How Content Guidelines Improve Your Marketing and Inspire Your Audience

Consistent presentation of a brand has seen to increase revenue by 33%.

Considering this statistic, you can see that it literally pays to be on-brand across all marketing channels. Consistent presentation means that no matter whether it’s an Instagram story or a print ad, an email or a LinkedIn ad, your brand communicates the same thing.

Consumers want to get to know your business through the lens of your writing. This helps them to trust you — since you’re delivering the same messages every time, they know it must be true.

What Are Content Guidelines?

Content guidelines are the rules for all your copy and content.

It’s a very handy document that includes positioning, key messaging, tone of voice and values.

Used both internally for the whole team to get behind your business and understand why you do what you do, as well as externally to humanise your brand and communicate your offering.

It answers questions like:

What does your brand do?
Where did it all begin?
Why is your brand better than competitors?
Who is your brand built for?
What values inspire you to do what you do?
What makes your brand amazing?

The importance of laying these foundations is undeniable. But there’s another edge that content guidelines give to your business. And that edge is how they improve your marketing at every level and inspire your audience.

How Your Marketing Benefits from Content Guidelines

Content Guidelines’ most valuable gift to your marketing is key messaging.

These are the consistent messages you want to drive home again and again to your customers. It’s what you want people to think of when they think of your brand. They resonate with your audience, set you apart from your competitors and embody your brand’s tone of voice and personality.

Your content guidelines become kind of like a recipe book.

You can pull out any dish and repurpose it for any occasion. An insta caption for lunch, an about us page for breakfast, a teaser campaign for dessert where you leave them wanting more. Time and time again, you can pull these messages from your recipe book and serve them up to impress your audience.

If you have your content guidelines nailed, then you essentially have a range of ad headlines, content themes for blog posts, emails, captions and overarching messages ready to go with any form of digital marketing.

Examples of Content Guidelines Increasing Revenue

Our client PUMA has a strong and recognisable brand. They’re confident, enthusiastic and always Forever Faster.

We manage their multi-channel advertising campaigns so we’re already familiar with their brand voice and style. When they needed an email strategy to match their global scale and fast-paced product releases, we knew exactly how to write the copy. By creating engaging content that we knew would resonate with their audience, we achieved:

A 22.3% average open rate, which is 3% higher than the industry average and thanks to a clickable subject line
2.1% average click-through rate, which is 0.7% higher than the industry average
152% increase in revenue from email over a 3 month period, compared to the previous 3 months

That’s how nailing your content guidelines makes money through marketing.

salt&pepper came to us to reinvigorate their online presence by implementing their new tone of voice.

We leveraged their diverse catalogue to create a series of blogs that boosted their product awareness and ensured great Google rankings while also showcasing a brand voice that their audience wants to invest in.

This meant we delivered content their consumers actually want to read and engage with. Creative copy that works hard to both sell the product as well as the story behind the brand. The result?

16.5% increase in organic traffic over a 3 month period
22.5% increase in organic revenue over a 3 month period

That’s how consistently implementing content guidelines increases revenue.

Benefits Beyond Marketing

So now we know having content guidelines improves your chance of getting business from new clients.

But did you know it also helps your employees? It boosts motivation internally, attracts better workers for your business and bonds the team over a shared direction.

Content guidelines equip every member of your team with the knowledge they need to sell your brand.

What if You Don’t Have Content Guidelines?

Without content guidelines, anyone could really write anything on behalf of your brand. The message gets muddled. The tone differs whether it’s written by the office comedian or Boring Bob. There’s no consistency in what you’re trying to say.

When you engage an agency for marketing services, they’ll often ask if you have content guidelines. This is so our copywriters can feel confident that anything they write is in line with your brand.

We want to say the same thing no matter who it’s coming from and still benefit from diversifying your marketing channels. So if you don’t already have content guidelines, you risk inconsistency and miss out on the opportunity to build trust through repetition.

“Consistent presentation of a brand has seen to increase revenue by 33%”

Luckily, you can get the same people who get great results from your digital marketing to also develop your content guidelines. This ensures total consistency across all channels, plus we can also tap into metrics to see what messaging is resonating with your audience and include that as a key section.

Be smart about utilising content guidelines as a powerful tool that benefits your marketing.