Our Marketing Style Guide Is Just 658 Words. We Love It. And You Can Steal It

Somewhere in your company (or your client’s), there’s a “Style Guide” that’s roughly the size of a mild regret. It’s 37 pages. It starts with “Our Brand Is…” and ends with a color palette no one uses. It’s beautifully designed. It’s also ignored like a gym membership in February.

We tried that. We also tried “let’s just be consistent,” which is like trying to “just be tall.” What finally worked was a marketing style guide so short you can read it in the time it takes your coffee to get dangerously optimistic.

Ours is 658 words. Not 6,580. Not “we’ll keep it brief” and then drop a novella. Six hundred and fifty-eight. It’s small on purpose, because a style guide only helps if people actually use it. And yesbelow, you can steal the whole thing.

Why most marketing style guides die young (and unread)

Marketing teams don’t ignore style guides because they hate consistency. They ignore them because the guides are often built like museums: impressive, expensive, and slightly intimidating. Your writers don’t need a curated exhibit. They need a light switch.

The friction problem: “Where do I even look?”

The longer a guide gets, the more it turns into a scavenger hunt. You don’t want “Section 4.2.1: Hyphenation in compound modifiers (see Appendix B).” You want a quick answer when you’re writing a landing page headline and the clock is doing that fun thing where it becomes a weapon.

The consistency problem: voice stays… until it doesn’t

Voice is the personality of your brand in writing. Tone is the mood for the moment. Without guardrails, voice drifts across channels: your blog sounds friendly, your product UI sounds robotic, and your “Oops, outage” email sounds like it was written by a courtroom stenographer.

The fix isn’t “write better.” The fix is “make it easy to write the same way, on purpose.” That’s what a good content style guide does: it makes the right choice the default choice.

The tiny-style-guide philosophy: fewer rules, more behavior

Great writing standards aren’t about controlling every comma. They’re about shaping repeatable behavior: clarity, consistency, and trust. The best modern style guidance tends to converge on the same core ideas: be clear, be human, be inclusive, and be respectful of the reader’s time.

So we built our marketing style guide around principles that show up again and again in strong editorial systems:

• Plain language wins. If a sentence makes readers reread it, it’s costing you conversions and credibility.
• Active voice beats mystery voice. People want to know who’s doing whatespecially in instructions, product, and support content.
• Consistency is a UX feature. Readers shouldn’t have to “learn” your writing every time they switch pages.
• Inclusivity isn’t optional. Biased, exclusionary, or culture-bound language erodes trust fast.
• Search is part of the reading experience. Your style guide should help people write content that performs in Google and Bing without sounding like a keyword vending machine.

Notice what’s missing: a 12-page debate about whether you can start a sentence with “And.” (You can. If it works. The writing police are busy.)

What to include in a one-page marketing style guide

If you want a short style guide that actually gets used, include only what people repeatedly argue aboutor what quietly breaks your brand when nobody’s paying attention. Here are the pieces that earn their keep.

1) A single “North Star” sentence

Not your mission statement. Not your brand manifesto. One sentence that tells every writer what “good” means. Example: “Help smart, busy people do one thing faster.” If a sentence doesn’t serve that, it’s decorative. And decoration is a tax.

2) Voice in 3–5 adjectives (plus one line of translation)

Adjectives alone are vague. “Friendly” can mean warm, goofy, or passive-aggressive with a smiley face. Add a translation line: “Write like a respected colleague, not a hype announcer.” That one line will save you 40 Slack messages.

3) Tone rules by situation (a tiny matrix)

Tone is where brands get weird. One minute you’re witty, the next minute you’re talking like a toaster manual. List your common scenarios (blog, UX, sales, support, bad news) and define how tone changes. This is also where you prevent the “outage email with jokes” incident. (Please don’t.)

4) Mechanical decisions that stop recurring arguments

Pick a house approach for the stuff writers fight about: numbers, headings, dates, punctuation, and link text. You don’t need to reinvent editorial standardsjust decide what your team will do so you can move on with your life. Think of it like choosing a side in the great “Oxford comma” debate, then never discussing it again unless clarity is at stake.

5) Formatting rules that make content scannable

Modern readers scan first, read second. Your style guide should encourage meaningful headings (H2s that say something), bullet lists when appropriate, and short paragraphs with one idea each. This isn’t “dumbing down.” It’s helping readers win.

6) Inclusive, accessible language guidelines

Keep it practical: gender-neutral language, avoid stereotypes, avoid culture-specific idioms, and don’t write in a way that shames the reader (“simply,” “just,” “obviously”). Accessibility also includes how content is structured: headings, link clarity, and descriptive alt text for images.

7) SEO guardrails that don’t ruin the voice

Your guide should help writers place the topic early (headline + intro), use related terms naturally, and keep each page focused on one search intent. SEO is not “repeat the keyword until Google cries.” It’s: answer the question clearly, then help search engines understand what you answered.

8) Ownership: who decides, who updates

A style guide is a living tool. If nobody owns it, it becomes a fossil. Assign an owner (or small group), set an update rhythm, and define a tie-breaker for disagreements (clarity tests beat opinions).

The 658-word marketing style guide (copy/paste friendly)

Here it isthe whole thing. We keep it in a place everyone can find, and we update it when real questions come up. We also love it because it’s short enough that nobody needs “time to read it.”

How to roll it out so people actually use it

A short guide is a great start. Adoption is the real win. Here’s how you make it stick without turning your team into a monoculture of identical sentences.

Put it where the writing happens

If your guide lives in a PDF, it will be treated like a historic artifact. Put it in a doc that’s searchable. Better: turn it into a snippet in your writing tool, your CMS, or your internal wiki. Your goal is “two clicks away,” not “download, open, scroll, pray.”

Teach with before/after examples

Rules become real when people see the transformation. Add a tiny set of “before/after” rewrites to your onboarding: one for a headline, one for a CTA, one for a paragraph that got lost in its own metaphors.

Make a short list of red flags

This is the cheat code. Create a mini “ban list” of terms and habits that consistently weaken your content: “world-class,” “synergy,” “simply,” vague promises, and jargon without definitions. It’s less about being strict and more about avoiding the potholes you’ve already hit.

Examples: turning fluffy marketing into clear marketing

Your marketing style guide should protect readers from the two villains of modern copy: vagueness and unearned confidence. Here are three rewrites you can steal, too.

Example 1: The “vibes” headline

Before: “Level up your marketing with next-gen automation.”

After: “Automate follow-ups in 10 minutes (without sounding robotic).”

Why it works: the second version is specific, time-bounded, and reader-centered. It also sneaks in relevant phrasing without turning into a keyword piñata.

Example 2: The paragraph that forgot the reader exists

Before: “Our platform enables robust optimization and leverages insights to drive outcomes.”

After: “See what’s working, fix what isn’t, and prove it with a report your boss will actually read.”

Why it works: verbs you can picture. Benefits that map to real pain. And it sounds like a human wrote it on purpose.

Example 3: The CTA that says nothing

Before: “Learn more.”

After: “See the pricing breakdown.”

Why it works: descriptive links and CTAs reduce friction. They also help scanning readers and improve accessibility. “Learn more” is a shrug in button form.

Keeping SEO and brand voice from fighting in the parking lot

SEO and voice aren’t enemies. They only feel like enemies when SEO is treated as a game of repetition. The healthiest approach is: write the best answer, structure it so readers can scan it, then use natural language that makes the topic obvious.

Use headings like signposts, not decorations

H2s and H3s should do real work. If someone scrolls your article and only reads headings, they should still understand the story. “What to include in a marketing style guide” is helpful. “Let’s talk about it” is not.

Match one page to one intent

Search engines reward focus because readers reward focus. If your page is trying to rank for “marketing style guide,” “brand voice,” “content governance,” and “how to write a press release” all at once, you’ll end up ranking for “confused.”

Write meta titles and descriptions like promises

Your meta title is the headline on the shelf. Your meta description is the “why click” line. Keep them short and specific. Hint at the payoff. Don’t summarize the entire internet.

Conclusion

A marketing style guide isn’t supposed to impress people. It’s supposed to help people. And help is fundamentally unglamorous: fewer debates, faster drafts, cleaner edits, and a brand voice that doesn’t shape-shift depending on who had coffee.

If you want yours to be used, make it small enough to remember, clear enough to trust, and flexible enough to work across blog posts, landing pages, product UI, and the occasional “we messed up” email.

Steal our 658 words. Then make them yours. The best style guide is the one your team actually follows.

Field Notes: of Real-Life “658-Word Guide” Experience

The first week we rolled out the 658-word guide, we learned an important truth about writers: they don’t hate rules. They hate surprises. Before the guide, every draft review felt like walking into a pop quiz written by a different teacher. One editor loved punchy one-liners. Another wanted formal, footnote-adjacent seriousness. A third would mark “utilize” as cringe and then replace it with… “utilize,” somehow. Nobody was wrong, but nobody was aligned.

The tiny guide fixed that by doing something boring and magical: it made decisions once. Suddenly, “Do we spell out numbers?” wasn’t a weekly hobby. “Do we say ‘sign in’ or ‘log in’?” wasn’t a 14-message thread. The most common comment in docs changed from “tone?” to “niceship it.” And when feedback did happen, it got more useful because it was anchored to shared standards instead of personal taste.

Our favorite surprise was how much it improved collaboration with non-writers. Product managers, support leads, and founders usually want to contribute copy, but they’re often nervous about “writing wrong.” A short content style guide lowers that anxiety. It gives them a handful of default moves: start with the outcome, use “you,” keep paragraphs tight, name the actor, avoid jargon unless you define it. That’s enough for them to contribute real drafts that don’t require a full rewrite. The guide didn’t just protect the brand voiceit invited more people into it.

We also learned what not to do. We tried to cram a “complete” SEO checklist into the guide once. It ballooned, got preachy, and accidentally encouraged keyword-stuffing. So we trimmed it down to principles: put the topic early, focus on one intent, use related terms naturally, and write meta snippets like promises. That small change improved search performance more than the longer checklist ever did, because it led to better writing instead of more rules.

The biggest payoff showed up in the places nobody brags about on LinkedIn: support content, onboarding emails, and the “something went wrong” messages. Tone matters most when emotions are high. Having a default for bad newshumble, accountable, action-firstkept us from sounding evasive or overly cheerful at exactly the wrong moment. And once we saw that, we stopped thinking of the guide as a marketing thing. It became a trust thing.

Today, the guide keeps evolving, but it stays short. When someone asks, “Wait, do we…?” we either point to the guide or add one crisp line. That’s the whole secret: treat the style guide like a tool, not a shrine. Nobody needs a sacred text. They need 658 words that make writing faster, clearer, and more consistenton purpose.