Why You Need a Tone-of-Voice Bible For Your Content Marketing Strategy

Priscilla McKinney: Hello and welcome to Ponderings from the Perch, the Little Bird Marketing Company podcast. I'm Priscilla McKinney, CEO and mama bird here with you as always. So today we're going to talk about a fun topic. So first we're going to start with a little bit of activity. So first open up three B2B company websites in your industry and read their about pages.

Feel free to pause this podcast, but come back to it and read their about pages and then try to guess which company wrote which paragraph. You can't do it? Well, congratulations, you've just experienced the bland content epidemic that is killing brands right now. I've been in content marketing for decades and I can tell you that content doesn't fail only because it's poorly written. It fails because it's utterly forgettable.

There's nothing memorable about the way someone felt when they were reading your words. And right now, we are living through what I would refer to as the golden age of absolutely forgettable content. Now, before you blame ChatGPT, please know that this has been going on long before AI. Also remember that ChatGPT and all of those alternatives are still only predictive engines.

meaning that their job is to surmise what is likely to come next in the sentence. And if you feed it keen information about your tone of voice, your style, and your values, then it is much more likely to write like you do. But if you ask it to work for you, and frankly, give it piss poor direction, you're back to the adage of garbage in, garbage out. So there's good news and there's bad news.

The bad news is that 90 % of B2B content sounds exactly the same. The same structure, the same corporate speak, the same solutions oriented approach to driving value for stakeholders, right? I mean, am I boring you already? It's total nonsense. I read sentences often and think, first of all, what did they mean and who on earth did they write this for?

Yes, AI is making it worse because everyone's using the same tools with the same prompts to create the same boring content, et cetera, et cetera, and your audience is drowning in sameness. And somewhere in that ocean of beige is your brand desperately trying to be heard. We know that what is so important is visibility, memorability. The good news is that 90 % of B2B content sounds exactly the same.

If you do your homework, it's not going to be too hard to get heard above the noise. So if you're with me and you wanna work on this problem, I'm gonna walk you through a few key understandings about the importance of tone and then some actions you can take to up your game. So I'd love to have you join me on this little romp. Before we start, I just wanna mention that sometimes you can think about your tone of voice as your brand's North Star. Now, a lot of people say that their values are their North Star, but I just want to say how important it is to get the tone of voice right because it is the thing that communicates the values, right? So I feel like they're inextricably tied.

The difference between companies that nail their voice across every single touch point is the difference from those who sound completely disjointed and those who seem to understand what their North Star is. So that's how it's connected. Okay.

Time for some tough love. I know it's hard to hear that your brand baby is ugly, but does your brand tone of voice sound totally disjointed? The social media sounds all buttoned up and corporate. Your emails are weirdly casual, like someone's trying too hard to be your friend. And then your website reads like a robot wrote it.

And sales proposals, oh my gosh, don't get me started because everybody who writes one writes it differently. So there's some place where it lands in between formal business limbo and really in the middle of that, everyone is asleep. Just as a sidebar, people often ask me how long content should be and my answer is always, oh, you need to write exactly until you're boring. So if you can write three sentences before you completely lose it, then it's a three sentence post.

If you can write three pages, then congratulations, you can keep me enthralled right as long as you want. So you need to kind of apply that idea of content to the brand voice. How long do you keep the brand voice consistent? How long do I feel like I'm talking to the same person? And as we're talking about the same person, that's where we need to start. We need to start thinking about what causes this problem or this disjointed approach, this disjointed voicing.

Honestly, it's because you have different team members creating different content with completely different voices of their own and that's fine, but nobody it sounds like has told them that they all should be working with one tone of voice. Your social media person might be a millennial who loves emojis. Your proposal writer is from the quote unquote proper business communication school of thought.

and your customer service team is just trying to be helpful, so they're super casual, and your executive team, they're writing like it's 1995, and they're dictating to a secretary, right? This is just what is actually happening in your office. But the result is that the brand switches between formal and friendly with really no rhyme or reason, and your audience has no idea what to expect from you. And that's the problem.

Because when people don't know what to expect from you, it is nerve wracking. I know that sounds very dramatic, but if we really go back to brain science and understand what people want, they want to understand what you are saying, and they want to know how to actually process it. And your brain tone of voice gives that signal to them, oh, it's these people again.

It's like when the team at Little Bird Marketing is referred to as peeps and you're about to engage with us and we talk about how your brand could be different outside of the cage. All of those things feel consistent and consistency breeds trust. So when people don't know who they're really dealing with, the brain sends signals that they should distrust what is going on. And when they hear comments speak and they know what's coming next, and they are actually amused or delighted, but it feels proper, it feels like it fits, their brains calm down and that trust can be built.

When things are disjointed, people just abandon what they're doing and move on to listen to someone else who's clearer about who they are. And I'm telling you, that brand recognition and brand trust is so important because no one remembers generic content.

Think about it, when was the last time you remembered a bland email or a totally unforgettable social post? I mean, there's a phrase doom scrolling for a reason, right? But you remember brands with personality. You remember ones that sounded like a human and made you chuckle or made you rethink something or made you feel welcome. So that's kind of tells us that there's some employee confusion even beyond some brand voicing confusion.

Teams often don't know how to communicate consistently because nobody tells them. Everybody just wings it. But creating a distinctive voice doesn't happen by magic. It's a system, and that system is called a tone of voice Bible. Okay, so let's build this thing. Your tone of voice Bible has three pillars, personality, perspective, and language.

And if you get these right, you're not gonna sound like everyone else again. Okay, let's talk about pillar number one, personality. This is who you are as a brand, not who you wish you were, not who your competitors are, but who you actually are. So start by choosing three to five core personality traits and be specific. Professional does not mean anything, okay?

So avoid words like that. Tell me professional how, right? Don't say confident. Tell me about what confidence means. Don't say we're experts, but tell me what that actually means in terms of how I can access that expertise. You need to couch some things.

Yes, we're bold, but we also are respectful. So kind of explain these words much deeper and don't make assumptions. In terms of personality, you heard that I said core values are really inextricably tied to tone of voice.

And just to show you what I mean by that, I'm gonna walk you through our core values. That might be a good place for you to start if you have really well-defined core values. But I think what you'll hear in this is that our voice is so inherent in what we created because it helped us understand not just who we are, but how we show up and how we don't show up. And so I'll talk a little bit more about that, but Little Bird Marketing, have four core values. One is care deeply.

Second is finish strong, then stay gold, and finally be true. Okay, what does this have to do with tone of voice? Well, listen a little bit. First, care deeply. The ethos behind this is that we are deeply invested in the brand, in each other, in our own growth, and in our clients' goals. That's what it means to care deeply.

Why is this important? Well, no one wants to work with people who don't put skin in the game. Now, what this is not is it can't be a bunch of clock watchers and it can't be people who are just looking to mark things off the list or what I call doing marketing. The next one, finish strong. The ethos behind that is that we are responsible for our portion of the project as well as collaboration.

So all projects are completed on time, on budget and within scope. This is very important because anyone can start a project and tinker, but few can consistently produce works of art that move brands forward. So what this does not look like is just walking away after your portion of the project is done. The third part is Stagold. So the ethos behind this is that we are a brand known as best in class and fun to work with.

So we are also best in show, best in meetings, best on planes, et cetera, et cetera. This really matters because in a noisy world of mediocrity, the way to be heard is to stay gold and we start each day untarnished. This is not rolling into a meeting looking unprofessional or being unprepared or unclear about the agenda. The last one is be true. The ethos behind this is that we are honest, we are data-driven, and we are kind communicators.

We operate in the truth. And why this is so important is because operating without Guile builds trust and it drives teams forward. Drives our team forward and it drives the teams of our clients forward. So what this is not is gossiping about our brand, about coworkers, about vendors, about our clients, about competitors or about colleagues.

When you read little bird marketing communications, I think you hear a lot of these things along with some interesting quirk, but it is the best place to start. Now, one thing that really helps you understand us a little bit is that we sum up our core values like this. Care deeply means give a shit. Finish strong means get shit done. Stay gold means be the shit. And be true means don't talk shit.

And this was the beginning where we really understood as a collective who we are, how we show up, and how we want to sound. All of that contributes to our personality, which is pillar one of your tone of voice. You can say the same things, but how you say it matters. Pillar two is perspective. Now, this is what you believe.

This is your unique viewpoint on industry issues. Perspective is about the stands that you take and the hills that you're willing to die on, right? Every brand that cuts through the noise has an opinion they are stating. I'm telling you, that is true. They may have contrarian takes and they might agree with the masses, but regardless, they're not afraid to say something, even if it annoys some people because they know it will resonate deeply with the right people.

So you need to think about what you believe. What do you believe about yourself as a company? What do you believe about the work that you do? What do you believe about your industry that other people don't? What do you think everybody else is getting wrong? What truth are you willing to defend, even if it's unpopular?

I don't know if you've noticed this, but we make a pretty bold statement on our website. We say, we believe every brand deserves a clear and effective marketing plan.

That comes from a deep conviction of what we saw in the marketing industry. Marketers being paid for general creative blobs of I don't know where they are and when they're going to produce it. And that concept and that type of relationship was antithetical to what I wanted to give to my clients. And as a team, we decided that that is the hill we die on. Everybody believes to not just have a wishy washy I don't know the creative team is working on it, they needed to have real deliverables and they needed to know how those deliverables were going to be delivered and when they were going to be delivered.

And most importantly to me, how they were going to ladder up to an effective marketing plan that is revenue generating. So make a stand, tell us what you believe, have a perspective. Now the third pillar is all around language, vocabulary, jargon.

This is just how you say things, and this is where a lot of brands get lazy. You have to make actual decisions about vocabulary. Are you technical or are you conversational? Do you use industry jargon or do you use plain English? Do you say utilize or use? Do you write long detailed explanations or short punchy statements?

You also need to think about sentence structure. Are you the brand that writes in tight sentences? Or do you prefer flowing paragraphs that build up to an argument? Now both can work, but you need to pick one and stick with it. Here's a little bit of a nuance. Your tone should be flexible in different contexts.

Listen, I can go into a formal meeting and I can go to a fun happy hour. I'm still Priscilla. But it shouldn't be so unrecognizable that there's no flow.

And how this relates to your business is that your social media voice might be a bit more casual than your proposals, but it still should be recognizably you. And when you need to be a little bit more formal and let's say your tone of voice is a little less formal, you can be the formal and then have one small sentence at the bottom that's a it that reminds them and brings them back to the tone of voice that is you.

Often our brand is writing serious content, but at some point I can stop and remind people that it's us they're talking to. So a long proposal might have KPIs and it might have deliverables and it might be really knocking out the basics of what the client needs to know. But I might at the end kick back in with, imagine your brand outside the cage. Now that is helpful because it's really pertinent to what I'm doing right there with a proposal.

But it also brings them back to that rapport building moment where they know who they're talking to. Let me give you a practical exercise for nailing this. I call this the tone word exercise. So start with a brainstorm, write down 20 or more words that you think describe your ideal brand voice. Now don't filter it yet, just bring them. Friendly, authoritative, quirky, thoughtful, bold, irreverent, helpful, expert, whatever comes to mind.

Now narrow it down to five core tone words. These can become your non-negotiables as long as you understand them fully. Every piece of your content should have at least three of these five, but this is where it can really get good. For each word, you have to define what it means and what it doesn't mean. In my example with Little Bird Marketing, we explained the ethos behind some things and then we gave the what it means and what it doesn't.

And you saw that we had done that work of tone of voice long before we did our core values. And that's why it all syncs up. Let's say one of your words is professional. What does that mean for your brand? Is it authoritative, but not stuffy? Polished or pretentious? Serious, but not humorless?

So get specific, create examples. Show your team what professional looks like in your brand voice versus someone else's version of professional. So do this for all five words and suddenly you have an amazing roadmap. Your team knows exactly how to sound because you've shown them and then it has to be implemented. And this is where so many teams drop the ball.

They create this document just like they create persona work and they put it in a drawer and nothing happens. So please don't be that brand. Your tone of voice Bible needs to live in everything. It should be used in sales emails and proposals, social media content and the responses you give on social. It should be in your website copy and your blog posts, consumer service interactions, internal communications, conference presentations and networking conversations, right? Every single touch point.

Sometimes it's not just in what you say, but the projects you take on. Let me give you an example of what I mean by sticking to your tone of voice, but also choosing projects that your personality of your brand would choose. So if you go to littlebirdmarketing.com slash content hyphen creation, this is where we show off a little bit of our work. The banner says ready for kick ass award winning creative content. Already you can see it's a bold statement on our website that is in alignment with our tone of voice.

but underneath it is where it gets really juicy. It says, making things up is tough work. Turns out the peeps at Little Bird Marketing are good at it. Skip the sweat and let our team create a custom plan. We'll start with strategy and follow through with operational excellence and transparency. You'll know what's being done and when, but you won't need the crushed floor tracksuit.

Buy the tracksuit by all means, but just for looks. So we've already kicked off what should be a pretty boring. let us show you our work and what we do and things we have done in the past with something so much more interesting and engaging than all the visuals follow. But the kicker is that at the end, I felt like we weren't really done yet. But I felt like people might look at this and say, well, that's all well and good for some other brand you worked for. But is mine gonna really look great?

Are you guys a one hit wonder? And so. While I was thinking that that is what the viewer of the website would think, I wanted to address that very issue. That is what the voicing of Little Bird Marketing does. We show up and we answer the question that people might be thinking, but are afraid to say. And so at the end of this page, it says, lest you think we're just a one-hit wonder, hear from others about their experience with the peeps at Little Bird Marketing.

Now in that one-hit wonder option, I actually have a hyperlink that goes to a page that is an absolute labor of love, but it says a lot about our brand, that we're willing to go the distance for something fun and funny and still remain professional. So I'll let you check it out. So to make this podcast super relevant, I wanna talk about AI and how you're using AI to help you get things done. And I don't blame you, we use it, but you've got to use it very well. So a great tone of voice Bible can be your AI insurance policy.

AI generated content is flooding the market. Thousands of businesses are pumping out blog posts, social content, emails, and ads written by chat, GBT or cloud or whatever they're using. And a lot of it sounds exactly the same. Now I am not going to get on everybody about the dumb M dash because let me just tell you, I love the M dash and I am really loathe to see it go away. But people who never knew about the M dash now have it all over their writing.

And we can sit here and play all these games about, I think this looks like AI or it doesn't. But I'm telling you, people would not be thinking about that if the content was good, right? So quit looking at quote unquote signs of AI writing this and instead make sure that you are actually training AI, whatever AI you're using.

to bring you things that are so close to your tone of voice before you make that final edit, and you will love using these tools. I think the biggest thing is that people are treating AI like a content factory instead of a tool. They're saying, write me a post about XYZ, and they're hitting publish, and they're using whatever comes out. So they're not editing, and they're not feeding in good information. And so that brand voice injection is super important.

We are playing an attention game and you have to have a brand with a distinctive voice in order to stand out. While everyone else sounds like that robot, you'll sound like a human. So be very specific and feed your AI engine with very, very key learnings about your brand voice, your core values, and how those are all wound together.

You'll get so sick and tired of telling AI what to do that you need to make sure that you create quality snippets that anybody on your team can use to explain to whatever AI system you're using what your output should sound like. Get those snippets, craft them really well, and then share them around. Now, every once in while, you're going to need to do a voice audit. You're going to need to pull a random sample of your content from different channels and different team members and take a look.

Does it all sound like the same brand? If not, why? Find the gaps and fix them. This is an ongoing project. It's really worth it because the compounding effect is that consistent voice builds brand recognition over time. People recognize your content even before they see your logo.

They see a LinkedIn post and they think, oh, that sounds like them even before they check the name. and that's when you know you've arrived. You want to create this kind of emotional connection beyond just information sharing. Everybody can information share. People don't want to just learn from your content. They want to feel something about your brand. They want to feel like they get you, like they like you.

In my words, like they're a part of the flock. Eventually, they can become advocates who defend your brand and spread your message because. They feel like they're a part of something, and that is the power of a distinctive voice. And that is why your tone of voice Bible isn't just a nice to have, it is a competitive advantage. Hope you have fun building yours because we certainly did. So from all the peeps here at Little Bird Marketing, have a great day and happy marketing.