Fixing content consistency issues

I created a Content and Brand Style Guide for educations.com, helping fix inconsistent tone of communication and quality of content.

Skills and tools

Content and brand strategy, UX, Information architecture, Change mangagement, Microsoft Sites

🧑‍⚖️ NDA disclaimer:

While the educations.com Brand kit is public, our internal content style guide isn't. So, to comply with NDA, I will only show/discuss the style guide's structure without the actual contents.

Process

Choosing the platform
Building the guide
Pushing for adoption

Goals

💎 Improve content quality

📈 Grow traffic

🖥️ Improve UX

Results

Increased average content quality
Consistent brand and tone
More AI citations
Faster decision-making for editors
2,000+ views of the guide across several teams

Context

My role

When I joined the company, I worked as a Content Editor. Over time, I was promoted to Content Team Manager, in charge of the content strategy and aligning content with the product stakeholders outside of the team. I was given the authority to shape the company's brand voice on all marketing channels.

The problem

When I took over as the Content Team Manager for educations.com, there were no concrete guides or documentation of the content creation process.

This meant that each content editor had their own approach to writing, which led to inconsistencies in content structure, quality and voice. To make matters worse, the company completed a large merger of 8 sites into educations.com. This made the inconsistency problem even worse, as those sites were separate verticals serving different audience (BachelorStudies.com, MasterStudies.com, PhDStudies.com, etc.). So, at that point, there were 1,300+ editorial content pages on the site without a concrete evaluation criteria.

What's more, because of this lack of documentation, external stakeholders also didn't know what our process was. Product managers and designers kept reaching out to me regarding our content process, what our strategy was, what tools we were using, how they could request content updates, etc.

To solve both of those issues, I decided to create a centralized resource to answer all those questions - a "one stop shop" for all things content.

The process

When I was building the guide, I had to figure out a way to do so without any budget or external help (i.e. from the designer or dev team). This was a solo mission.

1. Choosing the platform

For the format of the guide, I knew I wanted it to be a centralized database with many shortcuts for easy navigation.

After considering several options (Google sites, Notion...), I decided to use Microsoft Sites for 3 reasons:

We were already using Microsoft 365 for productivity, so the platform came at no additional cost.
Employees were already used to the Microsoft Suite, which meant they were familiar with the interface.
Our Microsoft software was managed by the company admins, so this site would be NDA-compliant.

2. Designing and building the guide

Writing and building out the first style guide draft, while time-consuming, was relatively straightforward:

I put together a list of 15-20 most common questions I received from internal and external stakeholders.
I gathered resources I had on hand: presentations, checklists, videos... anything that was (or could be) used for training or audit purposes.
I made an outline based on what I usually cover during onboardings and trainings of new employees - so I wouldn't miss anything important.
I wrote in-depth explanations on how educations.com brand identity should be reflected in the content, as well as how to optimize all web elements contained within the CMS.
I recorded and edited videos on how to use software in our tech stack, and added them to the relevant pages.

3. Pushing for adoption

The next step of the process was getting the wider team to actively use the guide.

No one has time or energy to spend deciphering internal resources. So if it doesn't make their life easier, the doc (or in this case, Microsoft Site) would just end up in the abyss of OneDrive.

Some strategies I used to make the "Content Design HQ" a success include:

I announced the first version of the guide in all of the key meetings with relevant stakeholders.
I directly messaged people who I knew would benefit from the guide, asking them to look over it and give me feedback. I used their feedback and questions to improve the next few versions of the draft.
I created several "TLDR" sections summarizing key takeaways (voice and tone, general writing tips...).
Whenever people sent me an email or Teams message asking about questions I answered in the guide, I would screenshot the relevant section from the guide and point them towards it if they wanted to learn more.

The result

Baf

Google Sites

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