Why style guide is important

And medical writers have their own as well. And then there are several guides for those who write about computer hardware and software. Your email address will not be published. This post has 1 Comment 1. A guide will create cohesion, direction and clarity for all marketing decisions in your organization. A visual style guide will help the creation and upkeep of your website, look and voice of your social media accounts and much more from blogs to ads.

Many companies choose to follow a specific widely known style guide such as Chicago Manual of Style or Associated Press Stylebook whereas other organizations elect to build their own individual set of standards. The company voice plays back into this notion that we, as consumers, personify brands as if they were real people.

Comprehensive style guides define the company image from a visual and editorial perspective to ensure a unified brand.

We recommend implementing both a visual style guide and an editorial style guide to keep branding consistent across all corporate materials. Consistency creates a cohesive experience that consumers can expect each time they interact with your organization. Over time, this will help build brand recognition and nurture future customers.

If you need help building a style guide or with your marketing strategy, contact Launch Marketing today! The answer is probably somewhere in between. Define your voice in your style guide clearly and in straightforward terms, and the rest will follow.

Your voice never changes, but your tone should be constantly adapting. This will depend on the position, needs and relationship to your audience for every piece of text you write. Therefore, in your style guide, you need to define your different tonalities: think of them as different roles you will play whilst still being the same actor with the same voice throughout. This is an optional, but very useful, addition to your style guide.

So there you have it — all you need to build your own style guide and construct a cornerstone for your brand to ensure to better, more consistent content. By building a writing roadmap for your company you can strengthen your brand identity, bring consistency to your content, and lay solid foundations for agile and scalable writing teams. October 22, Sophie Grant. Greater Consistency When it comes to marketing, consistency is key. Flexibility To Use Multiple Contributors Though in an ideal world, your content would all be written by the same small group of people, in reality, we know that the challenge to keep up regular content means you might need to resource content from a variety of locations.

Know Your Values You want your copy to accurately reflect your brand. Expect It To Change! Voice This is the most important part. A style guide refers to a document that clearly spells out how your brand must be presented from both a language and graphic perspective.

The aim of a style guide is to ensure that multiple contributors work in a cohesive way to reflect your true corporate style and maintain brand consistency with everything from writing to design. A brand style guide distinguishes your company from your rivals and establishes a strong brand presence to build long-term brand awareness.

Over time, that consistency and awareness build trust. Every company should consider its style guide as its visual DNA. In case your brand goes through a redesign process, make sure you always invent a new brand style guide to go along with it. Ideally, you should announce the re-branding strategy to your team so that everyone can get on board with new design guidelines. Big corporations that have teams in different locations across the world can immensely benefit from having online style guides.

Trello, Adobe, and Skype allow companies to publish all guides so every employee has access to these resources. Having a consistent style guide across marketing channels goes a long way to boost your brand recognition.

There are several studies that reveal that consumers perceive brands as personifications of companies, which also impact their buying decisions.

Since we all are creatures of habit, we are more likely to make purchases from brands that become familiar over time. Through consistency in branding, a company is able to meet the expectations of its customers and deliver successful services. Visual style guides define the way a brand will look so that all corporate graphics remain standardized across various materials. Graphic style guides normally include design standards in terms of feel and look, white space usage, variations, and applications of the logo and corporate color palettes.

Moreover, there are also layout specifics to depict how elements should be positioned on a page. One of the major benefits of having a visual style is that it creates unity among marketers in your business. Companies receive a mixed bag of results if they leave up their visual representation open to individual interpretation.