It’s impossible to market your product or service unless you have a brand. By brand, we don’t mean logo and colour scheme. We mean the values and personality of your company’s products, and of the business itself. You’ll see these values come to life in packaging design, advertising and the other visual elements of your brand, but it should also extend to the other methods of communication with customers and clients including through social media, email, and on your website. Crucially, the nature of your brand has a significant effect on the tone of voice of the content on your website and blog. If you’re trying out content marketing, it’s important that you keep your content on message.
What is tone of voice in content marketing?
Content marketing may chiefly be about communicating information, but written communication can occur in many different ways. A good writer will be able to tweak their style of writing to match a brand and its audience. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples of tone of voice in action.
404 pages. All sites have them. Some websites use a standard ‘page not found’ message (see: Coca Cola UK), while others have customised them to improve the user experience (take a look at BBC, Innocent, and Red Bull’s 404 pages). On the BBC page, we’re given two potential courses of action that might solve our problem. It’s straight to the point, and it’s polite – asking us to ‘please’ take additional actions. Innocent’s page is as cute and playful as you’d expect. It explains the problem in friendly terms, and apologises to the user. The page uses short, informal sentences to direct the user back to relevant content, and even features an embedded video that’s literally on the page just for fun. Red Bull’s 404 page is a good reflection of its brand. It’s a very action-oriented page, dominated by a huge photo of canoeists on the lip of waterfall. We’re then invited to dive head first into some suggested content. All 404 pages have almost exactly the same content, but it’s told in a different way. We have different emotional reactions based on the tone of the content. The photo on the Red Bull page is exciting and memorable, while we might leave Innocent’s 404 page with an amused smile.
Now, imagine if the 404 pages had been switched. We’d have been turned off from the Innocent website if it used the BBC’s rather corporate 404 page. If the Innocent 404 page was used by Red Bull, we’d laugh for all the wrong reasons.
Getting it right
Without a specialist copywriter on your team, it can be a significant challenge to establish a consistent tone in your website content. Here are some tips to get you started:
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Ask what your audience want. You should be fully aware of the demographics of your target market. If your target market is the HR departments of large businesses, they’ll almost certainly prefer content that’s straight to the point and contains the important numbers. Younger audiences may prefer more informal content that’s more emotional and imaginative.
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…and what they expect. If you’ve already established your brand, your content’s tone of voice should fit. As we explored in the example above, an unexpected mismatch in tone of voice can be jarring or even unintentionally comical. If your website and logo have been designed to look energised and quirky, don’t write your content as if it was an academic essay.
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Think about face-to-face interaction. Consider how you speak to your target market and clients when you meet them face-to-face. Do you meet over a coffee and chat as if you were old friends, or across the boadroom table dressed in well-fitting suits? In the same way that you change your mannerisms and speech based on the context and the audience, change the tone of voice of your content.
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Read content aloud. For the first few pieces of content you produce, read it aloud. Ask coworkers and friends if it’s the right style and tone. What is their emotional reaction to the content? It may take you some time to adjust your writing style until you manage to consistently attain the reaction you’re after.
Tone of voice is a crucial area of content marketing. If you’d like more guidance on creating fantastic content that acts as an extension of your brand, contact the Crowdbait team. We’re a content marketing agency based in York, and we’d love to hear from you.