Literally the most practical brand copy consistency guide

Season 9, Issue 6: A copywriting brief template

📬In this issue:

• Your new brand tone x copywriting bible

• QAing copy and brand tone consistency across all assets

• Templating micro decisions for different mediums

• Attach this to briefs (for humans or AI)

---

Bonjour Mehketeers,

One gold star I absolutely love to get on my Type A personality chart is “you write really good briefs.” This praise will have me floating on cloud nine for days.

What makes my briefs so good? I think it comes down to all the detail and micro decisions I include in them. Today’s issue is a template for all of those decisions, all the little things you probably should have a rule for, but it’s just not written down, considered on the fly, or not really considered at all.

I’m going to break this into two sections in the newsletter, but you’ll find it all combined into one templated guideline. If you click the button below, it’ll make a copy of the guidelines, and then you can customise it and start using it straight away.

Part 1: Brand tone micro decisions

When I say “tone”, the first thing that might come to mind is your classic adjectives: approachable, friendly, corporate, authoritative, and so on. That’s not what I’m going to focus on.

For big brands, the following things will be established, but for smaller teams, younger startups, and honestly even scale ups that are growing quickly and don’t have time to pause and set some processes will overlook the following.

Here’s some questions for you. How often do you go back to older content to check

• Do you write ebook or e-book?

• Do you add full stops to the end of bullet points?

• Is it ok to use “our” or “we” in copy? What about “you”?

• What’s the preferred terminology over “customer”?

When I’m writing for clients for the first time, these are the kinds of things that prevent me from getting into a flow state. I’ll check their website or existing materials and find every variation under the sun.

These are the micro decisions being made while writing — and if you’re using AI, while editing. If you’re outsourcing to a copywriter, giving them this info will ensure first drafts come back more aligned to your brand (and not whatever brand they just finished writing for and still have their micro decisions in mind.)

Even while writing this, I used micro-decision, microdecision, and micro decision. As you can tell, I went back and decided to stick with micro decision. Imagine if I kept changing between them through out this? Would you have been bothered by it?

Every brand I’ve worked with has had very specific quirks, so you’ll likely have a longer list than what’s in the template. Make it your own!

Part 2: Brand idiolect

This is the part where I remind you I have a ✨masters degree in applied linguistics✨ (a deep cut of Kayla trivia: I’m featured on my university’s web page for this degree and then under my photo they wrote the wrong degree lmao.)

So, what’s an idiolect? Sounds insulting, but it’s not.

An idiolect is basically the way an individual person consistently and reliably speaks. It is all their quirks, incorrect grammar, context switching, preferred vocabularly, and everything that makes you go “oh that’s such a Kayla thing to say.”

Brands should have this too! It can be as simple as set phrases you use consistently for specific products, or as nit picky as “we would never say ‘thrilled to announce’”. It is what you would say as much as what you would never say.

I definitely use set phrases a lot in product marketing if it’s something that needs precise definitions to be conveyed or a tricky phrase that was approved by legal.

Just recently I had a back and forth with a client’s legal team to find a phrase that would accurately allow us to claim to be the provider with the most options in that industry, while excluding a giant mega competitor who technically had more feature options but is American based.

Saving that phrase in a dedicated document is the easiest way to make sure I can access it, but also so that other team members can find it and forward it to any other external resources or new hires to get them up to speed.

Part 3: Templating the way you lay out web pages

The hardest things to write is always headers. You’ve got limited characters, it needs to be punchy, skimmable, and not generic.

I have found that whenever I set rules for headers, it becomes a lot easier to keep the copy across web pages consistent. The easiest rule to set is to say that H2s will always be focused on value, and subtitles will always be focused on highlighting a job to be done.

Here’s a shortlist of options you can choose from:

• Value propositions

• Functional description

• Persona driven

• Job to be done

• Industry focus

• ROI

• Testimonial or quote

• Witty, punny, or otherwise brand/personality driven

The thing to remember here is you can set these rules to have consistency across sub-groups of pages. For example, case studies follow one set of rules while the home page has its own rules, and your product pages also have their own rules. You get some flexibility for the content you’re working with, while still having that quality assurance.

Where you need even more flexibility, you can say H2s can have one of three options, instead of strictly just one (we all know sometimes the copy just doesn’t flow…)

You can do this for all sorts of content as well, not just web pages. Headers on slides, social media hooks, product brochures, printed materials - literally anything that has a visual hierarchy, AKA uses different sized text. Go ham.

---

Ta-da

Honestly I don’t know how to end this issue. It’s 10pm the night before publishing so this is all the gas I’ve got left in the tank!

Sometimes I wonder if the topics I pick are too niche, but then again, this is what I’m actually working on this week, and that’s the spirit of Mehdeeka! The inside of my brain, turned outside, and presented to you. Ta-daaaaa.

See you next week,

Kayla

P.S. Was this too niche? Was it just right? Tell me 🥲