Developing your brand voice

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Developing your brand voice

- To make sure that your content is consistent, you wanna work on developing your brand voice. Your brand voice presents a consistent experience across channels, giving your brand a recognizable persona. This is extremely important because your brand voice will ultimately help you stand out. There's a ton of information out there and a ton of noise out there online, so you wanna make sure that your content is specific and unique. By developing a brand voice that really speaks to your organization, your content will stand out from the noise.

First you'll wanna create your brand voice persona. Your brand voice persona is essentially the feeling that you'll want your content to convey. Your personal might be conversational, accessible, humanistic, educational, authoritative, professional. There's a wide variety of attributes that you can use to apply to your brand voice persona. Next, you'll have the brand voice tone. Your brand voice tone is essentially the way that your content will sound. It could be friendly, direct, honest, formal, perhaps it's scientific, humanistic.

There's a wide variety of attributes and ways that your content can sound. Next, you'll want to determine your brand voice language. This is essentially the language in which your content is written. This could be simple, wordy, complex, jargon-y, it depends on your business and who you're selling to. Next step is to create a style guide. Once you have your persona and your language, and your tone all dialed in, you'll wanna put that down on paper so that you, your content team, and any external writers that work with your company can determine the exact style in which you write.

For your style guide, you might wanna answer questions such as, who is your company? Who do you sell to? Who makes up the content team? You style and writing tone. Specific grammar guidelines, as well as content types and structure. This could be short or as lengthy as you want. The more information you put in there, the easier it'll be to train incoming content marketers on your company and your style. This is an example style guide for the company that I work for, Marketo. We put down all of the information on brand, tone, voice, and persona into a document so that the content marketing team, as well as external writers have a good sense about who we are as a brand.

This could be created in a simple Word doc turned into a PDF, perhaps the Google Doc for easy sharing. Either way, make it accessible to anyone in your organization creating content. One thing to note is that your tone might differ slightly for each persona. As you build out your different personas and learn what each persona likes for their content, you might learn that one persona might have a different tone than another. So, it's important to make sure that you're writing content that's relevant for each persona.

Overall, your voice should stay consistent throughout your content. Now that we've walked through how to create brand voice and tone, now it's time to sit down and write your own style guide. Get together, map out what you want your content and your brand to look like, put it down on paper, and put it into action.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/content-marketing-foundations/developing-your-brand-voice