4 Steps to Easy Brand Copy Guidelines for Your Business
Branding is more than skin deep
It’s easy to see the importance of visual branding — choosing the right colours, typography, and visual style that makes your brand stand out from the crowd and is distinguishably you.
But there’s more to branding than what’s seen on the surface.
As a copywriter & content strategist, one big piece of the puzzle that I often find missing from my client’s brand guidelines — especially if they’ve created it themselves — is a breakdown of their copy.
Copy is the voice of your company — it’s how your customers hear you when they read your website, receive your promos, and interact with you on social.
Without clear guidelines around your brand voice, tone, messaging, and words to use/avoid, even the most consistently-coloured copy can become confusing for customers — especially when there are different people writing behind the scenes.
If you’re a large business, or small one looking to scale, it’s essential that you create brand copy guidelines to ensure that your marketing manager, freelance writer, new social media maven, and all future hires keep up a consistent style and standard set by you.
Creating brand copy guidelines, or a copy style guide, for your business doesn’t have to be difficult. You can create a basic one in just four steps:
Step 1: Specify Your Voice
Your brand voice isn’t necessarily the same as your CEO’s voice. Figuring out your brand voice is about intentionally choosing where you want to sit on the spectrum of:
- Witty / Punny to To-The-Point
- Neighbourly to Expert
- Quirky to Straight
- Professional to Relatable
Think not only about what will represent your company, but also what will resonate with your audience. A younger demographic may respond well to cheeky humour, where an older demographic seeks direct language.
Your tone is also important — this is how you communicate feeling through your copy. Do you want to inspire and encourage? Instil confidence? Trigger fear?
What kind of emotions do you want your audience to feel as they read your copy? Write these down, and keep them handy to “temperature check” your copy as you’re writing.
Step 2: Specify Words You Like
Once you know your voice, start thinking about what words represent your business, mission, and spirit, and what words you think would attract your ideal customers.
If your business is a travel agency for the wealthy, your words list might include:
- Boutique
- Tailor-made
- Luxury
- High-end travel
- Comfort
- Glamour
- Exclusive
Your word list can be as short or long as you like — I’d usually aim for 10–20 words. They can be a mix of nouns, verbs, adjectives, phrases, or concepts — there’s no limit.
These words will form a quick-reference guide for getting into the voice & tone of your company when writing, and making sure that you’re giving the right impression across all marketing touchpoints.
Note that this is not an SEO keyword list, as these words are not necessarily going to reflect your search terms — they’re more about triggering responses and recognition in your target customer’s mind, and creating the right impression of your brand.
Step 3: Specify Words You Don’t Like
Next, it’s time to create a second list: a negative list. This list is all about words you want to specifically avoid using.
Using as an example again, the travel agency for wealthy customers, they’d want to avoid any language referencing:
- Budget
- Shoestring
- Cheap
- Backpacker
Using those words would speak to the wrong type of customers, and create an impression that the business services both cheaper and high-end patrons, when in reality their target audience is exclusively the wealthy.
To write this list, you have to know already what type of customers you DON’T want to attract. Plenty of businesses know their target customer, but not enough consider who they want to repel.
Time-wasters, unqualified leads, and bad customers can’t be avoided altogether, but they can be reduced with the right messaging to help them see your company isn’t right for them.
Step 4: Create a Checklist
The easiest way to keep up consistent standards across your copy and content is to create a checklist.
Depending on how deep you want to go and the goals of your copy, the checklist could be as high-level as:
“Does this add value? Is this educational? Does this answer a need?” or
“Which customer persona does this speak to? Which pain point does it solve?”
To ensure you’re on-point with your branding, you might want to check:
“Does this fit my brand voice? Does this fit my tone? Does this use my positive words? Does this use any of my negative words?”
For conversion-focused copy, your checklist could include:
“Does this have an engaging hook? Does this have a CTA? Does this highlight benefits over features? Is this customer-centric, not company-centric?”
And for SEO-centric copy, your checklist might look like this:
“Which keywords does this include? Are these in the H1? Are these in the first 100 words? Do all H2s and H3s feature keywords? Has your meta-data included said keywords?”
I use checklists for all of my clients, as a simple way to make sure I’m hitting the right notes every time, and never slipping.
On busy days when I’m working across multiple clients within the space of a few hours, it’s too easy to get their voices muddled or forget which tone is what. Checklists keep my work up to standard and keep me on track, so my clients can push out strong copy every time.
Now go create some beautifully on-brand communications and see your business grow!
