Creating Your Brand’s Voice

Creating content may feel like a one way street. Composing content for your company’s website, writing blog posts, and social media updates become a lot of work and require a lot of thought to create creative content. However, communication is about two parties: a writer and a reader, or a speaker and a listener. To get your message across, you need to understand who you’re writing for or who you’re talking to. Henneke Duistermaat, writer for KISSmetrics, shares useful steps on how to spark interest and engagement with your brand’s voice.

Step 1: Create a Buyer Persona Profile

Duistermaat says that your web content is the start of the conversation with your ideal reader or buyer persona. You’re developing a relationship with one person at a time.

The person may read your web copy, check out your blog, and then decide to sign up for your email list.

So how are you going to engage that person and entice him/her to sign up? Duistermaat gives us suggestions:

When you try to engage a crowd, write to please just one person. When you write for one person, everyone who more or less matches your reader profile will feel like you’ve written your web content specifically for them.

Step 2: Define Your Brand Personality

Imagine meeting your buyer persona in real life. How would you talk about your product/service? What words would you use? How would you persuade him/her to buy your product? When you imagine communicating with your buyer persona face to face, you get a feel for your brand voice. Duistermaat suggests creating a series of statements to define your voice.

Step 3: Translate Your Brand Personality Into Your Voice

To translate your brand personality into your voice, Duistermaat suggests we play with the following three elements:

1. Word Choice

How flowery are your words? Do you use strong language? Do you use difficult or simple words? Dusitermaat suggests creating a list of favorite words, and of words that don’t suite your brand.

2. Sentence Structure and Rhythm

Few people actually consider the rhythm of their writing, but it has a big impact on how content is perceived. A series of long sentences makes your writing more formal. Interrupting your flow with short sentences adds enthusiasm. As the old rule of thumb goes, before publishing content, read it out loud and hear if it sounds monotonous or dynamic. Do you stumble across your words? Do the long sentences make you gasp for air? Simply reading aloud your content helps a lot with sentence clarity.

3. Questions

Using questions in your writing engages your readers. It makes your content sound friendlier, more welcoming, as if you’re starting a conversation.

People do business with people. Nobody likes ringing a call center. Nobody chats with a corporation. To connect with your audience you need to sound human. Duistermaat firmly clarifies the point that your business needs to have personality. The only way to express your brand’s personality is to woo them with your writing. Charm them with your brand voice and entice them to want to learn more.

At Five Technology, we can help your business shine with a great website with personality. Your content marketing is the way you’ll be able to entice potential customers. If your business would like to enhance its website with enticing content, let’s chat!

Read the full article by Henneke Duistermaat.