We recently spoke with a client who told us that she just didn’t like the way her company’s site sounded. She felt it was pieced together and just didn’t work cohesively – that their team just added some content here and there when they needed to, but that they didn’t have a plan.
When we asked her what kinds of sites she liked, she had a definitive answer, though.
She quickly reeled off the name of a site known for its creative look. Its tone and communication style definitely followed along in the same vein and had fresh, interesting copy with snappy or witty headlines.
Why Is It Easy to Choose Your Site’s Visual Style, But Harder To “Make It Sound Like You”?
We are physiologically wired to have a strong link between color and emotion, so it’s easier to look at a website or a logo that’s a deep blue and see steadfastness (it’s the most popular logo color for Fortune 500 companies), or at orange and see excitement and innovation (which makes it a favorite of tech companies).
With all those associations in mind, it’s easy to come up with the colors or fonts that you like and think should represent your business.
The words? That’s not always so easy.
It can be hard to people to express their vision for what they should sound like online – what’s too casual, too pompous, too aggressively sales-y, not sales-oriented enough.
Many people go blank, figuratively and literally, when they’re asked to write about themselves. While they can talk all day why their product matters or what makes them different, putting the words into pen and ink, or keyboard strokes, is a very different story.
The tone and style your site uses can tell your customers and potential customers a lot about what you value. So, in a world full of web content, how can your site stand out?
Connect Your Website Voice To Your Values
The voice of your site should reflect your values and should connect with the audiences who are most interested in your products.
Know Who You Are
If you’re selling nail polish, you probably want your website to sound light, fun and clever – after all, you don’t want all those puns on the bottle names to go to waste.
If you’re selling medical equipment, you might be talking to an audience in a more serious frame of mind, and you’d want to adjust your writing style accordingly. Don’t feel like your content has to be bland just because it’s serious, though. Even a serious tone can convey powerful things about your brand – like that you’re time-tested, trustworthy, compassionate and place a high value on integrity.
Before, or in conjunction with, choosing a writer to work on your site, you can spend some time with your trusty thesaurus to get an idea of who you are as a company.
Take a look at what your business values. What are you now, at this very moment? How do your consumers view you? Trustworthy? Reliable? Friendly? Scholarly?
Go ahead and make yourself a list of the words you are, and then make another list of the words you want to be – maybe you’re hoping to attract collegiate customers and want to sound youthful; maybe you’re trying to build credibility and think the word “expert” is something aspirational but achievable that you’d like on your list.
Once you have this list, think about the sites you love that embody these traits.
- When I’m looking for knowledgeable reliability, I check out the Harvard Business Review or The Economist.
- When I think about websites with a hipster vibe, Warby Parker comes to mind.
- A favorite site with an edge is Subversive Textiles (a CoLab partner of ours!).
- Another site with a strong voice identity is Draper James, Reese Witherspoon’s ecommerce apparel site.
Make a list of the sites you like most that align with the traits you want your business to embody.
Know Who They Are
You may have one set of ideas about how you want to sound. However, you also need to make sure that you sound like the people who buy your products and services.
Just because you like using slang or casual language, does your audience like it?
If you’re selling estate planning services, you probably don’t want to use a lot of the same language that a personal injury attorney might use for example. You’re talking about a serious and grave matter and you want your word choices to reflect that (incidentally, the use of “grave” here is a pun that would not go over well on either of these types of sites).
At the same time, you may have some leeway with your audiences. Just because you offer B2B services, for example, you don’t necessarily have to be dry. If you’re building a B2B site and talking to a group of accountants or compliance consultants, for example, you may use a more formal tone than if you’re connecting with marketers and graphic designers and using more informal language/tone.
Completing persona development research is a tried-and-true way to figure out who you’re talking to, what they need and how they want to hear from you. It brings together a mix of head and heart, as you typically combine data analysis with person-to-person interviews to get a good understanding of what people say they want versus what they actually want.
This process can be lengthy and time-consuming. Nielsen Norman group’s research shows that small companies dedicate 22.5 to 72.5 staff hours on persona development while large companies spent between 55 and 102.5 staff hours. Maggie (our CGO) once led a project that included more than 2,000 staff hours dedicated to persona development, based on the global markets and audiences her employer at the time was targeting.
What if you don’t have the bandwidth to do that amount of in-depth research?
You can work with an agency who can support these efforts; you can dedicate your time to creating key messages; and you can use social media and customer surveys to get a better understanding of what your customers like about your brand and your products/services. Keeping a running list of the questions people ask on social media can be an easy cost-saving shortcut; you’re able to take the exact topics that interest them, then use those topics to build your voice and develop your content.
Practice And Find The Words and Voice That Tell Your Story
Social media can be a great place to listen and to experiment with content. Your audience on social may be quite different from your audience on TV or radio, and that gives you room to try out new things and see what resonates.
Try different social voices across different platforms. Your key messages and proof points should stay the same, but the way you express them may be more casual or formal depending on the platform. For example, our LinkedIn company page focuses on sharing business information and useful articles. Our company Instagram includes some useful content but we also sneak in occasional cute pictures of Ruffles, our business mascot and the cutest bundle of squishy French bulldog on the planet.
See what people respond to, and whether the people responding are your target audience, the ones you want to get to know you and the ones who should be buying your products and services.
Figuring these things out is more than half the battle.
From here, after you’ve used social media as your test kitchen to refine your voice, you’ll be ready to take a look at your website.
Complete a full content audit of your site. You can determine where your current writing fits the bill and where you need to make changes, re-write or restructure your site to reflect the vision you have for your content.
You can also build out a set of key messages, the ways you’ll communicate with your customers and get your point across.
Taking time to figure out the most compelling and persuasive things about your brand, then make them visible across your business efforts, can take some time and some outside voices/support. However, it also makes content creation and management much easier and more consistent going forward.
While creating a unique voice isn’t always a quick process, it pays off if you choose to create a voice and style for your brand that resonates with your consumers. You’re telling them what they want to hear and learn more about, and you’re doing it in language that makes sense to them and sounds authentic and on point.
Sound easier said than done?
Well, you may need to work with strategic marketers and insightful writers to really take the voice you want to share with clients and put it on the page. Learn more about how we support businesses and brands as they find their unique voice.
