Defining and Refining Your Brand Voice is Vital for Effective Content Marketing

An established brand should have a brand voice guideline, that helps anyone creating content understand how your company should sound and how should it be perceived. When people read your content, view your ads, and consider your pitches, how do you really sound in their head?

If you look at established brands, some will have a lot of material about their brand voice, vision and principles of work. Anything that is of considerable size or volume was grown out of a simple starting point.

So when you’re creating guidelines for your own brand voice, consider:

• Tone: Ensure the style of communication you want to project is understood by the writer ahead of time, so your content always sounds familiar to your readers.
• Content Type: Different type of content has different effects on readers. A blog post may not attract the same audience as a technical article, so create separate guidelines depending on the type of content you create.
• Templates: In order to make it easier to comprehend create templates for things like text layout, visual goals, and more.

Refine Your Brand Voice

Once you have written out your brand guidelines, you need to make sure your content aligns with them. However, not everything is set in stone and adjustments along the road are perfectly fine.

If sales are the primary goal, promotional language could be more heavily used. If you want to get readers to sign up to your mailing list, adopt a more conversational and casual tone when communicating with them.

• Personalization over Automation: In some instances only a personalized message will achieve the desired effect and make the connection with the readers.
• Generate conversation with content: Instead of taking a product-centric approach, a conversational voice in your content could grab the attention of your audience. The goal is to give readers something to talk about, so conversational tones take priority over promotional language.

Your changes could be less evident than that, but just as impactful. Every brand should evolve over time to be able to keep up with the changes in their industry, and most importantly the changing behavior and needs of their audience.

A Sense of Personality

Companies aren’t individuals, but a brand tone of voice could be thought of as the business equivalent of an individual’s personality. Your brand tone of voice is your choice of language and your writing style. It’s your way of delivering a message in a way that is unique to you.