Does Your Business Have a Brand Voice?

How to identify a writing style that will resonate with your audience

No matter what business you may be in, having a consistent voice that will accurately convey your brand and reach your potential customers is important. From law firms to eCommerce store owners, having a consistent voice that also represents you well can make or break the sale.

Why is having a consistent and accurate voice important?

• People buy or partner with people they like
• Having a professional voice can build trust
• Consistency allows you to tell a guided narrative about your business throughout the site
• A brand voice will ideally guide other marketing materials. 

Not sure about your brand voice? Here are three exercises to help you find your content marketing voice.

Identify your ideal reader

Before you even begin writing or blogging, it’s important to establish who you’re writing for. Are you trying to build new business? Are you hoping to maintain a relationship with your current clients? Or maybe your main goal is to establish authority on a subject?

Consider conducting research on brand personas that can show you who your target audience is. Knowing your audience can guide your writing, in both verbiage, length, and topics of dicussion.

Create your own persona

Once you’ve figured out who exactly you’re writing for, then you can figure out your own writing personas. This can be done when you decide on your goals for your writing: is it to inform colleagues, build trust with a new client, or provide help to current and new clients?

You should also think about how you’d like your “voice” to be described. Brainstorm a handful of adjectives you’d like to describe your blog and other content. Do you want to be seen as clever, smart, insightful, funny, serious, wise? Will the voice be authoritative, youthful, friendly?

Create an exact persona that you’d like to be the voice of your content marketing by combining these words into a kind of mission statement. Then use this as a reference for the rest of your writing. 

Try to make it pass the stranger test

There’s evidence that, regardless of who you’re talking to, creating a writing persona that’s more casual can make your content more memorable, therefore increasing brand recognition. When you’re considering topics, make sure it’s something that could be interesting to an audience that isn’t too terribly small. Since we’re discussing primarily writing on the internet, we’d recommend that you try to make sure that your topics of writing are not so specific that it requires a lot of heavy explaining required for readers to make sense of your content.

To test this, read one of your blogs aloud, either to yourself or someone else. If it feels a bit too specific, or like it wouldn’t be a good conversation topic in a room of people, it may not be broad enough to really land with your ideal audience, even if they’re other professionals.

If you’re still feeling lost, the content marketing experts at efelle can help. With years of experience writing and blogging for the internet, we can guide you toward a voice that’s both functional and sustainable.

Looking for help finding your voice? We can help!

We've got a team of digital strategists, content directors, and brand experts to help guide you. Call us at 206.384.4909 or fill out our online contact form to get in touch with a custom web design specialist.