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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Brands are really just a fancy way to talk about a compilation of your customers’ experiences with your business. These customers experience brands a lot of different ways.

As customers’ interactions with companies (brands) are increasingly online, shouldn’t we shift our focus? Why do we still believe traditional marketers should control branding? Why are we afraid to put branding power in the hands of the digitally-driven folks? After all, for many current and future customers, your website is your brand. It’s the hub, the driving force behind all of the experiences customers have with your company. People are spending as much or more time online as they are watching TV these days – and that’s not just the teens and 20-somethings. Digital is already driving brands, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Online-only businesses are obvious examples, but increasingly, traditional brick and mortar and B-to-B businesses are reaping benefits – and raking in sales – by creating digitally-driven brands.

Let’s review a familiar example: Best Buy. They’re still an electronics store with lots of semi-annoying helpers in blue. The face-to-face experience will never go away. It’s just enhanced by a bevy of online communication tools.

For example, customers can reserve products online (on a phone or a computer) and pick them up in stores.

Once they take products home, they can talk in real-time to Best Buy’s customer service folks through Twelpforce, a group of 2,200 Best Buy employees who answer customers’ questions and solve issues via Twitter.

If customers come up with grand ideas that would make their experiences better (a key component of branding), they can share them at Best Buy’s IdeaX.

Best Buy has tackled everything from creating a streamlined mobile site to customer and employee forums, blogs, and Facebook applications on their fan page. They’re all over digital branding. In other words, they create positive customer experiences through the tools, accessibility and information they provide online.

Now, I know you’re thinking: well of course she believes in digital branding…she works at a digital agency! And that’s fair. As an early adopter and digital marketing geek, it’s easy to see why I’d be a proponent. But there are plenty of people backing me up these days. And there is plenty of new research that supports the theory. An example? How about this Razorfish report about digital experiences driving brands. I think you might like it.

Slide 8 is my favorite:

• 65% of consumers have had a digital experience change their opinion about a brand.
• 97% of consumers say their digital experience influenced whether or not they eventually purchased a product or service from that brand.
  

So tell me: how do your customers experience your brand in this Digital Age?

Miranda McCage is an Associate Digital Strategist at MediaSauce. She’d like to hear about how you’re developing a brand with digital. Contact Miranda at 317-284-5683, on Twitter @mirandamccage or email her at miranda.mccage@mediasauce.com.

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Maybe you’re going to retire in the next five years. If that’s you, then don’t worry about a thing. But, if you plan on working in 2015, you should consider your relevancy now. As technology facilitates behavioral change, organizations of all sizes must develop new strategies. A clear path to irrelevancy is to ignore change or, worse yet, fight it.

If you continue to do business as usual, running your career and business day by day, then you will find that you might not be needed. Consider these red flags:

1. You don’t have a mobile strategy, yet you spend all your time relying on your mobile device to connect and communicate.
2. You have no defined online strategy, you just guess and explore, yet like eighty percent of all c-level executives, you  spend up to 4 hours a day on the Internet. more

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Launching your company’s social media presence is a big step – both in terms of shifting to a more engaging and customer-centric marketing approach, and because of the resources you’ll need to dedicate to make it succeed.

As a strategist at MediaSauce, I’m often charged with helping clients launch their social media initiatives. I’ve found that the most challenging thing for most marketers isn’t learning how to use new tools. It’s knowing how to get digitally organized.

Time management, baby.

Now, I should clarify. These tips are for businesses. If you want to spend 5 hours checking out your old high school friends’ family photos, by all means, feel free. Your time, your dime! more

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How does a company that desires to break the mold of an ‘agency’ or ‘web design company’ or ‘creative shop’ figure out what to call itself?

A few weeks ago I told the story behind the inspiration that prompted MediaSauce. I promised at that time to also give some insight into how our name came into being.

Looking up the definition of ‘sauce’ in the dictionary gives a wide variety of results, but I’d summarize the overall points to:

1. adding flavor, moisture and visual appeal to dishes – often a unique element to cuisines around the world
2. to give piquance or zest- to spice up the experience
3. to add value and change the ordinary into something unique

The term ‘sauce’ really stuck with us as we looked at all the amazing things our creative team was capable of putting together – and the dreams and ambitions we had for the company in our early days.

Add sauce to the term ‘media’ (derived from the creative team’s artistic background working with ‘media’ of various sorts) and we had an option.

Turns out, the deciding factor was that mediasauce.com was an available domain for us to buy.

Name? Check!

Logo? Oy! A whole other set of issues.

Our original tagline was “tastefully blended digital bits of information” with the steam being a cute assimilation of 1’s and 0’s. A bit too literal perhaps (Hey, I admit we’ve grown our branding experience and team skills exponentially since those early days.), but the concept was on point. In the early days our commitment and belief focused on the fundamental shift in brands, conversion, and commerce migrating to a 24/7 online world.

A good cook once told me that a great sauce must shift to the meals it is being prepared for.

It couldn’t be more true. Today, we’ve morphed MediaSauce into a firm that deals in all forms of media, from traditional to events to experiences, all centered around online integration that leverages digital and social media to create a whole new result.

In a world where commoditization of products and communication has created a high degree of confusion, boredom, and disengagement, having the right sauce is critical. Understanding that every meal (and business situation is different) requires the acumen and experience to adapt those past experiences for the current challenge at hand.

We didn’t know how our business would evolve, yet seven years later the name MediaSauce couldn’t be any more relevant.

What’s in your sauce?

The challenge for your business is to decide what’s in your secret sauce as you transform your company for the digital world ahead. What are you going to blend or create that provides a more flavorful experience for your audiences? A lot of companies are experimenting with new ingredients, but many are failing to lead the way hoping that the same-old ingredients will be enough to get through.

We’re seeing sauces being created all around us: creating new, fresh and inspiring work. The same won’t do. We can’t afford it; it doesn’t resonate, and it’s not what consumers in this Interconnected Age are expecting. I dare you to add a little spice to your business – or risk missing out on the opportunities ahead.

Bryan Gray is co-founder and CEO of MediaSauce. He’d like to hear about the moment of inspiration that sparked your business. Contact Bryan at 317-218-0500, on Twitter @bryansgray or email him at bryan.gray@mediasauce.com.

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