Content Marketing 11 Brand Voice Tips: Detailed Content Style Guide for Consistent Content Marketing

Are you struggling to find the right brand voice for your content marketing? How about writing content with a consistent tone to ensure homogeneity in all your content marketing efforts? As a brand content marketing manager, coming across impediments while choosing the right brand voice for your content is a common issue. However, to save you from the hassle of struggling with experimentation, we have got you covered with our detailed style guide. 

How to Find and Implement The Right Brand Voice for Content Writing

Here is a list of useful tips to help you find the right brand voice for your content marketing:

Gather Representative Content for Defining Your Brand

When you ponder over the tone of voice for my brand, the first thing to do is gather representative content. Dig through your direct competitors and adjacent competitors websites to find out the voice and tone that will closely represent your brand. When you create brand content, the representative content will offer you a clear direction. It will help you device which type of brand voice you need to adopt for defining your brand in front of your customers. Once you have a good set of examples of tone and voice that closely represent your brand, it is time to brainstorm and group the similar ideas together on a white board. This practice, called mind mapping, helps you identify those brand voice elements that resonate with your target audience.

Use Three Words to Answer “What is Your Brand Voice?”

Establishing your brand identity as clearly as possible is important in deciding your brand voice and tone of content. While you are sorting your representative content into groups of similar themes, try to use three different words (adjectives) for description. This practice will help you describe the most dominant elements of your selected groups. Moreover, discuss these common themes among your content writers and marketers circle to find out which elements will be best for your brand.

To make this step simpler, you need to ask yourself “If my brand was a person, how would people describe it?” 

For example, if you have a brand that is in fashion niche, the most common content tone and voice themes for this segment would be:

1. Quirky
2. Trendy 
3. Purposeful 

Now, describe each trait in further detail, such as:

1. Quirky: eccentric, offbeat, unconventional, and one-of-a-kind
2. Trendy: fashionable, stylish, vogue, popular and modish
3. Purposeful: resolute, determined, single minded and goal-driven

When you describe your brand traits, you will have a clear view as to what content voice elements you need to include in your content tone.

Help Your Writers Understand How to Set Your Brand Voice Elements in Motion

Your writers are the primary source of brand creativity which aligns content voice with consistent tone. Once you have defined your content’s voice, it is time to help your writers understand how to communicate it using words in the content they will create. Here are some steps you can take to help your writers set your brand voice in motion:

Get Personal With Your Writers Team

Meet your writing and marketing team to personally discuss how to visualize your content voice and tone using words. Share your ideas with them and get their feedback on how they can implement your brand’s tone traits in the content.

Set Clear Content Quality Benchmarks: 

Show your writers what type of content tone your brand is trying to achieve. Show them examples of good and bad content to help your writers differentiate between the right and wrong content for your brand.

Establish Clear Writing Guidelines

Writing guidelines play a very important role in helping writers find and stick to a direction consistent with your brand’s identity. Set clear guidelines for your blog content, social media content, newsletters, case studies, product descriptions, PRs, survey questions and even the correspondence you will have with your brand customers or community members.

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Implement Standardized Design Themes

Your brand’s content is as good as it is writing AND representation. Thus, you need to establish and implement standardized design elements across all avenues of your brand content marketing. It means that your newsletter, blog, social media content and even your SMS writing should have identifiable and unique design elements standardized according to your content voice. The visuals, graphics, and textual design elements should be consistent throughout. Moreover, decide your signature brand color as it helps in improving your brand recognition by 80%. ^[1]

Implement Rigid Screening and Review Process

Make your review and screening process very clear to your writing and design team. Inform your editorial section about all the content themes, styles and standardized design themes you will follow across various content marketing channels. Once you receive content drafts, the editorial and SEO team should screen the content and make necessary changes before the final publishing.

How to Ensure Consistent Brand Voice and Tone Over Time in Future

As your brand grows, it is imperative that your content voice will transform over time. If you want to ensure that your brand voice evolves in accordance with your brand’s growth, here are a few steps you can take:

Revisit and Refine Content Voice as Your Brand Evolves

A brand content tone is anything but rigid. While you want to ensure that your content voice stays consistent throughout your content, it does not necessarily mean that you need to stick to your initial content tone elements only. As your brand evolves and new competitors add to your pool of competition, your brand messaging strategy will change as well. Conduct a quarterly review of your brand messaging and find key communicators that can evolve your brand voice in alignment with your brand’s future prospects. For example, if your fashion brand is evolving from a trendsetter to being a sustainable fashion platform, your brand voice will shift from quirky, exciting and thrilling to factual, empathetic and compelling respectively. Review the do’s and don’ts your writers need to follow to ensure your brand message evolves in the right direction.

Compel Others to Stick To Your Brand’s Mission

Your brand mission will serve as the compass you need at times when direction seems to be lost. Since your brand mission is a part of your brand strategy, it will help you avoid straying your brand’s true identity. Make your brand’s mission clear to all your content writing and marketing team members. Re-emphasize the brand objectives over and over until they are imprinted on your team’s minds.

Make No Compromise on Quality Screening

Brand editors get sluggish over time which kills brand messaging faster than anything else. Implement a screening process for your writers as well as your editors. Conduct a No-Logo Test. In this test, you will send brand content without adding a brand logo and check whether your audience can still identify your brand. This test can help you see where you lack and how to improve your brand messaging.

Save Time on Writing Brand Content with Consistent Voice Using AI

Creating brand content with consistency is a challenge in itself that requires time and thorough brainstorming. If you want to skip too many content tone variations, using our AI content generator for brand is the perfect way to save time and get the consistent tone. All you need to do is select your preferred content writing or ideation tool. Go to our list of features and input your desired content tone to get the ideal output.

Brand Voice Content Writing Guidelines – Frequently Asked Questions

Why is consistent brand voice important?

Just like all other brand elements and associative characteristics, your brand voice sets the right tone for your content messaging. Thus, it means that a consistent brand voice imprints your brand better on the memory of your target audience than generic content tone.

What is a content voice?

Content voice refers to how your target audience perceives your message. It also refers to the practice and methodologies you follow to present a brand image. It reflects through your brand message to your audience. Content tone and voice consistency is an important part of brand content marketing.

Wrapping it Up

Setting the right brand voice is a process that requires rapid insight and action. Once you decide on a brand voice, it is important to get it implemented right. Moreover, you must evolve it over time as your brand grows.

References:
[1] Brand Recognition – RebootOnline