How Can Editors Maintain a Consistent Brand Voice Across Content Types?
In the quest to maintain a consistent brand voice across diverse content, we've gathered insights from editors and founders alike. From the importance of embracing method acting for brand voice to ensuring content alignment with the mission statement, here are five expert pieces of advice to guide editors in their endeavors.
- Embrace Method Acting for Brand Voice
- Develop a Concise Style Guide
- Establish Tone with a Brand Guide
- Embody Brand Essence in Content
- Align Content with Mission Statement
Embrace Method Acting for Brand Voice
Get into character. It's almost like method acting—imagine your customer and what they like to do, what they do on weekends, when they feel happiest. Then ask yourself, would my character say this? Would they tell their friends about this? Eventually, you might have a little voice in your head to guide you.
Develop a Concise Style Guide
For a consistent brand voice, editors need a clear style guide: brand voice adjectives, preferred language, and a predefined glossary. SOPs for content-specific guidelines ensure a unified voice across platforms. The key to this advice is that the SOPs should be concise and to the point, with examples for each bullet point.
I have worked with clients where the SOPs are like a 2,000-word book. A concise, to-the-point action plan is the key to a better SOP.
Establish Tone with a Brand Guide
Create and refer to a brand style guide that establishes the business's voice. It can be helpful to add adjectives that describe the tone in which the business plans to speak to its audience. For example, a business that aims to be uplifting, inspiring, and informative may sound quite different than a company that wants to be brutally honest and unapologetically opinionated. Defining this voice ahead of content creation can lead to a more consistent brand experience across mediums.
Embody Brand Essence in Content
As the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of Resilient Stories, I believe that maintaining a consistent brand voice across various content types is not just about adhering to a set of rules but also about embodying the essence of our brand in every piece of content we produce. It's about infusing each story with the same authenticity, empathy, and empowerment that defines us and what we stand for. We do this by establishing clear brand guidelines that outline tone, style, and messaging principles.
My advice to fellow editors is to approach brand voice not as a rigid framework but as a living, breathing entity that evolves alongside our audience and the stories we tell. By staying true to our core values while remaining open to experimentation and feedback, we can ensure that our brand voice remains relevant, relatable, and resonant across diverse content types. Ultimately, consistency in brand voice is not just about maintaining uniformity; it's about forging a genuine connection with our audience, one story at a time.
Align Content with Mission Statement
My one piece of advice to maintain a consistent brand voice is to always look at the content and then read your mission statement or pillars. If you can't fit that piece of content into one of those pillars or your mission statement, then it's not consistent with your brand and won't propel you forward.
