Branding for Content Marketing: How to find your voice
Without branding, who are you, really? Are you another company offering X and Y products that are (hopefully) a cut above the competition? Great, but unless you’re situated in a well-defined space with a recognizable name and huge footprint, you may have some work to do.
Branding is crucial for any company, of any size. It’s also a multi-faceted process with a widespread impact that ranges from how you sell your products to how your CEO talks about them on LinkedIn.
For this post, though, we’ll primarily talk about how branding relates to writing content for your site. That goes for whether your site is massive and filled with product pages, smaller but brimming with intriguing blog posts, or anywhere in between.
While it’s great that you’re producing content, your audience may not recognize it as specifically yours. And at a time when we’re all inundated with content on our myriad devices, it’s more important than ever to stand out with a clearly defined voice.
How to find your voice
When we talk about your branding, we’re really talking about your “voice.” You can also think of it as a point of view or perspective because how you use your voice helps to define exactly who you are and how your audience perceives you.
Review what’s worked—and what hasn’t
If you’re already creating content and have been for some time, you may actually be in luck here. One simple hack for better defining your voice is to take a look at what you have created to date and see what has had the strongest response.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be in terms of views or clicks, either. If an article, guide, or tweet you published has a lot of replies or comments but didn’t “go viral,” you should consider that a win. It proves that people are looking to you as a conversation starter in that particular area. All you have to do is embrace and more strongly define that voice so you can run with it.
Get internal with it
If you’re just starting out, you may want to start smaller than that. You can kick things off with this approach:
- Meet with key stakeholders. Find out how they personally view the company’s voice, and then how they would prefer to see it portrayed. Plus, you need their buy-in.
- Poll the workplace. No matter the size of your staff, you are bound to get at least one useful piece of feedback here that can be utilized. Hell, even the most off-the-cuff recommendation should be taken into account. That being said, getting “weird” with your voice only really works if you know your audience is just as goofy.
- Consider the culture. In addition to your audience, your voice should be a strong fit for your company culture. For example, you can’t use an uber-professional vibe in your marketing if no one in your office acts that way. This is particularly important if members of your team speak at conferences and events. They should have their own personalities and voices, but there should also be an overarching theme so people know what to expect from you.
Even if these steps don’t give you a clear-cut definition of your company’s voice, they will put you well on your way toward creating one. You may also find that there’s a disconnect between the levels of employees and how they view your company, making it all the more important to establish a singular voice in your internal materials, too.
Define your voice
With the research done, it’s now time to define the voice. A tried-and-true method for this is keeping the process simple by narrowing down your concept into the three words that define your brand.
Those words can be whatever you want them to be, so long as they stick to what you have been putting together so far, of course. Once you choose them, you can continue to define your voice by adding three or four more descriptive terms for each.
For example:
- Helpful: Cooperative, supportive, thoughtful
- Engaging: Conversational, charming, interested
- Authoritative: Authentic, dependable, reliable
Whichever words you choose, make sure you’re not rushing to pick them. They are incredibly important for defining your voice and maintaining it through different forms of media. From social networks to guest posts to white papers, anything representing your brand needs to follow what you have built here.
To make that a bit easier for you and your team, create an accompanying style guide that properly outlines the voice you have created. Write template tweets, Facebook posts, etc., using the voice to portray how the company should be portrayed and pass it around the office.
If you’re looking for a super-quick way to do this, use MailChimp’s free-use style guide and adapt it to meet your needs. It follows many of the guidelines you’ve likely seen across the web in terms of grammar, but it’s also a solid foundation for creating your company’s style guide.
So, why is brand voice important again?
You can create all the content you want and, who knows, some of it may even be successful. But without a brand voice to tie it all together, you’re bound to lose much more than you gain. That’s particularly true as we continue to see brands churn out more content, which can cause your undefined voice to get lost in the clutter.
It boils down to this: if you don’t know who you are, how can someone else know? You can get all the clicks you want from a zany or controversial tweet or blog post, but you’ll see no long-term benefits without a consistent voice and follow-up content.
At Ayima, we’ve successfully worked with numerous clients on the process of setting a tone of voice. This allows us as an agency to produce and brief in consistent quality content, and it creates a robust content strategy with copy that really speaks to our clients’ audiences.
Contact us today to learn how Ayima’s expert content team can help you find your voice.
