Ah, consistency. An ongoing effort to maintain but something you only notice in its absence.
The more people involved, the more difficult it becomes to sustain. A content team producing regular social and blog copy is a whole different beast to a new website project involving freelance writers alongside an in-house team.
There’s no end of tech designed to help manage content consistency, but I’m a firm believer that you need to tackle the human behaviour first. I’ve watched from the sidelines while additional tools and platforms are added on top of the wrong habits and practices, simply amplifying the chaos.
Therefore, I’m going to concentrate on the practices, processes and softer skills involved.
Define what consistency looks like to you
Unless everybody involved is clear on what you’re trying to achieve, you won’t achieve it. For some people, tone of voice is the pinnacle of consistency, for others it’s your stance on important topics, or even grammatical preferences.
Don’t forget to outline exceptions, or instances where the rules can be relaxed a little, such as individually authored blogs, for example.
Assign someone to oversee all content
To keep all your copy in line and make sure nothing slips through the cracks, it really needs to have a designated person in charge. Even if it goes through additional checks along the way, this person should have final sign-off on all copy.
Make sure this is someone with a keen eye for detail, organised enough to keep on top of various amends and approvals, yet with the management skills required to understand how different copywriters work.
It’s all in the brief
The best briefs contain the information you need, but as concisely as possible. If you can complete the first piece as a guide to follow, even better.
But it’s not just what you brief but how you brief people. Repetition is key to forming habits – you can’t tell your copywriters once to capitalise all product names and then expect to see that reflected in every piece of finished copy.
Similarly, don’t rely on email to convey key information. Everyone works differently, but typically people are more likely to remember human interactions and conversations over instructions they’ve read in an email or a 50 page document they’ve been sent access to, which brings us on to the next point.
Consider a style guide…
But keep it usable! Huge documents that stipulate hundreds of rules to follow not only stifle creativity, they’re counterproductive. There’s too much to take in and often this results in nothing being remembered, or worse, the guide remaining unused. The only thing worse than a 50-page document is several different documents which all live online, but no one can remember where!
Keep it concise, and remember to give examples. People interpret things differently, and an “informal, chatty tone” can look vastly different from one writer to the next.
Rather than focusing on more vague elements like purpose and vision, prioritise the more easily definable parts such as which tense you write in, whether to use active or passive voice, how the date should be written, or how certain words are formatted.
Try to avoid spending too long creating the style guide itself, and not allowing copywriters enough time to read and digest it before completing the copy.
It’s also a good idea to run through the style guide with everyone before you start, to answer any questions and nip any misunderstandings in the bud.
Nail the proofing and feedback loop
Keep your style guide open as you proof and make sure you feed back on content that isn’t quite hitting the mark. There’s obviously no need to point out typos that you’ve corrected, but if the tone is a little off, or certain words are being formatted incorrectly, make sure the writer understands.
It’s also a good idea within larger teams to get copywriters proofing each others’ writing as this helps everyone understand how their work compares, therefore highlighting any gaps in consistency.
For larger projects like website rewrites, I’d recommend gathering all content together again at the end to review how it all sits together. Often, you’re stricter on the things you pick up on at the beginning than towards the end, with later pages judged by a more relaxed standard.
And of course, if all that sounds like something you don’t have time for, give us a call 🙂