Communication guidelines
Corporate wording, strategic and consistent: the frame everyone writes in: team, agencies and, by now, machines.
What the guidelines contain
The guidelines translate the brand voice into rules people can apply. They settle how audiences are addressed and how they are not, which terms the company uses and which it avoids, how long a paragraph may run, how a heading is built, how numbers, emphasis and loanwords are handled. And what a claim looks like that the company can actually back up.
The form matters: a document that only describes will not be used. A document that decides and puts example beside counter-example ends discussions instead of opening them.
Where text is produced with AI support, guidelines are no longer a recommendation to people but the instruction to the system. A language model without direction writes competently and without a brand. Guidelines that work as a prompt foundation are the difference between production at scale and blandness at scale.
How the guidelines are built
Analysis
Brand, goals and audience expectations. Plus a look at what actually gets published today.
Settle the brand voice
Where the tone is not yet defined, it comes first in the brand voice workshop. Guidelines without that foundation are only formatting rules.
Build the framework
Tone, style rules, fixed wordings, term lists and counter-examples. In a structure people actually open at work.
Test on real texts
Existing content is reworked to the new rules. Whatever cannot be applied gets changed.
Make it AI-ready
The rules are written so they can be handed to a language model as instructions, not only read as prose.
Roll out
Handover to team and agencies, with a session applying the rules to their own texts.
Where the tone is not yet settled, the work starts one step earlier, in the brand voice workshop. Once the framework exists, it becomes the benchmark for every content review.
What changes afterwards
Review loops get shorter because questions of taste are settled up front. New colleagues and new agencies find the tone faster. And across every channel a presence emerges that is recognisable. Including where the logo is not in the frame.
Your contact
Senior Content Strategist
Senior Content Strategist, with netzstrategen since 2024. She came to content strategy from journalism, bringing a passion for deep research and an eye for the bigger picture. Her guiding principle: no execution without strategy first. She develops content concepts for B2B, technology, innovation, health and social media, thinks cross-media from the start and guides clients from strategic idea to cross-channel execution.
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