Know Your Brand, Sound Like Your Audience

In one of the Harry Potter films, Hermione Granger and Harry Potter are given a magic device that enables them to travel back in time. They use it to return to the moment a mythical animal is about to be killed but seconds before they save an innocent life, Hermione sees her future self hiding behind a tree. She stops, shocked.
“Is that what my hair looks like from behind?” she asks.
It’s a comic moment and one that’s entirely understandable. As individuals we struggle to see and project ourselves as we want others to perceive us. We struggle to express our true selves — and for businesses, it’s no easier.

Before a company can produce an appropriate and consistent tone of voice for its content marketing, it first has to know itself. It has to understand who it is. It has to define its personality. And it has to speak with a voice that represents it’s own characteristics.
The process usually begins inside the company. The brand should ask itself a series of questions: What makes it unique? What defines its corporate culture? How does it present itself to customer? What key messages does it want to communicate?

How Does a Brand Listen to Itself?
Answering those questions will help the brand to understand whether its personality is young or old, casual or formal, friendly or professional. From that understanding, companies often create three one-word values: “Focused, innovative and risk-taking,” for example. The more specific and clear those phrases are, the better. If a company describes itself as “focused,” for example, team members should understand that means it excels in a narrow field of interest and they should know the subject of that focus.

From that list of values, the company can produce guidelines that govern the tone of voice to be used in its content marketing materials. The guidelines should be specific and they should also take into account the tone used by competitors. Companies that sell pharmaceuticals, for example, will usually try to adopt the tone used by doctors and medical professionals but a brand that can add to that voice a note that’s comic or down-to-earth can stand out. While most insurance companies, for example, use a sombre tone to describe their services, Geico has chosen to sell its car insurance policies through the voice of an animated gecko. It’s a voice that speaks to the young men at which it targets its advertising.

If you’ve ever listened to a recording of yourself speaking, you’ll know how hard it is to hear yourself as the world experiences you. For brands that’s a struggle too but it’s an essential stage in the process of creating the right tone of voice — and it’s a lot easier than going back in time to save a hippogriff.

To learn more about tone of voice in content marketing and what it can do for your business, contact us at contact@astelo.com.

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