Getting Your Company’s Voice Right

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You’ve worked up a content strategy, applied it across your marketing channels and delved into your reporting, ready to expand on what works. But what voice do you speak to customers with and how do you know if your company’s voice is striking the right tone?

Even if you long to be playful, sarcastic or hip—like the publications and blogs you follow online—pulling that off in a corporate environment, with a range of collaborator talent and marketing goals, can be very challenging. How do you know when you’re being too casual, or when you’re being too stodgy? Marketing expert and consultant Noah Fleming, who has worked on customer retention strategies for small-to-medium sized businesses, large companies and entrepreneurs, has some easy tips for finding your south africa whatsapp number database company’s voice and letting it shine through in your content.

Know your company’s character

“Every company has a character,” Fleming points out. “If you were to think about your company as a person, what would they be like? Would they be fun and exciting or would they be mellow?”

Just as you’d find it jarring if your favorite TV character suddenly acted in a way that didn’t make sense, your company voice and personality should be consistent. Make sure that every person taking part in content creation or social media marketing understands what the company is about and what it stands for, as well as how you want to be perceived by people. It’s fine for contributors to take a slightly different approach but the overall tone and feel should fit that same voice, so that your content is always characteristic of your brand.

Be more human

“Everyone always says that people need to be authentic, but the problem is that nobody says what that means,” Fleming explains. “I think what it means is that you enter into a real and legitimate dialogue with somebody in the way you speak to them.” That means that your writing and speech should be conversational. This allows you to communicate with people in a way they can understand, as if you were having a discussion with them face-to-face.

If you regularly interact with clients one-on-one either at events or even via phone or email, it can become a bit easier to determine how they’d react to certain types of information or language, and whether material would be too difficult or too easy for them to understand. As your business grows, making sure that people who have client-facing roles express that information to those creating content is key. This helps bridge the gap between those creating content for clients and those who regularly interact with them.