It’s not what you say, but how you say it. You’ve probably heard that before, from your parents, your partner or your friends. It’s the old chestnut that never seems to get old! Just like any other situation in life, that notion is applied when it comes to content marketing. Content marketing is effectively the process of opening up the closest thing to a direct dialogue with your audience, and if you want to appeal to them personally, your business or brand will need to develop its own, unique and special tone of voice. Sure, the words written (or spoken) are important. But it’s the order, rhythm and pace of these words that really sets the tone; brand identity cannot be formed without adding personality to your words. So, when it comes to ‘tone of voice’, you’ve got to make sure that it actually fits the product or service your business is promoting, as well as appealing to your target market. Spanning across your written copy, social media channels, email marketing and even your packaging, each form of your branding should personify the same tone of voice and give your brand a real personality. Remember, there’s competition everywhere so standing out and creating a personal connection with your audience is the way to set you apart from your competitors. Just like a great tone of voice can make you; a boring or offensive tone of voice can definitely break you.     via GIPHY

1. Understand Who You Are

First things first, tone of voice is vital when creating your brand identity, so don’t treat it as an afterthought. It’s something that should be developed in line with the core values that represent your brand.  Of course, to achieve this you’ll need a very strong understanding of your business’ values, and what you believe characterises your brand. We recommend brainstorming these key personality traits and the core values that your business stands for. Do you pride yourself on consistency? Or is honest customer service your forte? Again, once you go through your core values, it will enable you to craft your business’ tone of voice and the personality traits that you want to portray.

2. Understand Your Audience

Just as important as knowing what you stand for as a business and the way you want to portray your brand to consumers, is also to understand exactly what is going to appeal to your consumers. Their tastes and interests will play a huge role in moulding your tone of voice, as this will inevitably be the way you’ll gain engagement from your audience. Let’s talk you though a little scenario. A consumer picks up your product and LOVES IT. They go away and search your website and social media pages, only to find boring and generic content that’s quite frankly, forgettable. Are they going to follow you? Or are they going to leave your page never to return… You catch our drift! Every demographic is different, and some will engage more with a causal tone of voice than a formal one – which is why speaking to your consumers needs is so important. If your audience has a particular sense of humour, such as enjoying sexual innuendos and pop culture, then you can push boundaries a little more with the content you post. So, how’d you work out who your audience is? Or who you WANT them to be? Craft a persona! You can create different persona profiles based on examples of your audience, including their demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioural characteristics.

3. Understand Your Competitors’ Best and Worst Habits

Since competitors are everywhere, you’re going to want to keep your eye on them. Follow them, read about them – it’s time to up your stalking game.   via GIPHY Take notes from the brands that do well and who you aspire to be like, as well as the more questionable brands that you definitely don’t want to learn from. Content marketing requires heavy market research, so just think of your stalking efforts as market research and get stuck in! Through stalking, sorry, competitor analysis, you may even find a gap in the market, which you can use to your advantage. If you feel that there is a significant tone of voice that doesn’t exist, but is in high demand from customers, you may just hit the jackpot. This way, you’ll see the kind of tones, pace and personality that people engage with and respond well to, as well as an insight in to what NOT to do.

4. Identify Keywords and Phrases

Once you’ve identified your target audience and kept an eye on all of your competitors, you should then decide on the keywords and phrases that will define your tone of voice. The use of keywords can really help you to refine your marketing message, by explaining what your business is all about. Each keyword and phrase will define your brand’s personality and can then be used regularly throughout different means of communications to give your brand its identity. We’re not talking just one or two, either. Find as many words and phrases that you feel accurately demonstrate your brand’s desired tone of voice and use them as often as you can. Top tip: If you use keywords consistently, you’ll also increase your search engine optimisation and make it easier for your favourite people to find you. No, not your Uber Eats driver, but your target audience.

5. Develop a Style Guide Spanning Across All Communications

Create a style guide. No, we’re not telling you what shirt to wear with your pants to work (although, that would be pretty helpful on a Monday morning!). A brand style guide is a set of standards that defines your company’s brand identity – it references grammar, tone, logo, colours, visuals, word usage, point of view and more. Building a style guide works as a way to direct everyone that works within your company or represents your brand, and by following this guide, a consistent tone of voice will form and ensure your brand identity is represented in the same way across all forms of communications. Identifying the way that you want your brand to be represented through a style guide provides a framework that staff can always refer to and eliminates marketing decisions that are off-brand.

The Brand Doing it Right

Take Frank Body as an example – we could all learn a thing or ten from the marketing team behind the legendary Frank. The beauty brand provides coffee scrubs, moisturisers and more, and is very much a skin and beauty product. Unlike so many skin care products in the industry that promise eternal youth and use soft and fluffy words to describe what their product can do for you, the team behind Frank went for something on a completely different page. A different book some may even say. So, instead of fluff, meet Frank. A tongue-in-cheek, flirty guy with a cheeky sense of humour and full of sexual innuendos. They found a gap in the market and they made it work, appealing to teenagers, and twenty-somethings across the globe with their fun packaging, interesting website, and engaging Instagram feed.     Calling their customers babe, or referring to them as ‘frankfurts’, their branding is on point at all times, and we’ve fallen for it. Hard. At the end of the day, the aim isn’t for your audience to just comment on your great writing (that should be a given!), but the end goal? For them to remark on how amazing your business and product is. The right tone of voice is something that can take a little while to craft, but once you’ve got it nailed, the world is your oyster.