Getting Your Voice Right in Content Marketing

Writing marketing content isn't as simple as putting your thoughts on paper. Even after you've figured out what your audience wants and what you should talk about, you need to figure out what your voice should be like.

Plus, you want a different tone of voice for say, a press release versus a tweet, even if it's the same person writing both or the same team working collaboratively on the press release and taking turns at the Twitter account. How do you ensure you come across as the voice of the brand as opposed to the person you are?

Step one: what's your blogging persona?

The first step is to lay out what your brand sounds like (even if it's just your own personal brand), and if it sounds different in a press release versus in a tweet (if it doesn't that's okay—just make sure that's right for your audience and you're still playing to the strengths of both media. For my money, I'd prefer to see a press release that looks like a bunch of tweets than a tweet that looks like a line off a press release.)

Put together the "author persona" of each type of content. Basically, ask yourself what kind of person they presumably are:

• Are they reserved and conservative or loud and bold?
• What are their interests? Not just in real life, but what are their topics of interest to write about?
• What's their way of approaching content? What's the unique perspective they offer?
• What kind of words would they use? Think of adjectives like meaningful, actionable, wacky, gross, totally.
• Would they use shorter sentences or longer ones?
• Would they be more likely to use exclamation points or semicolons (or both)?

Step two: wear that persona as you write.

There are several ways in which you can do it, depending on who's writing your content.