As an enterprise, it’s critical to ensure that all of the content you put in front of your prospects and customers speaks with the same clear brand voice (which, by the way, is just a fancy term for tone of voice). That’s because when your content is inconsistent and doesn’t adopt the same brand voice and tone across the board, it can result in lower audience adoption and participation. In fact, every piece of content you produce that’s doesn’t reflect your company’s voice only takes you further from your audience.
In this post, we’ll look at how to create a strong brand voice and how you can ensure that it gets applied consistently across your entire business no matter who’s creating your content.
How to Create Your Company’s Brand Voice
The first step of corporate branding is to create your brand voice. It’s important for all your company content, not just your marketing content. Your voice is what makes up your brand identity and gives your brand a personality that consumers can relate to.
Start by trying to distill your company’s personality down into a small number of very specific words that reflect the essence of what your brand is all about. Maybe those words are rigorous, curious, and idealistic. Maybe they’re something completely different. Whatever the case, your values should be distinct, but complementary. In other words, not synonymous, but not total opposites either.
As you think about your values, don’t be afraid of using unexpected words — the sort of words you don’t normally hear in B2B marketing. After all, if your company’s values are unique, the words to express them should be too. The last thing you want is to sound like everyone else! Remember, you’re looking for the things that make your voice stand out — not things that everyone in your market can lay claim to.
Once you have your brand values nailed down, consider how they translate into writing style. For example, do you want your tone of voice to be formal or informal, simple or sophisticated, warm, or detached? Think about the impression you want your brand voice to make and how that will translate into your company’s writing style, and the kind of content your audience will resonate with. More specifically, think about how that will affect things like the length of the words and sentences you use; how concise your writing is; and whether or not it’s ok to use things like jargon, colloquialisms, and buzzwords.
Once you’ve made decisions around these preferences, make sure to document them into a style guide for everyone to refer to.
Want a more detailed look at how to create your company’s brand voice? Check out our eBook, “Watch Your Tone! The Ultimate Guide to Building Your Company’s Tone of Voice.”
How to Apply Your Brand Voice
Once you’ve decided what your company’s brand voice will be, the real trick is figuring out how to get everyone across your company to use it consistently. Simply creating a style guide is one approach, but getting everyone to follow it can be difficult. In fact, according to a recent Acrolinx survey of content professionals at leading businesses around the world, more than half (57 percent) said that their companies do an average, poor, or very poor job of making sure that all of their content creators adhere to their company’s brand guidelines.
To get around this issue, content leaders need a way to automatically ensure that all of the content their teams create is aligned to published guidelines before it goes in for editorial review. That means giving writers the tools they need to always be able to adopt a unified tone of voice while they’re writing.
Acrolinx solves this problem by learning how your team, department, and company write, while capturing the enterprise content standards that define your brand voice. Our platform then makes those standards actionable by guiding your writers to apply the correct preferences right in their favorite content authoring tools. The result is content that’s not only free of errors, but also completely aligned to your tone, voice, and compliant terminology — no matter who’s writing.
Reaping the Benefits of Having a Single Brand Voice
When all of your company’s content is written using the same brand voice, it makes your business more customer-centric while increasing the value of your corporate brand. Not only that, the content that you create will resonate better with your audience because it sounds distinctly like you.
Of course, when you can automate the process of applying your brand voice, your company stands to benefit even more. Not only can you rest assured that all of your content is being written just the way you want it to, no matter who’s actually doing the writing, you can also save your editors considerable time and effort. That’s because when a piece of content comes in for their review, they can focus on making meaningful changes, rather than doing the clean-up work they might otherwise have to do to bring the content in line with your brand voice.
Ultimately, getting to a consistent brand voice is critical. Once you’ve determined what yours is, using the right technology will allow you to ensure that it gets applied accurately across your business. Want to know more? Let’s talk.
