Finding the Right Tone for Your Blog

Your website and blog are often the first opportunities you will have to connect with potential customers. Finding the right tone for your blog is an important part of developing a well-rounded content strategy because every piece of content that you publish is another chance to show your customers who you are, how you think, and how you conduct business.

A great blog article also has the potential to connect with readers and establish you as an industry resource. Attracting the right customers is an important part of inbound marketing. And, writing content with a consistent tone that resonates with your audience is essential. Ideally, every blog article or email will connect with your buyer persona and provide helpful information through their buyer’s journey.

Here are Three Things to Consider When Finding the Right Tone for Your Blog

Know Your Persona

Your Buyer’s Persona is a semi-fictional personality that represents your ideal customer. Having a clear picture of your persona is vital to your developing a cohesive brand.

These questions help to develop a picture of your ideal customer or persona and can help inform the best tone to attract them.

• Are you writing to a colleague?
• Is the intent of your writing instructional or conversational?
• Is your persona blue collar or white collar?
• What is the age range?
• Is your audience predominately male or female?
• What are their pain points?
• Who else do they see as digital influencers?

Once you know who you are writing to you will have a better idea of the best tone with which to communicate.

It’s also important to remember to write as an audience member as opposed to writing as an outside observer who’s purpose is to tell your persona what to do. For example, if your company sells products to electricians, you don’t need to write articles explaining the responsibilities of electricians.

Writing content that informs someone about their job isn’t helpful and it isn’t educational. This content may tell the reader that your website does not contain information or product they need, or worse, may make the reader feel frustrated you are wasting their time. Either way, you are less likely to attract the right persona.

Many companies develop more than one persona. Your tone may adjust to best connect with each persona. For example, if you are writing to both electricians and homeowners about your products, the information you post will vary but how you present the information should stay consistent.

Reflect Your Brand

Part of branding involves deciding on a writing style and tone. Whether a customer sees an image, logo, or product they should quickly associate the content with your business. This includes written content as well.

Ask yourself how can you use your blog to set your brand apart? Rand Fishkin says “A blog’s tone – the style in which content is crafted – can’t be too impersonal or corporate-babble-y. The best blogs connect with people through their writing by creating a human bond – that’s basically the entire purpose behind blogging, rather than just issuing daily press releases on a website. If you want to call it a blog, give it a voice that has the power to compel, connect and engage.”

Building trust with potential customers includes providing a consistent message. The tone of your sales meetings should match that of your written content. Ideally, a potential customer will feel as if they already know a little bit about you and your business style before you speak in person or over the phone.

Variety is Good

Your blog is a great space to feature multiple voices within your company, especially if your customers will interact with those employees. Each author will have their own tone and writing style which will add interest to your blogs.

Still, every author should know who they are writing to and mirror their sales tone. Some may prefer a formal, detailed delivery of information while others connect with one that is less structured. Variety can be a great way to help a broader audience connect with your company.

Establishing a Tone

The best way I have found to establish a consistent tone is to create a scale that highlights descriptive words on a sliding scale.  For example, here are words that can be used to structure content tone:

Humor—–Serious

Factual——Educational

Conversational———Formal

Warm——Cold

Authoritative———Informational

A company that ranks their content as being completely serious and formal and not at all humorous or conversational is going to attract a different customer than a company that strives to balance their content as factual and educational but also leans more towards conversational than formal.

Finding the right tone for your blog is a subjective process that begins with developing a detailed buyer’s persona. The best tone is the one that speaks to your customers in a way that helps them learn more about your company and you, the author. This isn’t something that will happen without research and strategic planning, but it is worth your time and attention.