A content guide, or content style guide, is a document that establishes the guidelines for everyone in an organization to follow when creating content for your brand. Guides address brand personality, voice, tone, and key messaging points, as well as grammar, punctuation, and formatting preferences.
On an episode of Shopify Masters, Ryan Rouse, president of plant-based milk startup MALK, says that using a content guide keeps messaging consistent, yet distinct, across channels. “You want to have an internal-facing document, call it a brand bible,” Ryan says, adding that MALK’s content guide helps the team make decisions about copy, so they can “plug and play” key messaging points across assets.
In this article, you’ll learn what a content guide is, why it’s an essential tool for a growing brand, and practical strategies for creating a guide that sets your brand’s content up for success.
What is a content guide?
A content guide is a document used by content marketing teams to communicate standards for writing, editing, and formatting content across various channels. Common elements of a content style guide include a brand’s personality, voice and tone, how to use certain words or phrases, grammar and punctuation, and best practices for content accessibility.
A content guide is distinct from other style or strategy guides. While a brand style guide outlines your brand’s look and feel and a content strategy determines the purpose and goals of your content operations, a content style guide specifically outlines how to write, edit, and format copy.
Why is a content guide important?
A content guide turns subjective decisions about style, words, and formatting into clear standards that everyone can reference, so that your content is consistent no matter who on your team is creating or reviewing it. An emerging brand’s personality, along with its distinct voice and tone, can be a powerful differentiator when you’re seeking to stand out in a crowded marketplace. A content guide helps keep that personality intact as your brand voice is channeled through multiple people, tools, and channels.
Consistent messaging can help create brand trust, which leads to conversions over time. Since ecommerce brands can be discovered through many different channels, and prospective users are often targeted multiple times, consistency is critical in this space. A 2023 study from Psychology & Marketing found that “signal congruency,” or situations where all of a brand’s channels aligned and conveyed a consistent message, enhanced consumers’ purchase intentions and perceptions of authenticity.
How to create a content guide
- Outline your content strategy’s core goals
- Define your brand personality
- Document writing standards
- Include examples
- Update your guide regularly
Follow these steps to create your own content guide:
1. Outline your content strategy’s core goals
A content strategy outlines how your content aims to support your broader business goals, whether that’s improving brand awareness, growing your online community, increasing organic search traffic, or bringing in high-quality sales leads.
While a content style guide doesn’t need to include an in-depth description of your content strategy, it’s helpful to have a section that offers people an overview of your key content channels, principles, and goals. This will help writers and other creators understand the why behind every piece of content they work on for your brand.
2. Define your brand personality
The foundation of your content guide is your brand’s personality. A clear brand persona takes your content guide beyond a list of arbitrary rules and connects it back to your company’s mission. Define your brand’s personality by referencing existing content, collecting suggestions and feedback from people familiar with your brand, conducting a competitive analysis, and reflecting on what makes your company unique. Everyone’s process for describing brand personality is slightly different; some companies craft a character as a reference, and others lean on archetypes, like the adventurer or the eldest daughter.
For Lillian Tung, cofounder of the beauty brand Fur, a strong brand personality helped inform important content decisions, such as keeping the phrase “for pubic hair and skin” prominently displayed on their packaging.
As Lillian says on Shopify Masters, “Very well-meaning people said, ‘We love the product, we love you, we really want to carry this. Take pubic off the front of the box and we will do so.’ We thought really carefully about that as a self-funded business, and we did not do it. Because then you destroy the mission, you destroy everything we’re fighting for here to de-stigmatize pubic hair and skin and body hair. So we didn’t.”
3. Document writing standards
Once you’ve nailed down your brand’s voice, it’s time to come up with your company’s writing standards. Here are some typical standards to include in a content guide:
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Voice and tone. Your brand’s voice and tone may need different versions for different contexts, like responding to a customer service request versus writing a LinkedIn post. A voice and tone section offers guidelines for how to write on behalf of the brand and calibrate the tone accordingly. You can use a tool like Shopify Magic to experiment with slightly different tones—such as fun, sophisticated, persuasive, or supportive—for different channels.
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Grammar, punctuation, and formatting. Some brands follow a standard style, like AP or Chicago, while other brands use a standard as a base with some exceptions. Clean, consistent, and error-free content builds credibility and trust. Think about how you want to approach details like abbreviations, numbers, capitalization for headings, dashes, exclamation points, lists, and more.
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Terminology. The section called Terminology includes words that align with your brand voice. This might include guidance on how to use key phrases, words to avoid, and preferred terms (for example, describing your audience as users versus clients).
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Accessibility. Many content guides also include accessibility and usability guidelines. Setting standards on reading levels, alt text for images, video subtitles, voice-over, and translation ensures that your content is both inclusive and legally compliant.
4. Include examples
One of the most helpful resources you can include in your content guide is a library of approved examples that align with your brand. Include examples of ideal product descriptions, social captions, email subject lines, and responses to customer questions so that new writers and other decision-makers can see how your brand voice works in real situations.
Where helpful, break down the example to show why you chose one word over another or formatted a post in a specific way. You may even choose to show what not to do in common scenarios so team members have their questions answered directly in the content guide.
5. Update your guide regularly
As your brand evolves, revisit your content style guide to ensure it still reflects your personality, priorities, and goals. Make sure it still aligns with your broader brand guidelines and visual brand guide as well.
You might want to set up a regular review of your content guide with your content marketing team, so you can add in new examples or messaging in real-time. By making small tweaks over time, you can ensure your guide stays relevant without the pressure of a total overhaul.\
As Pia Mance, founder of the accessories brand Heaven Mayhem, says on an episode of Shopify Masters, “We do have a formal brand guide, which is also changing and evolving. We probably tweak it every six months.” Twice a year, Pia and her team revisit the brand’s tone of voice, approach to brand storytelling, use of logos, and fonts to make sure every rule supports the most updated version of the brand.
Content guide FAQ
What is the difference between a content guide and brand guidelines?
Brand guidelines are a set of high-level rules that describe your brand’s overall identity, covering both visual and strategy-related elements like logos, colors, and core values. A content guide is a narrower tactical tool with a focus on written rules, such as grammar, word choice, tone, and formatting.
What should a content style guide include?
A content style guide should lay out a brand’s personality and strategy for creating content, including elements like core brand voice rules, grammar and punctuation standards, formatting conventions, and specific vocabulary choices to make sure that every part of your content marketing strategy feels aligned.
Why do ecommerce businesses need a content guide?
A content guide is non-negotiable for ecommerce businesses with multiple employees because it helps ensure the brand voice stays coherent across multiple forms of content. Content guides help you build buyer trust, strengthen search engine optimization, and maintain clarity across product pages, blogs, and social media posts.
