Why Your Company Needs an Editorial Style Guide (from Day 1)

(A version of this article was featured in The Startup, the largest active publication on the Medium platform.)

Most small businesses and startups don’t have an editorial style guide. By a “style guide” I mean a document that not only outlines style issues such as whether to use the serial comma and how to write numerals in text but also identifies and describes the brand tone and voice. Most organizations will put off creating one, usually because it’s perceived as non-essential.

In fact, a style guide is a vital element of your marketing efforts that should be put in place as soon as you start creating content. It’s not just a boring document that editors and writers like to have. A style guide is vital to support consistency, clarity, and credibility in your brand and marketing efforts.

Consistency

Marketing collateral, blog posts, tweets, and emails that are all over the place in terms of who is speaking and what they sound like create dissonance in your potential customers’ minds. You don’t want to leave your brand presentation to chance — or to the inexperienced college intern who is writing your social media posts. You want a smooth, frictionless brand experience, with the assurance and security of a unified, consistent voice across all your materials — the voice that you have carefully thought out and defined.

Same thing with editorial style. Do you use the first person or third person in marketing materials? How does the organization refer to itself in content — do you always use its full name or is a shortened version acceptable, and when? Do you spell out “percent” or use a symbol in text? What other symbols are acceptable in copy, and does that differ across types of content? Are customers “customers” or do you call them something else — partners, clients, shoppers?

Clarity

Much like spelling rules, style guides support the clarity, readability, and comprehensibility of your materials. Have you ever stumbled across a social media or blog post in which the writer mashes all of their thoughts into one long paragraph, with run-on sentences and random words capitalized? Those can be very hard to read, much less understand.

Style guidelines can improve the clarity of your content by providing guidance around everything from word choice to paragraph length. This guidance helps employees understand how to accurately frame their language around your organization’s vision, mission, and services when writing to or speaking with clients, vendors, and potential partners. It also serves as a resource for new hires and freelancers during onboarding to acquaint them with your brand.

Credibility

While your customers may not be consciously aware of things like title case or passive voice, they are definitely going to notice on an unconscious level if something is off in your content. Take this headline:

How we Work With our Customers

It looks unprofessional, right? Even if you have no idea why, you know that it’s weird. (Answer: the title case does not follow standard or consistent rules.) Issues like this contribute negatively to your potential customers’ overall impression of your brand — especially if you have a lot of them.

A style guide makes your brand more credible with readers and consumers. Consumers are sophisticated — they’re sensitive to the smallest whiff of amateurishness. You may have created a cool-looking website and offer services that genuinely fill a need, but if your copy is a mess, it isn’t going to inspire confidence, and your potential customers may prefer to trust their investment with a competitor that presents a more polished brand.

A Living Document That Reflects Your Brand

Together, consistency, clarity, and credibility support brand alignment across all of your content and collateral. But a style guide isn’t set in stone — it is a living document that adapts and grows as your business and its needs change and expand. As your brand develops, technology evolves, and you continue to figure out what resonates with your customers, you can (and should) tweak and add to your style guide periodically to make sure that it is still fresh and relevant.

I can help your organization develop an editorial style guide that you can use to scale across your business as it and your content needs grow. With all the benefits to marketing and communication — both internal and external — that a style guide can bring to your business, it’s clearly an essential element of your strategic planning