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Should My Company Blog Have a Style Guide?
John Himes
July 16, 2024
Have you ever wondered if your tech company should have a written style guide?
The short answer is yes.
Convinced? You can stop reading now. For everyone else, let’s dive in.
A style guide is an often overlooked foundational element that helps you maintain consistency in your communications. Why is this important? It translates to brand trust and credibility.
You may already have a visual brand guide: your colors, font, iconography, and other elements of visual style that make your brand look like your brand. A style guide is basically that, but with words.
“Today, virtually 100 percent of buyers prefer to find and research technology products on their own,” says Vinay Bhagat for Forbes. This means people are asking questions to their search engines, combing through websites, and diving into their top candidate’s content.
When all of your content presents a unified voice, it builds a stronger relationship with those buyers because they feel like they’re having a conversation with you, not just a bunch of random people on the internet.
What is a style guide?
A style guide is a document that codifies certain conventions of writing. It sets rules that govern both the mechanics and personality of written communications.
For instance, a style guide clarifies ambiguous punctuation “rules” like the Oxford (serial) comma and whether to place spaces around em dashes. It can also set the tone of voice: are you humorous or serious? Are you formal or conversational?
Most company style guides start with an established guide as a default and then tweak it to their own needs. While we prefer Chicago Style for its simplicity, flexibility, and relatability, some blogs choose APA, AP, or even lesser-known style guides like Gregg.
Take a look at NASA’s guide for history authors and editors. They also default to Chicago, but then they provide specific guidance for issues like how to capitalize the names of celestial bodies.
The choices in a style guide can and should reflect a brand’s identity and hint at what that brand stands for. For example, if you look at Dynamic Tech Media’s style guide, you’ll notice that we have specific guidance for technology-related words. Makes sense—we talk a lot about technology, and there’s discrepancies in how people hyphenate and capitalize certain words.
Our line of thinking is that, as a technology becomes more commonplace, the way it’s styled becomes increasingly minimalist. Don’t forget there was once a time when it wasn’t outlandish to write “Inter-net”!
Now, we still sometimes see “Internet,” but it’s also increasingly likely to be stylized as “internet.” We embrace this change.
So, according to our style guide, “e-Commerce” becomes “ecommerce.” This general principle reflects our mission to simplify complexity and our belief that technology is an everyday wonder that’s achieved common-noun status.
What are the advantages of having a style guide for B2B tech marketing?
The main benefit is that it’s good for your brand. It enforces your unique personality and builds consistency in your audience’s perception. The end result is more credibility.
Remember, B2B tech brands market and sell to smart people who pay attention to details. Sure, a misplaced comma probably won’t kill your deal. But if your communications are all over the place and lack cohesion, then those buyers may start to wonder about your tech stack as well.
A great style guide is a tool for presenting a clear brand voice. When your audience reads your blog, they should unconsciously feel something inside them saying, “Yup, this is the brand that I recognize.” The takeaway is that it nurtures the relationship your audience has with your brand and moves them closer to saying YES to the big deal.
The second benefit to having a style guide for your blog and other communications is that it makes the content creation process more efficient, faster, and ultimately less expensive (read: less time wasted going back and forth).
Basically, it makes the lives of writers and editors a lot easier when they can point to a single source of truth and say, “Yes, a hyphen goes here.” No further discussion needed.
“A style guide streamlines every decision during the editing stage,” says Nimmy Dumm, founder of Aspen Root Editing and copyeditor at Dynamic Tech Media. “How to treat numbers, capitalization after a colon, whether to use a comma before ‘LLC’—these things matter to your voice, and the best way to ensure consistency is to have that document to refer to.”
Third and finally, the style guide also helps with the graphic design process, both for blogs and for other assets. Again, it comes back to consistency. When graphic designers have clear guidance on what words to capitalize, for instance, they’re more efficient—and you end up with better, more consistent end products.
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How to create a style guide for your blog
Start with the fundamentals. You need to think deeply about your brand and your customer. What do you stand for? What messaging resonates? How do your buyer personas prefer to be spoken to?
Then start with an established guide as your default. The Chicago Manual of Style, for instance, is over 1,000 pages, and you instantly gain the benefit of all that hard work by adopting it. The same is true for choosing any other major style guide.
From there, it comes down to figuring out where you diverge from the defaults. Remember, a style guide should serve you, not the other way around. So don’t be afraid to build upon your brand’s style guide and tweak it as you go. A style guide is a living document.
That’s why it’s so important that you work with a professional editor who knows the defaults. They’ll flag discrepancies for you and then give you the choice to either go with the current guidance or revise your style guide. Then they’ll make sure your blog posts and other communications all conform to that same style.
The final step is making sure the document is easily accessible. Of course everyone working on your blog needs to know where to find it, but other departments may need it as well for their own communications.
Give all your written communications a boost with a style guide
The blog may be the first and easiest place to put your style guide to work, but it’s far from the only place you should apply it. Everything from pitch decks to press releases can benefit from a unified style.
But for marketing departments especially, a written style guide is much like audience research or buyer personas. It’s a foundational element upon which everything else is built.
Want help creating a style guide that reflects your unique brand identity? Get in touch with Dynamic Tech Media today.
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