In everyday discussion, tone is everything. In verbal discussion, we may readily transmit our tone by our voice loudness, our gaze, and other nonverbal cues, but this is not always the case with written tone.
Content marketing relies heavily on the tone of voice you use to ensure that your reader understands what you’re saying in the context in which they were intended. Depending on the tone you use in your writing, your message may be seen as authoritative, pleasant, warm, funny, or crass.
The voice of your brand is shaped by the tone of your writing, and this in turn affects how buyers view your business. Authenticity and consistency in your brand’s voice are vital to 80% of customers in order to create and maintain confidence in your brand.
The tone of your writing (and your brand’s) should be consistent throughout all your marketing channels, and we’ll teach you how to do that in this post. As an added bonus, we’ll show you real-world examples of brands that have nailed their brand language.
Creating a consistent voice for your brand
It is a combination of the brand voice and the many tones utilised in various situations that makes up the tone of voice of your organisation. The brand voice vs. tone debate is worth exploring.
The personality or identity of your brand can be described as having a “voice” in the marketplace. Your brand or business, if it had a personality, would it be more reserved or outgoing, or just plain sassy? For example,
The tone of your communications will change depending on the situation, whether you have a serious, friendly, amusing or instructional brand voice. You’d sound more ecstatic if you announced a promotion than if you announced a change in leadership. Even so, it’s important that the voice still sounds like yours.
How do you actually go about doing all of this? Choosing a voice for your brand can be a challenge. Try out this five-step procedure.
1) First, take a look at your business.
It all begins with one’s own mind. Your company’s values and what it stands for to customers should be reflected in your thinking. Wouldn’t it be cool if your firm were a person? Would it choose to follow the rules as they are, or would it prefer to go against the grain and upend the order? Your brand’s tone of voice should reflect this.
Ask yourself:
- What are the rules and regulations of your business?
- To what end are you putting out this content?
- Which of the following is your primary goal?
- Is your material primarily geared toward promoting value or boosting sales??
The first step in identifying your company’s/brand personality is to answer these questions. Once you’ve got this, the remainder of the process is a piece of cake.
2) Determine the demands of your target audience.
Every company is unique, and so is its target market. You can create a brand voice that resonates with your target audience if you know who they are, what they want, how they communicate, and what interests them.
You’ll need to chat to your audience and conduct some research in order to discover more about them. If you have a large enough audience, you may want to try sending out surveys or polling them.
In order to construct a buyer persona for your target customer, you’ll need to know the following:
- Occupation by Age Group
- It’s all about what they believe in and what they care about
- Location
- Pain points related to the economy
- The manner in which they like to buy
- Whatever their social media habits may be, etc.
Many of these issues are interconnected. There are several factors that influence whether or not a person uses social media, such as their age or generation. The type of work a person does can also affect their financial situation and their willingness to use or purchase specific goods and services.
What are your preferred platforms?
Depending on your target audience, Twitter or LinkedIn may be more appropriate than Instagram or TikTok for your brand. It’s much easier to determine how your brand’s personality fits in with these channels once you’ve decided on your preferred marketing channels.
The tone of most brands’ social media posts varies, despite the fact that their voice is the same across all platforms. The website of a “serious” software firm may be more official, while the social media profiles of the company may be more humorous.
It’s possible that a lot of companies are more serious about their business on LinkedIn than on Twitter. So, if you’re aware of your many platforms, you’ll be able to craft the most appropriate tone for each one.
You can see this by comparing Slack’s speech on LinkedIn to the Slack brand’s language on Twitter.
4. Look at your competition
When it comes to finding a place in the market, having a unique value proposition and a distinct brand voice are essential. To stand out, your brand needs to sound different from the rest of the competition. As a result, conducting competitor research is critical to the creation of a unique brand voice.
Even if it’s a good idea to follow some established standards in your field, you must also sprinkle in your own unique magic dust, so to speak. It’s possible to find a gap in the market by studying your competitor’s communication methods.
5) Get advice from a professional consultant.
There are occasions when even the best advice isn’t enough to build a brand’s voice. Consider employing a branding expert if you have the money. These experts can help you with anything from logos, fonts, colours, and even your brand voice.
With the help of a branding expert, you can relax and concentrate on what you do best: running your business.
How to keep your voice consistent throughout your writing
How can you make sure that your brand’s voice is consistent throughout all of your material now that you have a voice?
You want your material to be recognisable even if you don’t have your logo or brand name next to it. Is it even important to be consistent? According to research, it does. For example, LucidPress conducted a survey that found that 68 percent of firms attributed a 10-20 percent increase in income to brand consistency.
In order to develop trust in your product or service, buyers need to be able to identify your company’s brand and tones of voice from your competitors’.
Are you all set to take advantage of these advantages? Here’s how to keep your brand voice consistent throughout all of your content.
Create a roadmap for your design aesthetic.
If you want to keep your brand’s voice consistent throughout all of your marketing initiatives, a style guide is a need. Using your style guide, you may specify how your company wants to be represented visually and verbally. Brand colours, typeface, and writing preferences are all documented in a succinct, easy-to-read, and detailed manner.
Your style guide is a cornerstone of your content strategy when it comes to writing. There should be a list of regulations, such as:
- Your brand’s pronouns (are you “I” or “We”?)
- Voice guidelines
- Word choice
- Sentence length
- Use of slang and colloquialisms
- Use of emojis and multimedia like GIFs
- Inclusion of industry jargon vs sticking to layman language, etc.
Pro tip: Include real-world examples in your style guide to demonstrate how your standards are put into practise by your team members.
2. Review and update style guide
It’s important to remember that a style guide is only useful if you follow the guidelines in it. Your team members should all have access to the style guide. The most important thing to remember is to keep your style guide current at all times. Is it time to join a new social network? Keep your style guide in place so that social media managers can properly represent the business.
Some idioms may become outmoded, unpleasant, or insensitive as a result of changing societal mores and fashion. By updating your style guide, you may avoid disclosing information or using terminology that may offend your target audience.
Use an AI writer
Even if you have a style guide, it might be difficult to ensure that your words express the correct tone. What do you think? Is it too serious or too friendly? Is it amusing, or would it be too much for readers? We can use the assistance of an AI writer like Jasper here!
AI writing assistant Jasper has been trained by professional copywriters and has access to 10% of the Internet’s information. Let Jasper handle the tough lifting so you don’t have to go through multiple copywriters. This AI writer is capable of creating a wide range of written content in a number of voices. Here is a partial list of choices.
For this exercise, let’s experiment with a few of Jasper’s 52+ writing templates in a variety of voices.
1. A funny bio in a personal voice.
With his wife and two young children, “Shemus Broker” resides in Wisconsin. Jarvis’ personal profile template features funny tones of voice. When he was thirteen, he began writing and never put it down. For his best-selling young-adult novel, Gods of the Force, he’s received acclaim around the world.
His favourite activities outside of work are mountaineering, skiing, and snowboarding!”
However, while Jasper’s bio remains professional, Jasper adds a bit of wit (in parentheses).
In a welcoming tone, the Amazon product description
2. Friendly Tone of voice in product description on Amazon
It’s a multi-shaped cosmetic case with numerous compartments for lipsticks, powder, eye shadow and other makeup items. Diva Makeup Case With an enamel coating, it’s easy to keep clean, and the titanium substance is long-lasting. BPA is not used in the manufacturing of this product. It comes in a variety of colours and is backed by a lifetime warranty! Now is the time to step up your beauty regime by adding this product to your cart.
Talk about nailing the tone with this Amazon product description, which reads like a friend recommending a new favourite product to you!
3. Write a professional-sounding blog post
Template for Jarvis long-form assistant – excellent voiceovers
Because we didn’t provide much in the way of instructions, Jasper was left to his own devices to come up with the ideas for this post on his own.
4. Facebook ad that is sincere
Are you a host for Airbnb?
Assuming this is the case, you’ve had experience running a small business. Your company’s day-to-day operations must be balanced with marketing and customer service. In order to assist Airbnb hosts in better managing their listings, we developed the BetterBNB set of tools. All of our customers get free photography services from us!
Do you think this ad makes you feel like the author cares about you? That’s thanks to Jasper.
5) An enthused subject line for an email
Excited tones of speech in the Jarvis Email Subject line template. Emojis offer an added dose of excitement to these subject lines, making them more noticeable in the inboxes of the readers.
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