sports apparel and accessories. Due to their durability and quality, the brand knows that individuals with disposable income can afford their products, allowing them to market their products with the promise of motivation, specifically targeting young and aspiring athletes.
Step 2: Establish brand voice and tone guidelines
You can ask some basic questions to clearly define an objective for your company:
- What is the brand’s purpose?
- What does my product have to stand out among a sea of competitors?
- Does my brand stand for anything?
- Who are my competitors? What do they offer that I lack?
An excellent example of this would be Mailchimp’s style guide. The guide is specially curated for the employees, and has well-defined objectives that the company aims to achieve.
The audience’s perception of your brand will depend significantly on your tone and voice. It will also depend on your audience’s needs and how your brand can deliver.
The voice can be casual, formal or encompass a variety of slang if your products are targeted toward the younger demographic of the population.
Step 3: Document grammar, spelling, and formatting standards
The internet has a sea of information, but that does not mean that all information is a hundred percent accurate. You must ensure that your research is backed up by reputable sources.
On the other hand, relying on multiple sources might prove counterproductive since you may appear confused. Choose a widely credited source to support your structure.
For instance, you can use universally accepted sources like Oxford for all your grammar and spell-check needs.
Step 4: Create visual identity duidelines
Before making a guide, remember that you do not want to make it tedious to read. Infuse the guide with a dash of your creativity with elements like visualization of data and illustrations to make it more engaging.
Visual content is believed to be better retained by an average viewer. Hence, the more images and infographics you add to your guide, the better.
You can add witty comparisons and enhance the overall quality of your guide. After all, this guide is the holy grail for the marketing department and should be prepared as such.
For example, Ollo, a mental health tech startup, has infused its style guide with a perfect combination of text and images. It catches your attention with its vibrant colors and every page in the style guide introduces you to the brand identity using attractive images.
Step 5: Launch and maintain your style guide
If you successfully complete all these steps, pat yourself on the back! You have created an efficient marketing style guide. Unfortunately, your work is still not over. You might ask, what could possibly be remaining?
The release, of course! In fact, it is not enough to give this much-coveted document a bland release. It is important to take inspiration from the numerous campaigns that your company has launched and incorporate the same for your style guide.
Firstly, create a buzz around the release of this document. You can either use a short and dedicated promotional campaign for the launch or keep it low-key but noticeable by involving every employee in the process.
Using this strategy gives your style guide a more personal touch, and makes people feel included. Ultimately, highly engaged teams produce better output and display greater profitability. Put together a successful campaign, and your style guide will be the talk of the office!
What to include in your content marketing style guide
- Mission and Brand Overview (1-2 pages): Company purpose, values, positioning, key messages
- Voice and Tone (3-5 pages): Personality traits, tone variations, examples by content type
- Grammar and Writing Standards (5-10 pages): Style manual reference, brand-specific rules, formatting guidelines
- Visual Guidelines (5-10 pages): Logo, colors, typography, imagery, layout examples
- Content Type Templates (5-15 pages): Blog post structure, social media guidelines, email formatting, landing page framework
Common content marketing style guide mistakes
Creating a style guide isn't always straightforward. Many teams make avoidable errors that reduce effectiveness and adoption.
Here are the most common pitfalls and how to avoid them.
1. Making it too long and overwhelming
A 75-page style guide collects digital dust. Most teams need 20-30 pages maximum. Include only essential standards that directly impact brand consistency.
Comprehensive doesn't mean exhaustive - focus on guidelines your team references regularly, not every possible edge case.
2. Being overly rigid
Style guides should provide guardrails, not straitjackets. Allow writers creative freedom within defined parameters. Specify when rules can flex for specific contexts.
For example, social media might permit contractions and casual language while whitepapers remain formal. Balance consistency with adaptability to prevent robotic, lifeless content.
3. Never updating after initial launch
Brands evolve. Products change. Audiences shift. A style guide from 2019 with outdated examples and references becomes irrelevant.
Schedule quarterly reviews for fast-moving brands or annual updates for established ones. Assign an owner responsible for tracking needed changes and implementing version control.
4. Poor accessibility and discoverability
A PDF buried five folders deep in shared drives won't get used. Host your style guide on an easily searchable internal wiki, shared cloud document, or dedicated platform.
Make it accessible from anywhere - writers shouldn't hunt for guidelines. Consider a short URL like styleguide.yourcompany.com for instant access.
5. All rules, no examples or context
Stating "use a friendly tone" without examples leaves interpretation wide open. Show don't just tell.
Include approved and not-approved examples for every major guideline. Before/after comparisons demonstrate standards clearly. Real content samples make abstract rules concrete and actionable.
6. Skipping visual examples entirely
For visual elements like logos, colors, and typography, descriptions aren't enough. Include actual screenshots showing correct logo placement, color combinations, and font usage.
Show common mistakes alongside correct applications. Visual learners especially need to see standards, not just read about them.
What are some useful resources to create a style guide?
Historically, there have been some standard formats used for creating style guides. Even so, it is important to remember that the rules in these guides aren’t set in stone. You can devise your own way of structuring your style guide.
What these pre-existing guides do is provide you with an idea of how to get started. Some of the most popular books utilized are as follows:
- The Associated Press Stylebook has a set of rules to prepare a style guide for news media. Most importantly, this book is known for containing commonly accepted journalistic standards for usage, spelling, grammar and punctuation.
- The Chicago Manual of Style is filled with writing standards employed in commercial and academic publishing.
- The Modern Language Association Style Manual has widely accepted guidelines for formatting and citation, especially relevant in scholarly writing and manuscripts.
- The Elements of Style was written in 1918 and emphasized the relevance of clarity and simplicity. Later, the guide was revised by EB White to make it more relevant to current standards.
Make a stellar content marketing style guide today!
A content marketing style guide transforms scattered content into a cohesive brand experience. Consistent branding increases revenue by 23% and accelerates team onboarding by 40%.
Style guides aren't creativity killers - they're efficiency multipliers that let teams focus on strategy instead of debating Oxford commas.
WrittenlyHub - a full-stack marketing agency creates custom content marketing style guides that capture your brand voice and scale your content team effortlessly.
FAQs on content marketing style guide
1. How do I create a content guide?
A content guide is primarily concerned with the elements you use for your writing. You can create one by defining your brand parameters, like the font, language and tone you want your content to follow.
2. Why have a content marketing style guide?
A content style guide allows you to have a uniform structure throughout all the content that your brand releases. It gives your brand consistency, allowing people to recognize your content immediately.
3. How do you write a style guide?
To ensure that you create an effective style guide, you must first decide how you want your brand to be perceived. Based on that, you can set the tone and the graphics that will be synonymous with your brand. Further, the same consistency should be followed when you market your brand to your target audience.
4. What is a content marketing plan?
A content marketing plan outlines your strategy for creating, publishing, and managing content to achieve specific business and marketing goals.
5. What is the difference between a brand guide and a style guide?
A brand guide dictates how a brand presents itself to the world – its personality, tone, core values, and visual identity (logos, color schemes). A style guide is more specific to content creation, focusing on the standards for writing style, tone, and formatting to maintain consistency in communications.
