Finding Your Voice: What Makes Your Content Unique?

Published by Kevin O'Connor on Friday, November 10, 2017 in Content Marketing.

Before you can put out compelling content, you have to streamline your content marketing strategy and establish your brand's voice. It's important to establish your voice because your content marketing strategy overlaps your voice with your vision and goals. It also helps them to identify your brand across various channels. But just how do you figure it out? It starts with a deep dive into what your brand represents and what you need your audience to get from your voice. Here's how to get it done so you can create unique and compelling content.

1. Ask the Right Questions

Irztflkbraqoacjtuewk The glowy question marks are the right questions. It's a metaphor? No, it's not.

By answering a few questions, you can establish your voice and be on your way to putting your content marketing strategy into action. Here are a few questions to explore:

Who is my audience? Knowing who your audience is is essential to establishing your voice. That's because your audience is who you are "speaking" to and you have to create content that meets their needs. Understand your audience's pain points and demographic information, such as their location or age. This will help you get a better sense of who they are and how you can help them.

What can I offer them? Understand how your services help them to solve these problems. Translate the features that your service offers into benefits for your audience. These benefits deliver value to your audience. One way to find your voice and deliver value to your audience is by building a persona.

What describes my brand's voice? Describing your brand's voice will help you to build your persona. It gives you direction on how to communicate to your audience.

2. Establish a Persona

Think of your brand as if it were an actual person. How would your brand respond or engage with your audience? Your persona is about your traits and personality. You can start to establish your persona by choosing three words to describe your voice and use adjectives to define them. For example, if you use authentic as one of your descriptive words, you could use adjectives, such as trustworthy and engaging to further define your persona. By narrowing down your brand's traits, you can establish a path for how you want these traits to show up in your content. You can also establish different personas for different customers if you speak to various audiences.

3. Hang Where Your Audience Hangs

Check out the places where your audience hangs online to see how they speak, the terms they use, the topics that they care about the most and get involved. Practice engaging with them to gain a sense of how they respond to your comments and content while remaining authentic. This is also a chance to test out your content with your audience to see if it is a right fit. Don't just leer at your potential audience from the outside like some sort of creep, spend the time to really engage with them. When you know your audience well, creating content for them becomes like second nature. Their needs become your needs and real engagement can begin.

Take it from these headless friends. They found where headless people hang out and they found common interests.

4. Stay Consistent

You want your brand voice. Understand that you won't be able to please everyone so it's important to stay consistent and serve your niche audience's needs with your content. Don't forget that as your customer grows and changes, so should you. It's crucial to adapt to changes and recognize your audience's needs to stay relevant and add value.

5. Focus on Your Audience

Finding your voice and maintaining its consistency also ultimately calls for delivering a user-focused message. You can differentiate your website from others by concentrating on your user's needs. Give them all of the help you can, whether it be in the form of how-to tutorials or case studies that use real-world examples that break down how your service helps them solve their problems.

Final Thoughts

The best way to differentiate your site from others' requires focusing on the user: your audience. By delivering a user-focused message and providing your audience with all of the help and information they need, you can set your website apart from competitors and stand out among a sea of content.