Content is still king when it comes to marketing and what you produce defines you in the eyes of your customers. Making content that drives your brand in all the right ways takes planning and research. Though the online world moves quickly and there’s often a temptation to get content posted as swiftly as possible, you need to ensure you’re sticking to some established guidelines if you want to be successful. Incongruous, poorly produced content looks unprofessional whereas a properly curated selection of well-constructed pieces sets you apart from the competition. Here’s Probella’s tips on how to set your own content creation guidelines.
Know Your Brand Voice
This is easier said than done, especially in the early days of a business, however, understanding your brand voice before you start to use it is essential. Think about how you want to be perceived and who you are addressing. Conventions that are commonplace in some industries could spell disaster in others. For example, casual, pun laden monologues to camera might be par for the course in gaming marketing and product reviews, but less popular in business to business to scenarios. Think about the kind of language, tone and style you are trying to present before you decide to upload any copy or video content. Style guides can be useful for copywriters in the same way that scripts and onscreen rules can be helpful for those presenting videos. Basics such as avoiding certain ways of speaking or phrases that might be at odds with what you’re trying to represent can take time to learn, so having a list of dos and don’ts or a more comprehensive set of guidelines is highly recommended.
Be specific about quantity
Whether you’re writing blogs or tweeting micro reviews, you need to be aware of how much space you have to work with. When you’re creating your content plan, consider things like running time, word count and technical elements such as file sizes. (Rendering time and other processes can be overlooked in the conceptual stages of a campaign.) Take some time to research your competition and look at how long their articles are and how they approach their video content. Attention is at a premium these days and if web users get bored, they’ll simply move on. Setting specific guidelines about running time or word count also means that those who are creating your content for you understand how much time to invest on each piece of work.
Identify Your No-Go Areas
Whether this means avoiding political references or keeping your content family, each business will have different no areas, depending on what they are trying to do. Making a list of things you want to avoid means you can establish your content guidelines with confidence. If you know that you don’t want to make cheesy jokes in your advertising copy, say so. If you have a problem with overly familiar language or casual postures on camera, make this clear. By highlighting the opposite of what you are looking for, you can communicate a clearer picture of how you would like your content to look.
Mission Statements and Key Messages
Not every business needs a mission statement, but it can help to think about the key message you are trying to present. For example, are you trying to be provocative in order to disrupt a certain sector of the market? Or are you hoping to establish yourself as an authoritative but neutral source of information? Depending on your intention, the way you present your information will need to be adapted. Mission statements or summaries of your goals can help to define content guidelines as you can refer to them whenever you create a piece of work.
Audience Profiles
The content you create will be consumed by real people, not just algorithms, so ensure you know who you’re communicating with. This means you need to understand details such as reading speed, reading level, attention span and more nuanced elements such as brand preferences. Understanding how your audience are likely to interact with any pieces of content you create means that you can set content guidelines that work. Analytics are available to provide you with information such as how long a person spent on a particular page, how much of a video they watched and whether or not they reacted to a call to action. This information can be key when creating content guidelines as it allows you to craft copy, images or videos that genuinely appeal to the people you’re trying to connect with.
Flexibility and Adapting to the Market
Style guides and specific rules about content are undoubtedly necessary, but it’s also important to maintain an element of flexibility. Trends come and go, people’s tastes change, and the way users interact with pages can be different from person to person. Regular reviews of your content guidelines are essential to ensure you’re producing pieces that genuinely work for your audience. Though you may have started out trying to avoid short, very direct videos or bold, simplistic text, if this is proving to be effective for everybody else in your market, you should probably at least consider adopting some of these conventions yourself.
Define What Quality Means to You
As we mentioned earlier, the stylistic conventions that are suitable for one business may be very different to those preferred by another organisation. It’s important to work out how you measure quality when it comes to content, before you start producing anything. Think about the key elements that matter the most in your content. This could be image resolution, rates of engagement, grammar and punctuation or even sound levels. Though all of these things are likely to important in their own right, you will still need to prioritise what matters the most to you, your staff and your customers. There are no set rules when it comes to content creation, so defining what you think is important is one of the most critical steps of all.
