How can you address sensitive topics in your brand voice?

1 Know your audience

Before you write anything, you need to understand who you are writing for, what they care about, and how they might react to your topic. Research your audience's demographics, preferences, pain points, and feedback. Use tools like surveys, polls, analytics, and social listening to gather insights. Segment your audience based on their interests, needs, and behaviors. This will help you tailor your message and tone to suit different groups and situations.

3 Use empathy and compassion

One of the key elements of a successful brand voice is empathy. Empathy means putting yourself in your audience's shoes and understanding their emotions, perspectives, and experiences. When you write about sensitive topics, you need to show empathy and compassion for your audience and anyone else who might be affected by the issue. Use respectful and inclusive language, acknowledge different viewpoints, and avoid making assumptions or judgments. Also, express your own emotions and opinions in a genuine and human way, without being defensive or aggressive.

4 Provide value and support

Another way to address sensitive topics in your brand voice is to provide value and support to your audience. Value means offering useful information, insights, solutions, or resources that can help your audience solve a problem, learn something new, or achieve a goal. Support means showing your audience that you care about them, that you are listening to them, and that you are willing to help them. For example, you can share stories, tips, examples, or testimonials that demonstrate how your brand or product can make a positive impact on the issue. You can also invite your audience to join a community, ask questions, share feedback, or access additional content.

5 Test and optimize

Finally, you need to test and optimize your content before and after you publish it. Testing means getting feedback from your colleagues, peers, or experts who can review your content and suggest improvements. You can also use tools like readability tests, sentiment analysis, or grammar checkers to ensure your content is clear, accurate, and appropriate. Optimizing means monitoring your content's performance and measuring its results. You can use metrics like views, shares, comments, conversions, or retention to evaluate how well your content is reaching and engaging your audience. You can also use tools like A/B testing, heatmaps, or surveys to identify what works and what doesn't, and make adjustments accordingly.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?