Speaking As One: Giving All Your Content Channels The Same Voice

Mary Poppins is a hugely entertaining movie, filled with great songs, wonderful characters and plenty of laughter. For English people, that laughter is doubled because they get to hear Dick Van Dyck attempt to put on a cockney voice.

It’s not that he doesn’t do it well. It’s that he does do it well but he doesn’t do it all the time. Whenever a word slips out in American accent, whenever he misses a glottal stop in the middle of a word or drops a letter that a true cockney would keep, audiences see through the effort. They stop seeing the character and start seeing the actor behind the part.

Businesses have a similar challenge when implementing their tone of voice, especially when they’re engaged in content marketing. The right tone of voice is essential. It’s a vital element in the message the business is broadcasting. It helps to determine whether the audience will want to build a relationship with the brand, and it sets up the nature of that relationship for the future.

A business will produce a steady stream of content that has to speak consistently in that voice. From the website copy to an email newsletter, from social media posts to blog posts, from an interactive simulator to a training video for buyers of a complex service, all the content produced by the brand has to sound similar and carry the personality of the company. It has to portray the genuine personality of the brand.

The process used to allow the tone of voice to permeate the company will tend to vary from brand to brand.

One Piece Of Content Can Echo The Tone Of Voice Through The Company

Examples help. Clear guidelines illustrated with memorable examples can enable employees to understand how they should be speaking when they address the business’s audience. Content should also be checked regularly and consistently to prevent producers from sliding back into a language that’s more their own than one that’s owned by the business.

Focusing on a few stand-out pieces of content can often have a powerful effect. Once the company’s home page has been rewritten to reflect its new tone of voice, that language can often echo naturally through all of the other pieces of content the company produces. Writers and content producers have a standard by which they can measure their own efforts.

Measuring success can help too. Showing content writers that a piece of content produced in the company’s new voice has a significantly higher engagement rate will prove that the voice is being heard and accepted.

The aim of employing the right tone of voice in a business is always to create a deeper relationship with audiences that accept the brand as one of their own. You don’t need to put on a song and dance show to make that happen. You just have to discover your natural tone of voice and speak in one, native voice.

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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