Your brand voice is the unique nature and tone that your business takes when interacting and communicating with customers, clients, and other businesses. For example, a business providing legal services would have a crisp and professional tone in its communication, whereas a toy brand would sound jolly and fun.
What you should look to achieve is quality and excellence in your brand voice, regardless of what type it is. In this blog post, we’re going to be specifically looking at some content writing guidelines and tips that you should follow when creating content for your brand.
By following these tips, you will be able to ensure that the content you write reflects nicely on your business and the brand voice.
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When and how is written content used for brand communication?
There are probably a lot of places and instances that you can think of where written content reflects the brand. For example,
- When a brand performs marketing, it often has to use content of various forms. If it wants to do email marketing, the messages sent to the recipients reflect the brand’s voice.
- In the same way, when a brand interacts with its customers and clients to provide support, the brand voice is reflected in the conversations and the messages.
How can you write high-quality content for a great brand voice?
Now that we are done looking at some instances and places where a business can be required to write content, let’s take a look at some tips that you can follow to make sure that said content is high-quality.
- Before you write, find out about your audience
The best content is the one that is written with the needs of the audience in mind. If the audience finds what it needs in the content, it is inclined to read it from start to finish, from top to bottom.
There are different things and factors that a reader looks for when going through content. The tone, style, type of information, level of complexity, etc., are some examples of such factors.
The good thing about these essential bits of information is that they can be acquired quite easily. You don’t have to make a lot of effort. All it takes is a survey campaign where you can send an email to a selected group of customers and ask them for their feedback. You can ask them about things like:
- What age group do they fall in
- Which area they are based in
- What their qualifications are
And so on. This type of information can basically help you understand the way that your content has to be written.
- Always write in an easy and readable way
Unless your business caters very specifically to a highly educated audience, your priority should be to create easy-to-understand content. The writing should be simple and straightforward, and it should not pose any difficulty for the reader to comprehend it.
There are different steps that you can take to make your writing like this.
- First of all, you should consciously and actively make an effort not to use difficult words in the content and to keep the terminology simple
- You should also pay attention to how long your sentences are. Unnecessarily long sentences can spoil the readability of the content. This can also have a bad effect on your brand voice
- Use active voice instead of passive voice. Active voice sentences are shorter and more straightforward. This makes them easier to understand
- Ensure that your content does not contain grammatical or spelling errors
If your content has grammatical and spelling errors in it, it can show the amateurism of your marketing department, which can, in turn, show the amateurism of your whole company.
One thing you might have noticed about the marketing campaigns of large corporations and multinational companies is that their content never has a missing comma or a hyphen in it—as well as any other error.
There are a couple of different things that you should do to make sure that your content has no errors in it.
- When you write any content for your brand’s use (such as for marketing), use word processing software that highlights the errors and mistakes as you go along.
- Once you are done writing the content, you should proofread it a few times. Simply reading the content that you’re writing from top to bottom can help you spot any imperfections that it may contain.
- As a final measure, you should also run your business content through an automated grammar checker. Grammar-checking tools essentially run on algorithms that let them quickly scan the provided content and look for any grammar or spelling errors that it has. They also provide the correct replacement for the errors.
- Make sure that your content is unique and original
A good brand voice is one that is unique and original. If you follow an existing brand’s style and if you mimic someone else’s tone, it can make you look like a copycat.
Worse than copying styles and tones is the literal copying of content. If you plagiarize something and this act of yours comes to the knowledge of the readers, it can spoil your brand’s reputation. It can also ruin your brand voice.
The thing about this all is that plagiarism is not just a problem when you go out of your way to copy someone. Rather, it can also occur accidentally, i.e., when you write something that coincidentally matches with the content already published and existing online.
Here is what you need to do to avoid this sort of problem.
- When you write your content, check for plagiarism in it using an online tool. There are many different tools and apps available on the Internet that you can utilize for this purpose.
- If any part of the content shows up to be plagiarized, you should alter its wording by using an online paraphrase tool. Paraphrase tools can reword the entire content and give it a new look. They can also change the exact phrasing and words that it contains so that there is no plagiarism and content replication to worry about.
Final Thoughts
And with that, our post comes to an end.
Creating a good brand voice is important for your business. A good brand voice allows you to do effective marketing and organizational communication.
In the post above, we have looked at various tips that you can follow to make your brand voice reliable, trustworthy, and engaging.