Rashida
Content marketing is one of the most powerful long-term strategies for increasing brand awareness and establishing industry leadership.
But before you dive headfirst into your content strategy, you need to get one key thing straight: your brand voice.
Without a clear, consistent brand voice, you won’t be able to increase your brand awareness and reputation.
As we all know (thanks to our English teachers) voice can be difficult to convey properly in writing.
So, how can you make sure you strike the right tone with your written content?
Here are our biggest tips:
Define Your Brand Voice
It may seem like an obvious first step, but it’s well worth reiterating: you need to define your brand voice first. Maybe you, as the founder or director of marketing know what you want the brand voice to be, but is this clearly outlined anywhere?
Defining your brand voice will be extremely important for ensuring consistency later on. Remember, your team cannot read your mind. You must make it very clear what the brand voice is.
One helpful tip is to define the voice in three words. Sometimes, less is more. While you can expand on these words in a way, keeping it simple also helps keep it clear.
Get Everyone on Board
If Susie from marketing and Richard from sales have two different versions of the brand voice, it will be impossible to be consistent. Once you define your brand voice, you must share this information in a digestible way with everyone- whether they are involved in content or not.
Create a Style Guide
Just like you need a design style guide, you should also have a brand voice guide. In your design guide, you may include the color codes and logos to use on every piece of content. In your voice guide, you can include words/phrases that align with your brand vs those that don’t.
Your style guide should include any important guidelines to help your team stay consistent with the brand voice. In the guide, review your values, mission statement, helpful resources, and more.
For example, I had a client in the estate sale space. Most people connect estate sales with words like “used”, “second-hand”, etc. They specifically stated that they did not want these words used, and instead wanted to include terms like “treasures,” “unique,” “vintage,” and “antique.”
Audit Your Existing Content
Does your existing content adhere to your brand voice? If not, it will be very difficult to emulate it in writing.
Once you’ve defined your brand voice, spread the word, and created your unique style guide, apply it to the content you already have. This includes your website, social media, blog, etc. If something no longer fits your brand voice, it should not be public. That doesn’t mean you have to throw away valuable content, just that you may need to repurpose it to suit your brand voice.
Future candidates, customers, employees, writers, etc will look to your existing content for insight into your brand voice. Ensuring all of your content aligns is key for consistency.
Give Writing Examples
Even for the most experienced writers, forming someone else’s voice is a challenge. While browsing through your existing content can help, it is still difficult to emulate brand voice in written content.
Provide writers with examples of “do’s and don’ts.” Of course, some of these should be in your style guide. However, take it a step further to provide commentary with examples. You could share a piece of content that aligns really well with your brand voice, and explain why. Then, you could share a piece of content (maybe an old one you had to rework) that does not fit the brand voice. Again, explain why.
Specific Feedback
Talented writers are able to adapt exceptionally well to feedback. Every time you provide detailed feedback, it positions the writer to better nail your brand voice in the next piece.
Not everyone understands your brand to the same extent as you, and it may take a bit of collaboration to get there.
“This doesn’t fit my brand voice” is not super helpful for writers.
When providing feedback, be detailed. Explain what worked, what didn’t, and why. Highlight specific words, sentences, phrases, etc. Show the changes you made.
Of course, you are busy. But, taking the time to provide detailed feedback, in the beginning, will help people write seamless content moving forward. The more specific you are, the quicker you can get everyone on the same page with the right tone.
The Bottom Line
Translating the essence of your brand into writing can be very hard, even for experienced writers. It takes time and dedication to nail down your voice and convey this to others. However, doing this well helps you establish a clear presence, resonate with your target audience, and ultimately grow your business.
