Content marketing is a great way to reach more customers and build your brand. However, it’s important to remember that content marketing isn’t just about producing lots of content.
Effective content marketing is also about adding value for your audience and developing and maintaining a consistent tone and voice throughout all of your content.
By consistently adding value for your audience and having a unified tone and voice across all of your content, you can create more effective content that resonates with your target audience.
Maintaining consistency in your tone and voice helps people who consume your content make the connection between your brand and the content you churn out. This is critical in building brand loyalty and forging strong relationships with your audience.
So how do you go about creating a consistent tone and voice for your brand? Let’s take a look.
Table of Contents
Establish Your Audience
The first step in creating a consistent tone and voice for your brand is establishing who your audience is. To maintain consistency, you need to understand who you’re writing for and what they want from the content you produce.
Start by creating buyer personas for your target audience. Having this in place allows you to ensure the content you produce is always designed for the needs of your specific audience.
An effective buyer persona includes characteristics like their age, gender, occupation, interests, and other aspects that make members of your audience who they are.
Here’s a great example with some things you can include beyond just the basics listed above.
Think about what kind of language your audience members (your buyer personas) use when talking or engaging with other people online. This will give you an idea of the type of language you should use to connect more effectively with your audience on your website or social media profiles.
Knowing the types of words your audience members are likely to use makes it easier to tailor the tone and voice of your content in order to engage them better.
Also, think about why they may benefit from your products or services as well as why they might reject them. Dig in and get detailed. The more detailed, the more consistent the tone and voice of your content marketing will become.
Develop Your Brand Personality
Once you have established who your target audience is and why they should care at all about you and your brand, the next step is to develop a brand personality that resonates with you audience.
This means choosing words that reflect what kind of values or ideas you want to communicate through your content.
For example, if you want to convey energy, enthusiasm, and fun through your content then choose words like “exciting”, “energetic”, “positive” etc., as opposed to words like “boring” or “dull” which have the opposite effect.
Coca-Cola does a great job of this here. Just look at the language the brand uses. These are all in line with the fun, energetic brand Coca-Cola portrays in its content marketing. “Discover,” “new,” “magic,” “value,” “enjoy,” all make an appearance here.
You should also consider whether you want to use formal or informal language when writing copy. While the laid back, fun persona above works for Coca-Cola, it make not work for your law firm or non-profit.
Your choice here will depend on who your target audience is, since different audiences may respond differently depending on their age group or level of education, along with other factors. It will also depend on the nature of your offerings and what your audience has come to expect from your brand.
Consistency Is Key
Once you have established both the target audience and the desired brand personality for your content marketing campaign, it’s time to start creating consistent content that reflects those things.
Make sure that every piece of copy follows the same rules as far as tone and voice go; this will help ensure that all pieces are unified under one umbrella and make it easier for readers to identify with your content as part of one cohesive whole instead of separate entities competing against each other for attention.
One thing your brand should have in place to make this happen is a style guide. This should focus on elements like branding, color scheme, language, ways you use and present particular words, tone and voice, and more.
Here’s an excellent video with tips to help you create an effective style guide for your brand.
Once you establish your brand tone and voice and you have your style guide in place, try not to switch between different tones and voices. This can confuse readers who may think they are reading different pieces from different sources instead of one continuous story from from your brand.
Stay Consistent and Connect More Deeply With Your Audience
Developing a consistent tone and voice for all of the content you produce is essential for your content marketing to be successful in terms of engagement with readers as well as building trust between them and the company producing the material.
Start by establishing who your target audience is (e.g., age group/occupation/interests) so that appropriate language can be used.
Then focus on nailing down an overall brand personality (i.e., energetic vs dull). This helps your audience recognize when a piece of content is from you and not a competitor.
Maintain consistency across all pieces of content you produce by maintaining your tone and voice throughout each piece so readers can easily identify any piece of content as coming from one source instead multiple ones competing against each other for attention.
So get started today on building a successful content marketing strategy. Develop and lay out your strategy. Then make it work for you and your brand.
Anthony is CEO and Founder of Gaenzle Marketing. He is a two-time published author and digital marketing influencer. He has helped brands both large and small grow and thrive across multiple industries through strategic marketing campaigns and leveraging a powerful network of influencers.
