When
starting to develop the brand, many companies spend a lot of time choosing
colors and hiring graphic designers but overlook their written content.
No matter where you’re sharing content – on your blog, social media, or other
websites – you want to develop a voice that helps you maintain your
relationship with current clients and generate new business.
But
how do you do that? Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you get started.
Get
guidance from your visual branding
Start
by looking to other materials you’ve developed – logos, business cards,
company photographs, and even your office or store décor. Write down words you
would use to describe them. Are they bright, colorful, and fun? Or are they
more straightforward and professional? Do you tend to share humor, or does your
brand seem more sentimental and flowery? The tone of your written content
should similarly share these qualities.
Establish
your message
What’s
the overall goal of your brand – and thus, your written copy? It can be helpful
to develop a one sentence statement which you can choose to share with the
public or not. For example, Google’s informal company motto is “Don’t be evil.”
When developing this message, you also want to keep in mind who your target
audience is. You would write different copy for soccer moms than you would for
recent retirees.
Develop
your web copy
Once
you’ve defined the tone that you want to hit, you should start by writing the
content for your website to further hone in on your company’s unique voice.
Since this copy is incredibly important, many businesses choose to hire a
professional writer for this phase. You can work with him or her to establish a
tone that you can use elsewhere, or you can go it alone. Either way, take the
time to get it right now, so you can use it as a template for other areas of
your web presence.
Find
the face behind your blog
Blogs
are all about making a personal connection with your clients, and one of the
best ways to do that is to literally put a face to your company. This can
be the CEO, an employee with an interesting position, or even multiple
employees. It doesn’t necessarily mean that this individual has to write each
blog; you can choose to hire a ghostwriter to handle that task if necessary.
Either way, you want to stay consistent with the tone you’ve established in the
web copy – but since it’s a blog, you can be a more informal and have a little
fun with it.
Create
a social networking plan
Figure
out where your target audience is spending the most time, and focus your
efforts there. Facebook is one of the most popular sites on the web and reaches
a wide audience, but you also want to consider other smaller social networks.
For instance, a LinkedIn presence might be important if you are targeting
business owners. Again, you want to take into account the tone of your brand.
If you have a fun, more playful brand, you may want to take advantage of apps
to take polls and create quizzes. For a more serious brand, you could share
links to articles relevant in your area of expertise.
Be
consistent
No
matter where your writing will appear, it should reflect your brand in the same
way. This is true even if you’re writing for a different audience, such as in a
guest post for another site. Certainly, you can make adjustments to better
target those readers, but you want to maintain the same tone and stick to your
branding message. Some companies find it beneficial to maintain a style
guide of sorts for their written branding style in order to help everyone stay
on the same page
No comments:
Post a Comment