The tone of voice that you use in your marking efforts is important. It provides the reader with a sense of what your company is about, the way you operate, your level of approachability, etc. In fact, tone of voice is something that is quite often the thing that makes the reader decide to either do business with you or not. It is vital that you maintain the right tone of voice to reach and successfully market to your target audience.
So how do you do it? How do you find the right voice? We have several things for you to consider that will help make the process easier.
Find Your Voice First
This sounds like it should be easy, but, as many of us have learned the hard way, it’s nowhere near as easy to communicate a feeling or an emotion with text as it is with the spoken word. When someone is speaking and being sarcastic, it’s obvious. That may or may not be the case in writing. What it boils down to is consistency. If you decide that your tone is going to be sarcastic, it needs to be uniformly sarcastic. If it’s going to be casual, it has to be consistently casual, and so on.
Yes, even in more professional situations, your personality can shine through. Does that mean you should be sarcastic in communications with investors? Of course not. What it means is that your investors should be able to get an idea of your personality and see a bit of transparency in your writing. This goes a long way toward building trust.
If you are a solo marketer, you have to get into the habit of writing like you speak, and then you need to determine the different ways you speak to different people. You likely approach colleagues and employees differently than you do clients or customers. Even if you have the vast majority of your copy written for you, the copywriting company or freelancer you hire needs to have some frame of reference as to how they should be writing as you to all of your various audiences. If you haven’t established a voice ahead of time, don’t expect a writer to be able to do it for you.
You can also find your voice by creating an avatar with specific personality traits and attributes. This is most widely done to identify who your ideal customer is, but it can also be used to develop a virtual “spokesman” for your brand – one that knows all the ins and outs of your business and has the personality to represent it well. Knowing your brand’s personality will make it easier for you to strike up a compelling conversation with clients, customers, colleagues, investors, and the like.
If you work with a team, finding your voice needs to be a collective effort. Collaborate on an avatar or just decide how you want your brand message to be delivered. Brainstorm and write a few samples. Use the best two or three as a guide when you hire copywriters so that they know, from a few slightly different perspectives, what is expected in the copy in terms of your brand’s voice.
Lastly, it helps to get out onto the table what your voice is not. This will help clear the way for more effective collaboration and brainstorming.
Now Develop the Tone
Your tone of voice also needs to take into consideration the audience to which you or your writer is communicating. Use what you discovered about your brand voice as a guide, and start making notes as to how you intend to approach each of your audiences. Again, B2B copywriting is going to have a different tone than a marketing email. A letter to prospective investors is going to have a different tone than a blog post.
The tone will change depending on the copy, but it should always remain anchored to the voice that you decide is yours. Going back to my previous example, investors should get a glimpse of your sledgehammer wit if that’s the voice you’ve adopted, but, more to the point, they need to be comfortable with the you that faces customers. You get there by knowing how to temper your tone in various situations.
When finding your tone, keep the following four things in mind:
1. The type of copy (blogs, emails, landing pages, B2B sales letters, etc.)
2. The audience
3. The probable emotional response to your message
4. The kind of tone that is most appropriate at present (friendly, sarcastic, empathetic, professional, authoritative, etc.)
With these things in mind, sit down (by yourself or with your team) and develop enough examples to keep your copywriter both busy and on course with your vision for your brand. The more effort you put into this, the better the copy you receive from an outside writer is going to be.