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Transcript

05/18 #ContentChat: Creating a Style Guide People Will Actually Use · #ContentChat

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Content Chat.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Eric Heald.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of companies think that they have a content problem when they actually have a documentation problem.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: One of the clearest examples of this, their style guide either doesn't exist or it's a dusty PDF somewhere on SharePoint that nobody ever uses.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: This episode is the third in our 12-part content chat series, bringing my book Content Foundations to Life, chapter by chapter.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Last time we focused on brand voice, defining who your brand is and how it shows up in your content.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're going to be building on that foundation by talking about one of the most practical and frequently overlooked content operations tools, your style guide.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: In chapter two of Content Foundations, I walk through in significant detail how to create a style guide that actually helps people create better content faster, whether that's your freelancers, your internal subject matter experts, your agencies, or your AI tools.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you want to scale content without losing your voice, your documentation has to work in the real world.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: So let's start by talking about the reason that so many teams hate style guides.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's because they've only experienced bad ones.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Too often style guides are exceptionally rigid, they're outdated, including messaging slogans, and even references to people, places, things that don't even exist anymore.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: They're impossible to find because they're in somebody's folder or nested within another folder on some, you know, some internet site.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: They're not part of everybody's everyday workflow, so no one really even thinks about them.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: And they're not, this is most importantly, they're not actually embedded in the tools that people use to create content.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: So functionally, they don't exist.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Teams in these situations are going to see style guides as brand enforcement rather than enablement.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: But the truth of the matter is that a really good style guide helps reduce rewrites.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: It means that you're not going to have those approval bottlenecks that happen when somebody does a cursory glance through some content, sees things, uh sees things aren't quite up to brand standards, and then puts that in the I'll get to this later file instead of the oh, let me just approve this quickly file.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: You also end up with inconsistent messaging and something we see every single day, especially here on LinkedIn, you see AI-generated chaos.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: But when it's done correctly, content governance is operational support, not just needless bureaucracy.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: And remember, you can't scale what you haven't defined.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, a really good example showing you how important it is to have a really good up-to-date style guide is something that I've experienced a number of times.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: I frequently get called in to rewrite copy that is technically correct, factually accurate, but 100% completely off-brand.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: I've done this for websites, I've done this for countless ebooks, and I've done it even for things that were supposed to be ghost-written bylines for executives.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: The thing is, is that not everybody even understands how to use brand guidelines, but it's especially because they're not written necessarily for content creators.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: They're written just so that somebody can check the box and say, hey, I got that style guide done, let's move on to the next thing.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a huge waste of time.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: If you're having to pay any human, whether it's an external consultant like me or it's your internal person who has all of the brand standards in their head, if you're paying someone to rewrite all of the content that's created by your content creators or to go in and make substantial edits, that is a huge waste of money that's 100% avoidable.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: So using a style guide should not feel like homework.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: It should feel like having your smartest teammate sitting next to you while you write.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: So in this in our last episode, we talked about defining who your brand is through your brand voice.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And what we're delving into today is translating that, taking it a step further, and providing that practical guidance that your team can actually use every day in the guise of their content style guide.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, in order to be useful, your style guide has to 100% transcend what is in your brand book.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, you're still gonna want to include things like here's what our logo, where you can grab our logo, here are our brand colors, especially with the the web hex codes.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna want to have all that stuff in there, 100%.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: But you need to go a step further.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna have your favorite grammar rules, and I'm looking right at you, Oxford, comma, and even more importantly, the M dash, all that stuff is gonna be in there too, but you absolutely need to go one step further than that.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's not your job to try to replace somebody's uh English 101 class.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's about you providing everything that any content creator, regardless of what kind of content they're creating, needs to know and understand about your brand in order to create content that is going to sound like it comes from you.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: So start with the brand foundations.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Provide that really succinct company overview, that elevator pitch of who you are, what you do, and who you do it for.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: But then take it a step further and include the mission and values, any current messaging pillars, and your brand differentiators.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: While these are things that you may have the expectation that everyone on your team knows, a brand new team member that you're onboarding, for example, isn't gonna know that.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: So having this kind of information in your style guide ensures that you can use it as an onboarding tool, whether it's for internal or external content creators or for your AI tools as well.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: You're definitely going to want to include your brand voice chart in your style guide.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where you're going to be able to take that style style guide chart, take that brand voice chart, put it in the style guide, and link out to examples of pieces of content that do an exceptional job of reflecting the voice that you're going for.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: So you can do that either right within the chart itself or you can do it underneath.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: But the point is, the style guide is that place where you augment that brand voice chart that you're going to be using in all sorts of your other tools.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: But this is where you augment it with those examples of putting it into practice so that way it becomes something that people can internalize when they're creating content.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: You're also going to have a section for your writing conventions because guess what?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Every company does some of these things differently.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: For example, do you use, do you capitalize the first letter of every word of every heading on your website?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: Or do you drop down and use sentence case for H2s and beyond?
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: Every company does this differently.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: So spell it out.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: How you focus, how you use things like capitalization when you're creating content?
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: What are your punctuation preferences?
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: What about the formatting standards?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have specific fonts that you use online versus fonts that you use offline?
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have a specific way that you want to be using language when you're doing experiential content?
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: Think about all of those things.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And importantly, also include your citation rules and any kind of inclusive language guidance that you want to make sure you are able to get all of your content creators to align on.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Anything around that, you've got to put it into your style guide to make sure that the creators understand what you're looking for.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got your documented brand voice, you've got all of your all of your guidelines in place, and then you can link out to things like your taxonomy and your templates too from the style guide.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: On the website, ericahill.com, I do have an article, the 18 core elements of an effective content style guide.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: That is, you can go ahead and take a look at the article on the site and download a template there.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: We also go into all of those elements that you should include and provide a free template in the book Content Foundations.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: All right, now before you start feeling a little overwhelmed, because I just said the words, the 18 core elements to include in your style guide, the goal isn't to document everything everywhere all at once.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: The goal is to just get started by documenting the things that people repeatedly get wrong or inconsistently interpret.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: So you know those things that you go, oh, I can't believe I'm correcting this again, or the things that that persnickety reviewer always is calling out in comments of don't use that word ever again.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Why are we still using that word?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: For a lot of people, by the way, it's utilize.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe we all just stop saying utilize and stop using it.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's just use it instead of utilizing it.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what I think is so helpful about style guides in particular is they are amazing training infrastructure.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is true for onboarding your humans, but it's even more necessary and true for onboarding any new AI tools.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: AI does not automatically understand your brand, okay?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: You got to tell it everything it needs to know, just like you would with that new employee.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: When some of these tools say that you can pop in 200 words and it will tell you your brand and replicate it, that's baloney, okay?
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's not possible that 200 words are going to give it enough context, enough information to look at your brand and be able to reflect it in anything, any of the outputs it creates.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, you can't just point it at your website and say, create a style guide based upon this website.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that might be a place to get some fodder for what goes into your style guide.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: As somebody who has rewritten dozens of corporate websites as part of rebranding, let me assure you that most websites have been have pages that have been authored by so many different people, many of whom have never looked at a style guide and have no idea what the brand messaging should be.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I've even seen pages that have the Oxford comma and not using the Oxford comma in the same page.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's horrifying, but it's reality.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: So AI needs context, examples, guardrails, and terminology definitions in order to be able to give you outputs that are usable without a significant rewrite on your end.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: For my opinion, I really feel that style guides have become this core AI operational document.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is something I've talked about in my two most recent Marketing Profts webinars, which are available on demand to Marketing Profts Pro members.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: You see, without governance, AI creates generic content because it has to.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's creating content, it's creating those outputs, it's answering your questions based upon an aggregation of all of everyone else's content.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it's going to be generic by design because it's a blending which gives you a great consistent blandness.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: When that happens, your teams are going to spend more time editing even simple outputs that you've created, and like such as reporting or having it help you uh do an edit, your inconsistency is just going to multiply faster.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas when you have a style guide in place, it means that your prompts aren't doing the same amount of heavy lifting.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: You are not expecting one little prompt to rule them all.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, you're able to do things like create a framework and say, reference our style guide, reference this brand template, reference these things, and then be very specific about what you're asking the AI to do within the context of those core foundational elements.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: That is so much nicer than having to type out thousands of words in every prompt to ensure that you're telling the AI everything you need it to do and everything you don't want it to do.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, if you're creating any kind of a custom generative AI tool, you're going to want to have this kind of documentation in place.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that way, that is one of the things that it's always looking to as being part of your core information that it's training on.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's also going to allow you to reuse your workflows and create really fantastic repurposing systems.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: In short, AI always needs to have at least as much guidance as you'd give a new hire.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so the companies that are seeing the best AI results aren't skipping governance.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: They're not trying to find that magic prompt or a magic tool that can just guess what it is they're trying to do.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: They're doubling down on creating content governance that helps them do the work more correctly the first time.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: So the best style guide in the world is going to be useless if nobody on your team opens it.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: So even if you've made sure that you create that you created a guide that has all of those most frequently asked questions, the most frequently edited it out comments and words, even if you do all of that, if people can't find it, no one's going to be able to use it.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: No one is ever going to say to themselves when they're about to create some content, oh gosh, before I get started, let me go look at that style guide again.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you're lucky, they might look at the style guide when you send out the email to everyone saying, hey guys, here's the new style guide.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: I hope everyone enjoys using it.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe someone will read it.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I would read it, but let's not let's not mistake me as your typical audience.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: Your typical audience is gonna think to themselves, I don't want to page through 24 pages of a boring PDF that doesn't apply to me.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's not gonna happen.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do you get people to actually use a style guide?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, first of all, embed links to that style guide inside your creative briefs and your channel specific templates.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: You can start you know by having the brand voice chart embedded there, and then just have that little for the rest of the style guide go here.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: Having that link is so helpful and makes it so much more likely by having it within the context of putting forth an outline for the content, going through that ideation process or the review process, that's such the great place to put a link that people will actually use to be using that style guide.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: If possible, you also want to make it searchable.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: You want to make this document be something that if somebody is working on something and they can't quite remember what your brand's way is of doing whatever the thing is, it's a file that they can just type into your internet.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, how do we refer to a person that we're quoting on second use?
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Do we use their first name or their last name?
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: Make it be a document that is able to be searched through your internet so that way people are able to come up with those kinds of answers from your style guide versus getting it from somebody one cube over who may or may not actually know that they're right when they're giving that answer.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, you can create some lightweight versions that just get at those core important things for a specific audience.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: For example, you might create a version, a lightweight version for your customer service team or for your sales team that address the kinds of communications, the kinds of content they're creating, and the specific kinds of rules and guidance that will apply just to them and help them get their content approved faster.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it's important, especially when you're creating those lightweight versions, to use examples, not just rules, because it's so much easier to remember the example than it is to remember the language of the rule of what you're supposed to do.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: You'll remember, oh hey, there's that video on this page that I can use as the, you know, as my inspiration for here's how we do customer, uh, customer advocacy videos, for example.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Having that kind of stuff in place, sharing those examples, then brings it to life and gives people a reference point that they can check their own work back against.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: I also encourage you to build feedback loops with your writers so that if you see that something keeps happening, even though you know it's in the style guide, that you check in and you say, Hey, how can we make this more clear?
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: Or what is it about the style guide that doesn't help get this across the way that I mean for it to?
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you ask people for help, people are happy to give you help.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: Don't approach it by you keep making this mistake, what is wrong with you?
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: What do I have to put in the style guide to make you do it my way?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: That is not what I'm saying.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm saying is how can you, you know, make sure you do that, have those feedback loops so that if you know something's in the style guide and people are just missing it, and spoiler alert, this happens a lot with brand voice because sometimes the words we choose are a little aspirational for the work that we do or the maturity of our brand.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: So be sure to do have those feedback loops about the style guide and incorporate that feedback into the revisions and integrate your style guide and suggesting to people that you want to hear from them about things that aren't included in the style guide or things that are confusing, integrate that into your onboarding for anybody who's going to be creating any type of public facing facing content or communications.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: The style guide is not there just to exist to catch mistakes after the fact.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: While it's 100% going to be helpful for doing things like that, especially if you create a tool or use something like Grammarly and you want to make sure that it uses all of your style elements, you know, the best style guides, that's not what they're for.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: They prevent confusion before content is even created, and they make it less likely that you're going to have those issues at the end of the road.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: They're really there to be an enabler for creating the right kind of on-grand content the first time.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so again, if building a style guide feels overwhelming, it shouldn't be.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because I guarantee you already have something in place.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: You already have some sort of documentation in place, or you already have that cache of Slack messages, or that most recent piece of content that got marked up by everybody with so many things.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: You already have these things in place, and you can start there.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to document everything at once.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: That said, I do highly recommend that you start with the brand voice because the brand voice is going to affect so much of how all of your content comes into play that if you don't have that brand voice defined up front, then there's a stronger likelihood that your content isn't going to feel like it has that consistency unless you do have that one single source of failure, i.e., the one human being that knows the brand who has to review everything before it can go out, which is horrible.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a good job.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it also doesn't give you any job security because I've seen plenty of people who used that approach get laid off, and then their team, people like me, had to come in and do things like go through all of their emails and go through their files to try and figure these things out, and nobody.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Wants to do that.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: Another low-hanging fruit kind of thing that you should be able to get your hands on pretty quickly is the common terminology.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: Those words that you guys, your team uses every single day in order to talk about what you do.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that industry terminology that people regularly use, grab all of that and put it into um put it into your style guide draft because it's 100% the kind of thing that someone new to your organization wouldn't know off the top of their head.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: Also put in all of your writing conventions.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: So if you are team, MDASH means that you used AI for this, which sadly there are still people who want to have that argument with us, despite Ann Handley's valiant effort to get justice for the MDASH.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: Google that.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: And your style guide is such the easy place to make sure that you put it.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so that way people understand if you do have tools in place, such as you've created a custom GPT that has all of the style guide, branding, brand voice, et cetera, elements into it that people can use to check their work and make suggestions or even give them a score for how on brand their content is.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: This is exactly where you put the link to that tool.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: So that way they understand: hey, there is a tool I can use for this.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have to start from scratch or try and figure it out for myself.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: So the at the end of your opening that document and trying to get started with your style guide, at the end of the of that session, you're gonna have a good working, working point to start from.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: You're not going to be done because it's gonna be something that is gonna be iterated over time.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: Your style guide is going to be added to by all sorts of different members of your team, and it's going to change as your brand changes and as your the market that you're that you're selling into changes and as your audience changes, and that's a good thing.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: You're just trying to get started with that minimum viable style guide as soon as you can, so that way you aren't starting from scratch every time a content creator, a new content creator comes on board and starts creating things.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because without that style guide in place, that's exactly where you're gonna be.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: So just you know, if you have one takeaway from today's conversation, I really want it to be that your style guide doesn't need to be perfect and comprehensive to be transformational.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: That minimum viable style guide is going to make a huge, huge impact on your day-to-day work immediately.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one of the biggest themes throughout content foundations and throughout any presentation I've given over the past three years is really that scalable content does not happen by accident.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: It happens when you document the things your team keeps repeating, rewriting, and re-explaining.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: And building a strong style guide gives humans clarity, it gives AI direction, and allows your organization to scale your content with consistency.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that is so powerful.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: Being able to move beyond the limited hours and bandwidth of your content team to empower others throughout your organization to be able to create content that is going to sound like your brand, that is so powerful.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that is going to be the kind of thing that you have the ability to claim real ROI on.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's not something touchy-feely like awareness, it's something where you can actually point to, hey, we went from having content created just by our three content team members to having 15 SMEs last year create content for us because we were able to scale what we were doing thanks to our content operations and our content governance.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: That is going to be the kind of real result that gets you increased budget and gets you increased respect as not being the arts and crafts department for being people who are able to really think through how to bring your brand forward in a way that's going to help you reach your business goals.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: So if today's conversation sparked ideas for your own governance documentation, chapter two in the book includes the detailed framework, prompts, and template outlines that I gave a high-level overview of here.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, take check out the book for the in-depth look at the style guide sections, implementation ideas, and how to operationalize this work across teams.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: And for those of you who are following along with the 12-part Content Foundation series, next week we'll move into audience personas.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because once you know how your brand brand sounds, the next step is to make sure you deeply understand who you're speaking to.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: So if you've been relying on random acts of content, this is your sign to start documenting what good actually looks like.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because content governance isn't red tape, it's your operational superpower.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: Catch you next time.