What Is a Content Style Guide?
A content style guide is a set of standards for how different types of content will be written and formatted for your eCommerce platform. Types of content include blogs, news releases, videos, product pages, and more. Guidelines for content differ based on where it will be presented, such as social media platforms versus your website.
Content style guides are closely related to website design style guides, and “content style guide” is sometimes used to refer to both. Typically, content style guides focus on what words, images, and other forms of content will be used. Design style guides focus on how that content will fit onto the website, the standard page layouts, and where and how content will be presented. Utilizing both allows you to:
- Present consistent tone, voice, messaging, and design for your content
- Maintain high-quality standards for brand identity
- Write compelling content for your audiences
Why Do You Need a Content Style Guide?
Digital marketing is essential for eCommerce business. To have effective content, it’s best to have a style guide that’s specific to your company and industry.
The best-selling author and blogger Seth Godin says, "Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell."
Having a market-competent product isn’t enough. Without the right marketing strategy, people won’t learn how awesome your product is—they’ll just skip right over it. Marketing is about expressing and presenting your brand in a cohesive, structured manner. For that, you need a content style guide. Here are some expert tips for how you can use a style guide:
How to Use a Style Guide
- Cater to your audience: Your audience’s expectations, needs, and wants should be reflected in every piece of content you make. This will vary depending on the platform you post on, the topic of the content, and the industry you are in.
- Maintain consistency: It’s important to keep messaging, tone, voice, and design consistent for all your content. Providing a consistent experience for your users builds trust and loyalty. It also allows you to create better content.
- Use best practices: In creating a content style guide, research is often the first step. You need to know what your competitors are doing, what’s working, what’s not working, what people prefer, and other considerations. You might conduct a survey asking customers to choose between two design or style samples. You can also use tools that allow you to examine how people currently interact with pages on your website.
The Goal of a Content Style Guide
The goal is to have high-quality content that increases customer satisfaction, trust, and loyalty. This means potential customers will spend more time on your website and come back again later. Over time, you’ll see an increase in traffic, or the number of people coming to your eCommerce site.
This equals more potential for conversions, or people who take an action on your website. Actions lead to sales, conversations, shares, and other forms of engagement. This loops back around to fuel customer satisfaction.
A content style guide will also increase the efficiency of the marketing team. Instead of having to guess or come up with new rules for each piece of content, they can refer to a set of standards and see exactly what they need to do.
What Makes Quality Content?
- Answers people’s questions
- Shares information in a digestible form
- Presents a clear, concise layout
- Has related, high-quality images, where applicable
- Contains a Call to Action or other form of engagement
- Fast load times
- Inclusive and accessible features
- Consistent messaging
These are key factors to creating content that people will want to read, view, comment, share, or otherwise engage with. The more engagement you have, the better your chances for conversion will be, and the more potential customers you’ll have.
What Does a Content Style Guide Do?
To summarize the above and add some more context, a content style guide helps you create content in a way that:
- Attracts potential customers
- Keeps visitors interested
- Increases potential for conversions
- Builds a loyal customer base
- Improves efficiency and productivity of the marketing team
- Establishes credibility for your company
- Is easy to understand and navigate
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How to Make a Content Style Guide
Here are some pro tips for creating your first style guide:
1. Start with an Existing Content Style Guide
There are dozens of style guides out there. Style guides are categorized based on the country and type of writing they are for. For example, if you and your main audience live in the United States, then you’ll choose a style guide that adheres to the style conventions that are standard in the US.
These style guides are then further broken down into what type of writing they are for. The four most popular style guides are Chicago, AP, MLA, and APA.
AP and Chicago are most often used for business and technical writing. MLA and APA are most often used for academic writing. Choose the style that best fits your industry. Remember, the most important thing is to be consistent, no matter the style guide you choose.
2. Build On the Style Guide to Make It Your Own
Your company has unique products, services, and content. Your content style guide needs to reflect that. Here are some suggestions for what to add or adjust to the base guide:
- Formatting: This details the specific fonts, spacing, line and margin width, text and image alignment, list formats, file naming system, and friendly URL standards.
- Word list: This is a list of words, spellings, or capitalizations unique to your company. For example, we always write “eCommerce,” rather than “ecommerce” or “Ecommerce.”
- Specific grammar rules: Your style guide can also be a resource for common, tricky grammar rules and grammar that is unique to your company.
- Policies: These are the policies pertaining to posting on external platforms and legal constrictions. Consider speaking to your legal counsel or researching what policies should be included for different circumstances.
3. Make Your Content Style Guide Easy to Access and Update
If your content style guide is easy to access, people are much more likely to use it. It needs to be easy to update because the market and business are always in flux; nothing remains unchanged for long. So, you may need to update your word list or formatting guidelines to match best practices in your industry as they evolve.
Making your content style guide easy to access also helps encourage collaboration among content writers and editors. Collaboration on these matters helps develop the content style guide into the best version of itself.
To further encourage collaboration, you might consider a team chat or channel of some kind. We use Microsoft Teams, and we have a group chat named “Content Crew.” We house our style guide in a shared OneDrive document that’s also in the “files” section of our group chat.
Custom eCommerce Makes Things Easier
Clarity can custom-make an affordable eCommerce platform that lets you easily implement your content styling.
Formatting and Website Design Tips
Formatting has a big impact on your website design. Content style guides aren’t things to tack on after creating a piece of content. Instead, you want to keep the guidelines in mind while creating the content. Formatting should be consistent, yet dynamic. This means having specific standards for different situations. Here are some tips for formatting and design.
Choose the Right Typography
Typography refers to the look or style of text, such as a font style, font size, and any additions like bold, italics, or underline. Typography should suit the overall theme and content of your site, and the products and services you offer. The text should also complement other media on the website.
If you have an eCommerce or digital store that offers clothing, accessories, or home décor, you might go for a smoother, more rounded, and slightly larger font. If you want to make sure the images stand out, use shorter words for any headings above them and simple phrases to emphasize what’s important.
The images themselves also influence the typography. You need to be careful about the color and font of the text on or around pictures to ensure each are clearly visible and the text meets the standards for color contrast. The pictures and words referring to them should complement each other.
Look at what successful competitors are doing to find out what works. Tweak the design to fit your website, and then make sure to keep it consistent across the website.
You can have one font for top headings, another for subheadings, and another for the body text. Or you can keep the font the same but change just the text size and add bolding or more space underneath. Whatever you choose, make sure it presents a clean, consistent visual.
Include High-Quality Images
If you include images in your content, make sure they render properly on different browsers, have appropriate alt text or labels, are sized properly, and are presented clearly (not blurry or pixel-y). Images also affect page load speed, so make sure all images are condensed properly to ensure both fast page load speed and visual quality.
The quality of your images, from the user’s point of view, speaks to the quality of your website, products, and overall company. So make sure they present well on different devices, too. This is crucial for eCommerce platforms.
Select a Comprehensive Website Design
The accurate and attractive portrayal of your product is based not only on typography and pictures but also on website design and web page design. You can only ensure proper content styling and presentation on the web page when your website allows you to put everything in a particular manner.
The layout of your site should be consistent and straightforward with simple instructions. Users are more likely to visit more than one page on your website if the transitions do not require much effort. If the transitions are not comfortable or pages take time to load, many visitors leave the eCommerce website and move to another.
Make It Easy to Gather Information
Content design, website design, and page design make it incredibly easy for you to make the website captivating. However, to add a more distinct look to your web page, consider adding specific elements to your business website.
Visual elements that showcase information concisely can be more influential than text alone, so why not utilize it and insert some infographics and charts on the site? Users love it when they do not have to skim through long paragraphs and get the desired information at first glance. This is also why it’s a good idea to utilize lists and headings to present main ideas.
Content Styling – A Characteristic of SEO
With all the other elements of SEO, content designing can be of great help. If the website presents itself beautifully to the visitor, the page visits and stay time will see a spike. This will boost traffic for your eCommerce platform.
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