Content Guide

Document the way the company communicates with its internal and external audiences;
Map who the audience is: we carry out research to update the persona;
Designing brand tones and voice, to create messages that respect the company's personality and set a communication standard;
Develop a tool to improve the company's content, reduce noise in internal communication.
Facilitate the work of those who write for the company, focusing on the clarity, simplicity and effectiveness of the messages.

Context

Fóton Informática is a 30-year-old company specialized in banking automation. Since 2020, it has been going through a growth process.

The remote work has allowed to hire professionals from other states, which has increased the challenge of communicating with employees, as well as continuing to carry out remote marketing actions to integrate and engage work teams.

We changed the communication strategy and in order to standardize it, we had to develop a document to guide the way we created content according to the company's personality. In order to make the messages more consistent, we studied the tones we could adopt at the right times and structured a voice that would reinforce the brand's profile.

Thus, I worked on designing a document that guides, informs and educates all those who write on behalf of the company.

Problem

The company didn't have a document to standardize communication. So, in 2021, I proposed the creation of a Content Style Guide to document rules for producing the company's messages and make them more consistent.

What was necessary?

To generate consistency and standardization in communication, both internally and externally.
To know the public with whom we communicate, the persona needed to be updated.
Research to understand how employees and management perceived the company and whether we were communicating in the right way.
Benchmarking to understand how other companies built their guides and to have models to guide our process.

Process

1- Benchmarking

At this step, I made an extensive research to understand how other companies disseminated and built their guides, as well as carrying out studies on the best UX Writing practices.

This allowed the team to decide what made sense for the company in this project. We structured the phases to build the document. The goal was to create a source of knowledge and research for all employees within the company and deliver value to the brand.

2- Updating the persona

One of the first steps was to update the company's persona. We prepared a form that was sent to employees by email, through which we collected information on age, gender, academic background, tastes, interests, among others.

From there, we were able to build a more up-to-date persona for the company, which was very important for understanding its profile, its needs and how we could communicate with them more efficiently.

3- Research into the company's personality

After structuring our persona, the next step was to understand the essence of the company. We launched a form to gather information on how the employees saw the company and, on the other hand, we launched a second form to find out how the board of directors saw themselves as well.

The idea was to combine this data to choose an appropriate voice and what tones we would use in our content.

What information did we gather?

employees' length of service;

It was used the Big Brand System: people chose between pairs of opposite qualities to say how they saw the company's personality. We used the average of the answers to create a scale. See below:

cloze test: we asked participants to imagine the company as a person and to take its values into account in order to complete the following sentences:

1- If Fóton were a person it would be ____, _____ and ____.

2- Then it would talk about ____, _____ and ____.

According to the participants' answers, we completed them as follows (with words that obtained more than 25% of the votes):

1- If Fóton were a person it would be reliable, successful, qualified, family-oriented, dedicated and communicative.

2- Then it would speak in a friendly, professional, responsible and empathetic way.

4-Structuring the Guide.

We brought the team together to discuss the results of the survey. As a result, we determined the words that would be chosen and thus determined the voice and chose the tones spelling, and accessibility rules we would use, as well as discussing the types of content and how to write them.

We also determined some topics that would be present and separated them visually, using the Miro tool.

5- Tone and Voice
The team understood that the focus of the company's communication needed to be on informing and building objective and relevant content for employees. We wanted to create more simple conversational texts that demonstrated the company's technical quality when necessary.

Guiding readers was one of the goals so that they gained confidence in the company and didn't get bored with unnecessary or boring content.

So I followed good UX writing practices and started using content heuristics to produce my work. We started using the data collected in the surveys to strengthen our essence and give consistency to our way of talking to employees daily.

6- Delivery
When we completed it, we made the document available on the company's intranet. We left it open so that all employees could access it and send in their feedback and collaborations.

7- Adaptation
Apply the rules to the daily production of content, leaving a channel open on the intranet to receive new insights from employees. The aim is to work collaboratively and also to educate employees about the good practices to be adopted when producing corporate content.

My role:

Conduct research, analyze data and structure the guide's topics

Collect references, write definitions and seek feedback

Adapt content according to the feedback received

Document each phase of the work