All writers have their own writing styles. However, if your organization has several writers on its content producing team, their conflicting styles can cause problems. Consistency is key when it comes to content creation. Without a cohesive approach across all pieces, your organization’s content could appear disorganized and chaotic.
As the statistic above shows, branding consistency is crucial if you need to communicate with your existing customers. Part of achieving consistent branding is your content.
After all, the above statistic shows that the main reason you are creating content is to build your brand. Therefore, ensuring the style adopted by all your organization’s writing team is imperative.
You don’t just need to make sure there is consistency in writing style. You also need to make sure it is appropriate for your brand. Without an appropriate and consistent approach to content, your organization’s content marketing strategy cannot fully meet its goals. So, why is writing style so important? And how can you ensure you get it right for your organization? Read on to learn more.
Why Consider Writing Style?
The first thought you probably have when someone mentions style is something relating to fashion. Yet, interestingly, one common definition for “style” is “a way to communicate.” The clothes that you choose and how you wear them sends a message about you to others. The same holds when it comes to a style of writing. Through your content, you’re giving your customers a message about your brand that they can interpret. Therefore, the style you use for your content is a key element of how you communicate with your target audience. In fact, in some cases, it could even be more important than the content itself.
Which Elements Do You Consider When Making Writing Style Choices?
When you are creating content, there are several areas to consider when choosing a writing style. These include:
- Vocabulary choices
- Reading level
- Formality level
- The voice of the author
- The appearance of the text
To use style effectively in your content marketing, you must match the writing style with the target audience’s preferences. Not only that, but you must also match it with the audience’s expectations, all while avoiding any inauthenticity.
The Emotional Impact of Writing Style
The tone you use in your content writing can have a major impact on your target audience. Content marketers understand that the most effective marketing won’t just appeal on a rational level but also an emotional one.
Recent research into psychology and how the brain works has confirmed emotions are responsible for more decisions than logic. Although a writing style isn’t directly appealing to the brain’s emotional side, it makes subtle and subconscious connections. These open up your prospects to your brand message. Effective writing must also be inspiring and enjoyable. Content needs to genuinely connect with the audience.
How Does Writing Style Affect Marketing Success?
There are many styles of writing, as the below infographic shows:
Choosing the right one for your organization’s content is vital for the following reasons:
- Getting the style right earns your organization respect and trust. Inappropriate language is one main reason that customers reject a brand’s message. Getting the style right for the intended market shows customers you understand and respect them. This lowers their natural barriers of resistance to your marketing message.
- Getting the style right crosses the receiver/writer divide. A key fundamental of communication theory centers around the fact that there’ is always a receiver and a transmitter. Yet, no communication can take place unless the receiver understands the transmitter’s intended message. With an incorrect style, the receiver can’t properly receive the transmission. This, in turn, causes incorrect decoding of the message or even total rejection of it. Get the style right, and it can help build relationships with your audience. Writing can fill the gap between the organization and the potential customer. This allows your organization to create connections between prospects and your brand. You will speak to them on a level they understand and demonstrate how you care and want to help.
- Getting the style right opens up prospects to the idea that your solutions improve their lives. Style allows marketing to become an art form. It allows you to get inside the mind of your organization’s prospects. It opens them up to the potential of accepting your solutions as the answer to their problems.
- Getting the style right moves your audience to act. When you are writing content, it is partly to move potential customers to act. You want them to take steps toward becoming a loyal consumer. Getting the style right determines whether or not your target audience takes those actions. Of course, the rationale behind your message is important. However, ultimately, it is the emotional connections that readers have built up that will move them to act. This means you need to not only pay attention to what you’re saying but also how you’re saying it.
How to Cultivate A Content Style for Your Marketing
It is all well and good to know that style is important for your marketing campaign’s success. However, how can your organization cultivate the most effective content style?
Here are a few top tips to consider getting you off to the best possible start.
- Paying Attention to What Works. The best content writers are also engaged readers. This means they pay close attention to the things that work in other organizations’ content. Check out what your competitors are doing. How are they doing it? What works well, and what does not? You can use this as a basis to launch your own consistent writing style.
- Analyzing Marketing Messages. The best marketers constantly analyze marketing messages that they find appealing. They note the way writers use tone, language, and humor to make each message effective. They can then harness that potential in their content.
- Drawing in the Reader. You need to create content that speaks to the target audience. This means finding a way to effectively communicate a vision of a world that appeals to the customer. Show them a world they envisage themselves living in and want to inhabit. The infographic below shows that consumers feel that most brands’ content lacks authenticity. Avoid this mistake by finding a way to resonate with your target market. By creating content designed to communicate on their level, you help bring them into the world you create.
- Be Wary of Knowledge. You understand your products and services. However, your potential customers do not. Be wary of that knowledge. Failing to understand what it is like for somebody to not understand what you do can lead to poor quality content. You understand how your services and products solve problems and meet customers’ needs. It’s hard to recognize that others don’t already have that knowledge. They will not automatically realize that they need what you’re trying to sell. You need, therefore, to view things from the customer’s perspective. Shaping your brand message, so it bridges the knowledge gap is vital. This will help prospects to see how what you provide can resolve their issues and improve their lives.
- Join the Dots. It is important to remember that you need to connect the dots for your audience. Don’t become so mired in your message’s details that you forget to do this. Outline the important details, then work out how you can connect them. This will allow your content to draw readers in and keep them engaged. Remember that you need to overcome your audience’s short attention span and natural resistance. Draw them into a world where their lives can be better and more productive because of your products and services.
The Why, How, and What of Writing Style
There are three key components of any writing style guide: The why, the how, and the what.
The “why” refers to the purpose of your brand. The “how” refers to the tone and voice. The “what” refers to the words that sum up your brand’s message. Let’s take a closer look at each of these.
The Why – The Purpose of Your Brand
Don’t tell your target audience about the attributes of your products and services. Instead, tell them more about why you’re doing what you’re doing. Let them know how you’re making a difference to people like them.
In your writing style guide, you can document and refine your brand’s key message and positioning. You can showcase the values your content needs to reflect. With an effective writing style guide in place, your writers can emulate and echo those messages. As a result, your content will reflect your brand personality consistently.
The How – The Tone and Voice of Your Brand
The “how” refers to the personality of your content. Like all communication forms, effective content centers around the words that you choose. The voice of your brand is, essentially, what you’re saying. The tone of your brand is the way you express your message.
Using the term “casual” to sum up your brand voice isn’t sufficient information for your writers. Rather, you need to present them with four to five adjectives to describe the voice you are trying to achieve. When it comes to tone, you need to describe the nuance you wish to use for every target audience. Each type of customer will respond to specific language choices in various ways.
The What – The Words that Personify Your Brand
The “what” refers to the rules that dictate the words and language your writers need to use or avoid. How formal does your content need to be? Which colloquialisms does your brand use? Make sure that you spell words correctly and for words where there are variations, choose which one you’ll use consistently. For example, you could also write eCommerce as e-commerce. Which do you prefer? Pick one and stick with it across every piece that you create. This ensures consistency throughout your site.
You also need to decide on grammatical rules in advance. This may not be as cut and dried as you think. You may think your writers know all about grammar, and they probably do. But this is more about consistency than about correctness. Contractions may be grammatically correct, but are they appropriate for your brand? If so, every writer needs to use them. If not, you must consistently avoid them. Decide on the pronouns you’ll use, too. Will it be she/her and he/him, or will you opt for the safer they/them?
Creating An Editorial Style Guide
As you have seen, creating an effective editorial style guide for your organization’s writers is imperative. Not only is it important for the consistency of your brand message, but it could also affect your organization’s reputation.
Without a style guide, your content writers are working in the dark. They have no idea where they need to go or how they need to get there. When this happens, it is highly likely that the content they create will not meet your expectations. More importantly, it almost certainly will not meet your marketing campaign requirements.
Writers, by their nature, choose their voice and style. Without knowing your brand’s rules of engagement, they will be unwittingly undermining your strategy. Editorial style guides ensure everybody who works on your content is singing from the same song sheet. They hold the writers accountable. It’s clear how your content should read. Most importantly, it gives your content the recognizable essence of your organization’s personality. Setting up clear outlines regarding style, tone, and voice is the best way to help your content writers flourish. Once they know what you expect of them, they can work within the rules. This ensures they create engaging content to draw customers in without damaging your brand message or negatively affecting your organization’s reputation.
Here is the bottom line: Set up clear rules for voice, style, and tone. Doing this allows you to deliver content that has the desired outcome and abides by brand standards. It also lets your writers flourish within them.