Find Your Voice

And be consistent in your content

Content Marketing requires us to create a lot of powerful content that is on message, and on brand, but what about on tone?  Tone is a quality we use to describe voice.  Can your content have a voice? Your voice, comes through in your content when you write.  For example, informational content tends to have a more serious tone, but depending on who you are educating, you might take a different tone.  Other content designed to entertain your audience, will tend to have a lighter, more humorous tone.

Think of your content as the voice of your brand how you communicate with your current and prospective customers.  Your actual voice should line up with that of your content to provide your customers with an authentic and consistent customer experience.  There really is no right or wrong tone, (even a negative tone, as long as your audience enjoys and expects it can perform well).  If you have different authors your content may even have more than one voice or tone.  This is your decision and as long as it makes sense for your brand, and you re consistent, you’ll be good.

The trouble happens when you are inconsistent or inauthentic with your voice.  Your readers will pick up on small details and differences.  At best, they’ll find it annoying.  Worse case, they’ll stop reading.  And the worst case, they’ll tell other readers and potential readers about it, and those people will become very difficult to win back.

What if our brand creates multiple types of content?

You’re in a good place if this is the case.  Creating a list of curated content topics or categories is a key component of any content marketing strategy.  Your audience will likely have more than one topic around your brand, products and the pain points your products solve.

Let’s look at a dog leash brand – content topics that make sense for a company like this are informational topics about keeping your dog safe, while exercising, or offering training tips.  To make this content more relevant and enjoyable for their customers, the company may choose to use funny stories, pictures or even memes – because dog people like that kind of content.

They may also share customer success stories about how their product made it easier or safer to walk a customer’s dog.  They may also choose to talk about leash etiquette, and how to respond to people who don’t understand these things.  And even still, they may choose to feature where you can use their leashes – ie the cool places that will allow your dog into their location.

We just listed a good bit of different content topics. Not all directly about their product, but closely related that it makes sense for them to feature this content, and for their audience to still enjoy it.  These posts will also make great social media posts and email newsletter features.

Let’s look at a different example – say of a human supplement company.  They will have a different audience for the most part from our dog leash company, but there may be some overlap.  While the educational content for the leash company was more humorous or enjoyable, a supplement company may need to keep their content in a more serious tone because they are talking about scientifically proven health benefits.  If all of a sudden this supplement company tried to do something humorous and their audience didn’t expect it, it could have a negative effect.  It doesn’t even matter if this particular post was a really high quality one.  It’s in the wrong voice for their customers.

A brand is much like a person, you have your physical characteristics, but you also have a personality.  And your content is your brands personality.  You can written content like blog posts and articles, photographic content like your instagram and pinterest accounts, even video content – but the personality, ie the voice and tone of all of this content, should remain consistent and authentic.

What do I mean by authentic? Just what it sounds like – you need to stay true to you.  If you, and therefor your brand is not a serious person, it will come across in your writing.  If you are a serious person and you try to write humorous content, it won’t go over well with your audience – especially if your audience knows you.  It’ve actually read content from a brand before and then met the people behind it in real life and it was a really odd experience, that left me with a pretty negative perception of that brand.

So be yourself, and be consistently yourself in your content and you’ll do great.