Crafting effective editorial guidelines

Hey there,

Inconsistent messaging across your content will make your audience distrust you. You can fix that by creating and adhering to a set of editorial guidelines.

This is crucial for maintaining brand voice, gaining your audience’s trust, and getting great first drafts from your writers.

Here’s what you should include in your editorial guidelines:

1. Objectives

What are you looking to accomplish by creating content?

It’s important to set goals for creating content since this will guide the entire content creation process.

Examples of goals include:

• Educating your audience

• Generating leads

• Driving sales

2. Audience

Who are you creating content for?

Your editorial guidelines should describe the target audience for your content.

Try to be very specific here: cover demographics, interests, behavior, job titles, and pain points.

3. Voice and tone

How do you want your content to sound and feel like?

Think about how you want your content to come across.

Casual or professional? Conversational or authoritative?

Something in between?

Make sure to include examples here.

4. Style and formatting

How is your content going to look?

Here, you want to go over best practices for writing and formatting content.

Do you want writers to avoid jargon or abbreviations? Or use short sentences and paragraphs?

When should they use bold or italic text?

Write all of this down in your guidelines doc.

5. Media policy

What kind of media (e.g., images or videos) can be used within your content?

It’s good to explain what kind of media is suitable for using throughout your content.

Maybe you’d like to avoid using stock images? Or focus on GIFs and videos?

You’ll also want to explain how to properly attribute the media that’s included in the content.

6. Linking policy

What kind of websites can your content link to?

Let writers know which websites are suitable for linking to throughout your content.

For example, you might want to avoid linking to your competitors. Or only link to highly authoritative industry publications.

Your editorial guidelines document

Add the above to a Google document or Notion page and share it with anyone who creates content for your brand.

You’ll start getting more consistent content in no time.

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