Setting the Tone for Your Content: An Introduction to Voice

As you embark upon building, growing, and sustaining your business’s content, you’ll be faced with a number of decisions surrounding how you portray your brand, and one of those choices will be…

::ahem::

Hey friends! So, quick question: Are you representing your brand’s personality in your written content? Today, we’re going to look at the voice – and see if you’re getting it right.

(See what I did there?)

Yes, voice matters in not only setting the tone of your content, but in communicating your brand to the world. The choice of what voice you want to use will be yours, but there’s some leg work you’ll need to do first.

What is your brand’s personality? Think of your voice as setting the tone for your brand, something that will convey your brand’s seriousness or whimsey, your brand’s approachability, or relatability. Your voice will create that emotional engagement with your audience, and may even shape your audience as well. It doesn’t take a writing degree to perfect your voice in your copy, and I’ll give you some tips on figuring that out.

You actually already know what voice is – you may just not notice it yet. Head back to your high school English class and think about works from Shakespeare, The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Farewell to Arms, To Kill a Mockingbird, Walden, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Little Women… These books didn’t read the same way because they were all written with different voices: First person, third person, formal, approachable, close narrative, distant narrative, fun, fantastic, dark, serious, didactic, pointed vocabulary, elaborate vocabulary, lyrical sentences, short sentences. The way each book was crafted - through the chosen voice - established the book’s “personality,” you could say. It created the book’s recognizable brand, so to speak. (As in, you’re going to recognize Shakespeare, or Hemingway, or Emily Dickinson’s poetry, without even seeing the author’s name - you know it by the voice.)

You’re going to do the same thing for your business. What kind of tone do you want to set for your customer? Grounded and stable, serious and educational, playful and nerdy, simple and innocent? The choice is yours, but it doesn’t get created out of the blue. Voice choice is based on what your company is all about at its core.

Make a list of your company’s values. Do you want to be seen as innovative, a step ahead? Or do you want to cultivate customer trust and relationship? Have you been around for two hundred years and celebrate your tradition? Or are you a funky start-up? Pick two or three values that you hold, and think about how you can portray that in writing.

Let’s take a look at some examples:

Olark
Olark is a company that provides live chat for businesses. They have a very friendly, “chatty” (they should, they’re a chat company!), self-aware voice throughout their materials. Take a read through their Values page for some great examples.

Bessemer Trust
You know Bessemer from Bessemer Steel. They’re now a family trust business, using such phrases in their copy as “lasting,” “deep expertise,” and “peace of mind,” and their website is solid and straightforward - it has to be, because they’re attempting to garner trust for long-term investing.

YNAB
YNAB - short for “You Need a Budget” - is a budgeting software supported by a lot of fun content to get people excited about, well, budgeting. Their content is short and punchy, with lots of exclamation marks, and stems from personal stories. Visiting their About page to get a sense.

Charity: Water
Charity: Water are masters of storytelling, as they deliberately chose as their business model to be financially transparent about where donations were going. You’ll find a lot of active, informative, fact-driven (citations!) content on their site in order to boost trust and tell the story of their impact.

Innocent Drinks
This brand was a mystery to me until I started researching what the best brand voices were, and Innocent Drinks was on everyone’s list. A visit to their Instagram shows why: Their voice is quirky, irreverent, and readily recognizable.

Mailchimp
Speaking of quirky and irreverent, Mailchimp makes creating newsletters enjoyable and easy. They have their style guide available to the public, and it’s a handy thing in understanding how to think about voice, and how to implement a strategy around it.

Now that you’ve got an idea of what kind of voice to adopt, here are some things to keep in mind:

Be consistent: Nothing confuses a customer quicker than having a mix of voices in your content – that goes within your website, emails, and across your social media channels. That also goes for style, grammar, mechanics, abbreviations, commas, capitalization, and more.

Make a style guide: Write up a guide to your brand’s voice, giving examples of the tone you want to convey, some keyword choices, and even down to the kind of grammar and mechanics you use (you need to make a decision on Oxford commas), so that everyone who works on your content is in the same lane.

You v. We: Decide whether you’re going to lace your content with calls to action (“When you visit…,” “Join our program…,” “You’re looking for an experience that…”) versus presenting who you are without any calls to action (“We do these things well…,” “We have over 30 years of service…,” “We offer a unique experience…”). There are arguments both ways, but make sure that you’re sticking to one plan.

Word choice matters: Trying for a more formal voice? Use words like “peruse,” “distinguished,” and “discuss.” Trying for a more conversational voice? Use words like “check out,” “awesome,” and “chat.” Think of it in terms of grade level. Do you want your copy to sound like it’s at a university level? Or a middle school or high school level? Neither is wrong, but you’ll be catering to different audiences.

Audience: When adopting a specific voice, you’ll either match your audience, or cultivate your audience. Your tone, word choice, and syntax will create an experience for your customer. For the more laid back, a more formal voice might not appeal to them. For a more cultivated audience, Millennial slang might not be the right approach.

 There’s certainly much more to say on this topic - look for more posts in the future drilling down on specific areas - but this overview should give you a good start!