What's Your Content Marketing Voice?
Tips to identify a writing style that will resonate with your audience
For many professional writers, the struggle to find their voice can be a lifelong pursuit—so it’s no surprise that folks who aren’t professional writers really struggle with it.
Whether you’re a lawyer by profession and want to better connect with potential clients (which requires a slightly less jargon-heavy writing style), a restaurant owner looking to try out food blogging, or a marketer who wants to reach a specific audience, finding a voice that lands can be difficult.
Here are three exercises to help you find your content marketing voice.
Identify your ideal reader.
Before you even begin writing or blogging, it’s important to establish who you’re writing for. Are you trying to find new clients? Are you looking to keep your existing list warm? Or maybe your main goal is to establish authority on a subject?
After you’ve answered that basic question, create a sketch of who that person is. How old they are, what their area of expertise in your field is, and what frames of reference they’ll be coming to your blog and social media accounts with.
Create your own persona.
Once you’ve figured out who you’re writing for, you can iron out the details of how writing for them will sound—will it be heady and complex, as though they’re a peer with a great deal of existing insight, or will it be colloquial and conversational?
List a handful of adjectives you’d like to describe your blog and other marketing strategies. Do you want to be seen as clever, smart, insightful, funny, serious, wise? Will the voice be authoritative, youthful, friendly?
Create an exact persona that you’d like to be the voice of your content marketing by combining these words into a kind of mission statement. This is your template. Stick to this.
Try to make it pass the stranger test.
Now, give it a double-check.
There’s evidence that, regardless of who you’re talking to, creating a writing persona that’s a little casual (but confident!) can make your content more memorable and therefore stickier when people need to recall a fact or an idea they once read about.
Even if you think your blog will be a little niche, try to make sure that it’s not so inside-ball that there’s a lot of heavy explaining required for readers to make sense of your content.
To do this, try reading through some of the copy you’ve sketched out as though you were meeting a stranger at a party. If it feels a bit too specific, or like it wouldn’t be a good conversation topic in a room of people, it may not be broad enough to really land with your ideal audience, even if they’re other professionals.
If you’re still feeling lost, the content marketing experts at efelle can help. With years of experience writing and blogging for the internet, we can guide you toward a voice that’s both functional and sustainable.
Looking for help finding your voice? We can help!
efelle creative is a Seattle-based web marketing firm that specializes in website design and development, website content management, search engine optimization, and other online marketing services. Since 2005, efelle has worked with hundreds of businesses to help them with their web development needs. Call us at 206.384.4909 or fill out our online contact form to get in touch with a custom web design specialist.
See Also:
The One Thing You Shouldn't Hack: Your Content Marketing Strategy
Why Storytelling is the Future of Content Marketing