Your brand’s voice should be unified across all your content to accurately reflect your brand persona.

I was reading a statement of work for a project I was joining and could tell immediately who had written it. At the time, our desks were across from each other, “Brad, you wrote this SOW didn’t you?” I asked. His initial response was “You make me so self-conscious about my writing.”

My past life as a high school English teacher occasionally makes my colleagues uneasy; he was prepared to hear me criticize his punctuation. To his relief, it wasn’t because of anything “bad” in his writing that allowed me to identify him as the author. I knew it was him because it sounded like him; I heard his voice as I read. There were words and phrases he uses frequently, and the sentences reflected the way he speaks conversationally. His personality, or voice, was present in the writing.

Hearing an author’s voice while reading isn’t limited to people you know. Voice reflects the personality of the person or organization speaking to you. An individual’s personality is often easily conveyed in face-to-face conversation, and the same is true online through their voice.

A clear voice is part of creating a unified brand identity across all content.

Organizations and individual brands need to have a clear, singular voice in their content in order to engage with their audiences. However, many organizations have either an inconsistent voice or one that is empty.

When a brand’s content is generated by a variety of people, the organization’s voice may be inconsistent. There may be too many people “talking.” When it comes to branding, your customers don’t get a clear sense of who you are if your voice is inconsistent.

When a brand lacks a voice, it lacks personality. The brand appears impersonal, and customers take notice. This may not directly hurt the bottom line, but it certainly won’t help. Have you experienced an automated phone system when calling customer service? No matter how human-like the voice, I have yet to encounter one that has a personality or makes me feel like the organization values my business. Your content shouldn’t feel automated either.

So what causes an organization to come off as unfeeling or devoid of personality? Think back to your experiences writing research papers in high school and college. You were probably taught to write in third person in order to appear unbiased, to avoid second person because it was too informal, and to avoid first person because it was immature and self-involved. (Yes, I’m about to blame your English teachers for this one.) Academia calls for being impersonal and detached.

In business, detachment turns off clients and prospects alike. Your organization’s content should read as a conversation with your audiences– a conversation where only one voice is heard and represents your brand’s personality and values.

Your brand’s voice should be included as part of your brand standards and should include key attributes that need to come across in your content and key phrases that are significant to your identity. Create a persona for your brand and write through the perspective of that persona. Before publishing content in the name of the brand, check it against the brand attributes your team has established. If it doesn’t sound like your brand’s persona, tweak it until it does.

Creating your unified voice comes through knowing your organization and your brand. It requires you to “become one” with your brand. When your audience connects with your brand’s persona, you know you have established your unified voice.

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Have you ever watched a hummingbird? They move rapidly from tree, to flower, to bush in search of nectar or small bugs to consume. They do not linger in their search. If what they visit lacks what they are looking for, they move on quickly. Are your visitors consuming what you offer on your website?

Are your visitors consuming what you offer on your website?

In that respect, visitors to websites are much like hummingbirds. Visitors come to the web in search of knowledge, entertainment, and goods to consume. They click into a website. If it isn’t what a visitor expected, they leave as quickly as they came and are on to another site until they find what they want to consume.

For businesses, visitors who fly off websites take with them opportunities for conversion.  Whether you think about conversion as time on site, ecommerce purchases, sign-ups, or completing a contact request form, if your visitors aren’t staying, it’s a problem.

This is where content strategy comes in. Evaluate your offerings by reexamining your content. You have to offer what your audience members are looking for before you can convert them. Think back to when you set up your site. How did you decide what information to include?  Were you focused on what you wanted to say or on what your audience would want to find?

It seems like content should begin with the essential messages you want to communicate about your business, but that isn’t the best place to start. Businesses that begin focused primarily on what they want to say often miss the mark. It is essential to analyze and strategize your content according to your target audiences if you want to see conversion.

Begin this analysis by identifying various audiences, their respective needs, interests, values, and priorities. It also entails anticipating what your audience knows and the language they speak. Developing this detailed knowledge of your audiences will help you greatly in developing content to convert them. If you have multiple audiences, you will need to cultivate content for each of them. If you can’t convince your audiences you know what their needs are, you cannot expect conversion.

I had an experience with this as an audience member a few months ago.  I was exploring the idea of buying my first home and decided to get pre-approved for a mortgage. I had contacted a lender referred to me by my realtor. The lender had sent me the application and all the paperwork,. When I reached the section of the forms where I was asked which loan I was applying for, I was at a loss. So I went to the bank website expecting to see a description of each loan, the benefits of each, and a comparison to differentiate the products from one another.

But that wasn’t what I found. There were descriptions with interest rates listed, so I could see differences. Each loan listed its term length, but the rest of the description was technical. Filled with acronyms I was unfamiliar with, it didn’t give any information that indicated which loan was right for me. So I abandoned the site and instead emailed the lender for an explanation of their loan products. He then directed me back to the bank website, but I already knew it had nothing to offer me.

Neither the bank nor the lender I spoke with took into account that a member of their audience would be unfamiliar with home loans and the lending process. Despite a word-of-mouth referral from a reliable source, this bank lost my attention and an opportunity for conversion because it failed to think about what I needed. Its content wasn’t relevant to me nor was it easy to understand. Had they used a chart to detail the differences and included explanations for technical, the result might have been very different for them.

Content extends beyond just the information you are trying to communicate. Content consists of:

• what you say (your message),
• what you say it with (its medium– a picture, video, music, a website),
• how you say it (style and tone),
• where you say it (in print, at a conference, a social media platform, a website, a billboard),
• when you say it.

There is a lot to consider when it comes to tailoring content to one audience, let alone to multiple audiences. If you want to convert them, you have to offer relevant content in forms that resonate with each group.

The bottom line is that if your content isn’t relevant and readily available, audiences may fly away from your site. On the other hand, if you create relevant content, you’ll be in a good position to retain audience attention, garner their interest, and increase your conversions.

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