For many small businesses, the brand’s personality and the owner’s personality are one in the same. And that’s fine! But as the team contributing to the marketing grows, maintaining a cohesive brand voice takes a concerted effort.
To keep a consistent brand, include content and copywriting tips in your brand guidelines (not just logo directions, which is all many brand guidelines include!). Some examples that could be included in a brand guideline:
- We want to write in the clearest way possible to reduce barriers for our audiences. Leave your SAT prep vocab flashcards, your semicolons, and your hithertos at home.
- We don’t use memes on a blog post or landing page, but it’s fine to use memes on social.
- When pulling in names from our CRM, always address the recipient as <first name> not <salutation> <last name>.
- URL subdirectories should include hyphens between words like /contact-us instead of /contactus.
- We don’t use buzzwords like synergy or innovative or alignment in our marketing. We instead opt for more specific words that better explain our USP.
These are 5 examples of the many content and copywriting rules that you could include in your brand guidelines. By defining these, you’ll get better on-brand content from your contributors and create less work for your marketing staff trying to maintain one brand voice.