How Premium Brands Keep Their Content Consistent Across Every Channel.
Maintaining a single voice across the numerous channels customers use is one of the biggest challenges for fast-growing companies. At first, a small founder team writes all emails, articles, and social media posts. As the company grows, the communication grows as well, and at some point, a network of teams, freelance writers, and external partners is needed to support production. Without a solid structure, the message will easily be split and, in the worst case, even contradict itself.
All touch points within a customer journey should convey the same message. Customers can be first exposed to a company by way of a video, an article on the company’s website, a number of emails that a customer received during the onboarding process, or by contacting the company’s customer service. All of these touch points should give the customer the same impression; otherwise, the customer will perceive each touch point as having been created by a different company, and subsequently lose trust in the company as a whole.
Defining the Core Identity Beyond Style Guides
A style guide is meant to define the approved usage of words and phrases, and the mechanics of how to write. But it cannot possibly include all of the nuances and idiosyncrasies of a brand’s voice and personality. A Style Guide is a starting point, and the key to developing a consistent voice is to create a set of core principles and values that underpin everything a company writes. These core principles define a brand’s “voice” or “personality,” and the style guide is simply a set of rules for putting that voice into words. The tone, for example, can be defined by a set of traits such as being knowledgeable yet approachable, or confident yet humble.
Style guides primarily detail the mechanics and word choice of a brand’s writing. However, they rarely capture the full extent of a brand’s identity, particularly the emotional connection that a brand attempts to make with its customers. The best way to define the identity of a brand is through core principles and values. A brand can then express its voice through character traits that describe how it sounds when it is writing. For example, a brand’s voice could be described as being knowledgeable but approachable, or confident without being arrogant. This way, a writer will be able to create content that embodies the brand’s identity and voice.
A writer who understands the core personality of a brand can apply that brand’s voice to any type of content. For example, a brief social update or post may require a different format or structure than a technical whitepaper, but both could be written with the same core identity or brand voice.
Building Clear Frameworks for External Writers
As a company grows, it becomes impossible for an organization to rely on in-house talent to write all the content. Most organizations use external writers, and that can pose a risk to maintaining brand voice, especially since external writers are often juggling between clients, projects, and writing styles.
To ensure external writers maintain consistency with the brand’s core identity, many organizations develop comprehensive onboarding resources for writers and other external partners who create content on their behalf. Providing writers with examples of “what works” and “what doesn’t” helps writers understand how to adapt a brand’s voice within the context of the work they are doing.
In addition to ensuring that high-quality content is being produced and distributed consistently, tools such as editing software can help distributed teams maintain brand voice. Grammarly, for example, helps ensure that content is grammatically correct and checks for and enables consistent tone adjustments before work is sent to the editorial team.
As automated tools become increasingly integrated into production workflows, quality will be managed by reviewing content using an AI content detector to determine whether the work in question was generated originally and whether it is of appropriate depth and quality. Automated tools can function as a first quality gate, freeing up the human editor to focus on aspects of the work that require a more strategic view.
Balancing Channel Specific Nuance with Brand Cohesion
A platform such as a professional networking site would typically demand a far more formal tone and approach than a consumer social media site, where people often post in a more casual, even lighthearted, manner. And while a brand’s voice is not necessarily suited to being posted word-for-word on every available platform, the brand’s core message should be transferable.
A company’s content has to be consistent and of a very high standard. And that is not achieved by sending writers off with a style guide and then hoping for the best. A style guide can cover the basics of a brand’s language and be a useful tool for writers. But it is not enough to guarantee consistency. The biggest challenge in creating and maintaining a brand voice and tone is ensuring that all of a company’s communications are consistently aligned with that brand’s core identity.
That means all communications, on all channels, by all authors. The brand voice has to be treated as a human voice. So that, for example, the tone and style that is used in a boardroom presentation will be different from that used in casual conversations with friends and family over coffee. But there will be a consistency of character, of values and of language that underpins both styles of communication. And that means that while the way a message is presented on different channels will differ, the core of the message will remain the same.
When distributing content across channels, brands can change how they format, lengthen, or pace their messaging while keeping the core message constant. A long blog post, for example, can become a short social media post, a newsletter update, or even a set of key takeaways to present on slides. The way in which a brand distributes information can change based on where it is being distributed; the perspective, however, remains constant.
Establishing Robust Editorial Workflows
Consistency requires more than a set of guidelines and good intentions. It requires a robust workflow that ensures all content is checked for accuracy and for adherence to brand rules before it is published.
The work of creating content consistent with a company’s voice and publishing it online is greatly facilitated by the existence of a robust editorial workflow that includes multiple stages of review to detect the types of discrepancies that could undermine a company’s online voice. The typical editorial process includes a content manager, a line editor, and a proofreader. Each of these individuals reviews a draft of a piece of content for different criteria, starting with the content manager’s review for whether the published content is on strategy and conveys the correct core message, then the line editor’s review for structural soundness, overall clarity and the correct and consistent tone or voice and finally the proofreader’s review for the more minor but still very important mechanical errors in capitalization, punctuation, spelling, etc.
Having these roles separately allows for the small mistakes to be caught but also for the content to stay on brand. Having all of these roles be part of a centralized review process and having a brand steward to oversee all of this allows for all content to be held to a high standard regardless of the writer.
Gathering Feedback and Evolving the Guidelines
However, a brand’s voice is not static, and it can change greatly as a market evolves. New audiences emerge, and old ones mature. The best brand is always evolving in order to continue to reach and resonate with its target audience. As a result, it is very important to regularly evaluate a company’s content and its brand’s overall performance in the market. And from time to time, the brand voice and the brand’s overall messaging may need to shift in order to continue to reach their target audience and to continue to achieve their goals.
They regularly review their content performance and gather information about their audience’s reaction to different styles of communication and ways of presenting information. Where they find a successful style, they incorporate it into the living brand guidelines.
This evolution of your brand voice and the brand guidelines should be a living document. It should continuously evolve and be updated based on data, as well as feedback from your teams and your external partners. They should go through regular training on the guidelines to ensure that everyone is singing from the same song sheet.