If you’re ramping up your content marketing, you need a distinct and consistent corporate style. You want to create a corporate personality that is consistent across all of your communications, starting with your website.
My last post talked about identifying your corporate tone and style. But what if you’re just getting started or trying to reposition the company?
Corporate branding is beyond the scope of this blog. If you’ve done branding work, then that will inform your writing style. Otherwise, here are a few ideas to help find your authentic tone and style.
Find your adjectives
Pick three adjectives to identify the corporate image you’d like to portray. Are you:
- friendly, responsive and expert?
- trusted, secure and authoritative?
- edgy, innovative and fun?
With only three adjectives, you cannot try to be all things to all people.
Make sure that the style will appear to your core customers. What works in the B2C space doesn’t always work in B2B. But B2B doesn’t have to be boring – just look at Box or AppDynamics.
The adjectives should be based in reality – if they don’t reflect the corporate culture, the perception won’t stick. If you’re a company fully of geeks, then embrace your own geekiness.
Try the goldilocks strategy
Once you know what you want, you have to decide how far to take it. Just how edgy do you want to be? If you’re not sure, use the Goldilocks approach. Look at the websites of other companies to find the extremes, then determine your own comfort level.
Too formal -> just right -> too casual
Too serious -> just right -> Too flippant
Maybe you want to push the boundaries. Every company will have a different take on what ‘just right’ means for their business.
Once you’ve identified some ‘just right’ websites, share them with your content developers to give them an idea of the tone and style you want to achieve. This will help ensure consistency across all of your content marketing efforts.
