How can you create a consistent tone and voice for your marketing materials?

Pay attention to what gets you attention. Save slogans, taglines, phrases, platitudes, and sentences that strike a chord with your audience. And capture your essence into your content by writing as you talk. If you aren't a funny person- don't use humor. If you aren't witty- don't try to use sass. Keep it simple and stay true to yourself. If you wouldn't say something to someone in person, then don't write it in your content.

If the brand you are working with is new, take your time at this stage. It is well worth it. All the discussions and debates you have and solve at this stage will eliminate problems down the line. Once attributes are defied and agreed upon everything else is much easier.

Learn everything there is to know about the brand and try your best to personify them. That way you'll get to the point where you KNOW what they'll say in response to something, in the same way we ask ourselves 'what would *insert celebrity here* do?'. Read what they're currently doing and obsess over it, or if it's a new brand, create a TOV that is so airtight it's obvious. You should be able to picture them in your head.

Definitely don't just "choose some adjectives that describe your brand personality, such as friendly, professional, playful, or authoritative." Like the intro here suggests - that's how you'll end up with a generic brand voice that sounds the same as everyone else. Spend some time exploring the unique and interesting facets of your brand's personality, to define a voice that properly captures the energy and humanity of your organisation. Think about your culture, your people, what they're like to work with and why and how they do what they do. Then you'll get to the good stuff 👌

To establish a consistent tone and voice in your marketing materials, start by defining your brand personality. Maintain a style guide with key elements like messaging, vocabulary, and guidelines for communication. Train your team on these principles and ensure they understand your target audience. Regularly review and refine your content to stay aligned with the established tone and voice. Consistency across all marketing channels and materials will help solidify your brand identity and resonate with your audience.

💡 Every content you publish has to be for someone or some people and before you pick your laptop to write, you have to know exactly who you're writing to. Knowing whom you're writing to, their typical problems and the solutions they're searching for, will help dictate the perfect brand voice.

Think of it like tuning into a radio station. If your audience loves jazz but you play heavy metal, you'll miss the mark, right? Dive into their world, understand their likes, and speak their language. Surveys and analytics? They're your tuning tools. The better you 'get' your audience, the more in-sync your message feels. It's less about talking at them and more about having a conversation with them. When you truly connect, your message doesn't just get heard; it resonates!

Understanding your audience is the only way to craft copy that’s actually engaging and resonating. Being familiar with who your readers are, their preferences, pain points, etc. helps develop a message that really connects. By speaking their language and showing that you understand their needs, you earn trust and real engagement from readers. Failing to demonstrate that you understand the needs of your audience risks alienating them with irrelevant or tone-deaf content. A deep understanding of how to communicate with readers empowers copywriters to deliver messages that persuade and leave a lasting impression.

Create a profile that represents your demographic. It helps to set a name for the user that comes to your site, let’s say you sell luxury cars and your biggest traffic driver is male 18-24 years old. But when you filter by conversion rate it’s male 45+. Name the 18 year old Luca - he can be described as the aspirational user. The 45 year old can be Tom who is affluent with high house hold income. Your brand should be able to attract and create content for both. A successful brand campaign I worked on was targeting the young audience on social with speed and exhaust videos, while older demographic resonated with family trips, seats, trunk space etc. Don’t limit yourself to one audience, one tone.

A brand style guide is only half the battle. To really get your brand and marketing assets consistent, someone needs to be empowered to enforce what's in that guide -- a "brand sheriff." And it can't be some consultant or outsider. It needs to be someone who has internal street cred. Otherwise, you'll encounter a lot of resistance.

An important point to remember about creating a tone and voice guide is that it's not there to teach people how to write good copy. It’s to help people who already know how to write good copy, write in your brand’s unique voice.

Your TOV guide should outline how a brand adapts to different contexts. Like a human, a brand is allowed to have facets and behave differently depending on the context. But, as with a human, there is a core sense of self driving these encounters. A strong TOV guide will make a brand's core sense of self super clear. In general, the clearer the mission and values the easier it is to navigate a brand through different waters.

Copywriting is an exercise in flexibility. You have to flex different muscles depending on the medium, the goal, and the audience, and you have to be constantly reevaluating those external factors. That said, you should be flexing within the confines of your brand guide to ensure that your voice is consistent.

Your tone of voice needs to resonate with your people. From employees and freelance creatives to customers. While sentiment monitoring tools and social listening can be useful, I've always found customer reviews and feedback the best place to see what messaging matters most to the people buying from the brand - especially when it comes to consumer products. Often, it's here, in the product or Google reviews that customers leave, that I see my words echoed back at me and used to describe what they really love their recent purchase - from the materials used to the design of the piece

I have a framework that might be useful: Certainly! Define your brand's identity by envisioning it as a person. Understand your audience through surveys and analytics. Draft varied content samples to test different tones. A/B test this content to see what resonates, then refine based on feedback. Document a consistent tone and voice guide. Train your team on this guide. Regularly review and adapt to ensure alignment. Stay attuned to audience feedback and be open to evolution.

Review, review, review Editing is also a fundamental step to creating content with a consistent voice and tone. Once content has been created, the creator should step back and come back with fresh eyes, whether an hour or a day later, ensuring grammar, spelling, syntax, and style within the text and compared to other brand content across the specific channel. If the company size and structure permit, it’s also preferable to have a second person check the work, as they’ll have a different perspective and will likely more easily catch mistakes and inconsistencies which can tend to be missed by the person who’s created the content.

These are also some ways for creating consistent tone and voice in your marketing materials: Analyze competitors - See what tone and voice competitors are using. This can help you distinguish your brand. Leverage templates - Create templates for materials like emails, ads, blogs etc. so they share stylistic elements. Collaborate across teams - Hold tone of voice training sessions. Marketing, sales, PR should all align on voice. Appoint a tone of voice champion - Have one person help guard your brand voice and provide guidance/editing.

SEMrush is a useful tool to get metrics around brand tone of voice. You can compare your score against your competitors. You can also see if you are consistent across all your pages. I use GA in market segments to see what sites my demographic consumes before or after landing on my site. Are they interested in sports, travel and cooking. Use that to build on your audience profile and define your display/affiliate partners.

I’ve found it very important to have founder/s present for establishing or reinventing a brand voice because literally no one can speak about a brand and business with the same passion, colors and fire as the founder.