How do you share brand voice with your web content writing team?

Having managed teams of as many as 20 writers, I find it's essential to create a style guide with examples of each type of content that has proven to be effective. This should include formatting guidelines, sizes for photos and illustrations, brand colors and preferred typefaces and sizes, length of headlines and subheads and lots more. In my experience, the more through the brand book, and the higher the quality of the examples, the better the results.

Maintaining consistency and a single voice across all content requires that your online content writing team share the brand voice. Here are some methods to make this happen: Create Branding Standards: For your team's reference, draft a document that outlines the tone, style, main messaging, and target audience of your brand. Give instances: Give instances of well-written material that captures the tone of your brand that you wish to keep. Instructional Sessions: Organize seminars or training sessions to go over the brand voice, go over examples, and address any queries your team might have. Reviews: Make sure the material produced by your team is consistent with the brand voice by giving it a regular evaluation and commenting.

A framework I like using: 1. Define the brand mission, vision, and values. What do you stand for as a brand? What do you want to achieve? What are your core values? 2. Identify the target audience. Whom are you trying to reach? What are their needs, interests, & pain points? 3. Choose a tone. What mood do you want to create with your brand voice? Are you friendly, approachable, or professional? Keep it consistent. 4. Identify the voice attributes. What are the specific words, phrases, and sentence structures that you'll use to create your brand voice? 5. Provide examples. Once defined, provide examples of how you would use it in different types of content, such as blog posts, landing pages, emails, and social media posts.

As a head writer currently managing a team of ten in an already established brand, I make sure to maintain consistency in my brand personality and values by making sure to provide resources and tips for training new team members on my brand voice and providing ongoing support for effective productivity. Overall, remember, that the format of your brand voice guide can be tailored to suit your brand's unique needs and preferences. The goal is to have a comprehensive and practical resource that empowers your team to communicate effectively and authentically on behalf of your brand.

Crafting your brand's voice is like curating a playlist. You set the tone, rules, and vibe for your writers to jam with. Regular updates keep the beat fresh, while webinars add insights like backstage passes. Encourage them to groove through past posts, like DJs sampling old tracks. For instance, imagine your brand voice as a mix of friendly chats and witty one-liners. It's all about striking the right chord!

When providing feedback, I’ve found it helpful when clients share some of their most common key phrases. Incorporating these phrases into their content really helps strengthen their brand voice.

Feedback and training is an effective way to make a remote web content writer key into your brand voice because these people aren't you and may not initially sound the way you want even after examples are given with the guide. There's tendency of initial deviations but with constructive feedback and training, there will be a blend.

Considered and clear feedback is key to ensuring your writers head in the correct direction when creating content for your brand. If you provide regular feedback with clarity then your writers will need less and less support, streamlining the workflow and saving everyone time. When providing feedback, especially to new writers be sure to reinforce excellent examples of their writing as well as the areas that need change. This will ensure they know which styles and messages to focus more on. When correcting mistakes or providing a steer on some misaligned messaging, be sure to be specific about what they need to change and even provide choice examples where you can for them to learn from.

Feedback and training go hand in hand. But, feedback turns into quality feedback when it comes directly from the outside world. It is really important to take feedback from the audience. It will help the brand to grow. Accordingly, training team members makes sense.

One thing I've found helpful is to ask the agency contact or freelancer how they would describe the company's brand identity. Their perspective will be valuable as they have local-market knowledge. Then, try to match the brand objectives with another company that's active in the agency/freelancer's market. This helps them own the brand voice in their market, steered by the company's own guidelines.

Copy.ai has a great tool that you can upload a document that has been written in your brand voice and they can assess your brand voice profile. It's an easy way to insert into your templates. Another thing I do is when onboarding new clients, I have a brand voice questionnaire where I ask them to share adjectives they use to talk about their brand, who is their target audience and what matters to them, words or phrases that they frequent amongst other things. This helps me in my ability to imitate brand voices. I also do deep research on the client's social media and anything else they've ever written to ensure that I am hitting their brand voice perfectly.

Whilst it’s important to not sound too robotic across content, having a formula and template for content such as blogs or advertorials can ensure brand style and tone is maintained. Regarding the use of tools, Grammarly is an excellent way to avoid mistakes!

The most important tool for web writing has to be an SEO tool such as Semrush or Ahrefs as this will give your content the best chance of success. Whilst grammar tools like Grammarly are useful, a writer should already be a master of spelling and grammar, meaning those tools would be less useful than SEO tools which scan thousands of pages of content for us. Your writers should be using SEO tools to identify which keywords to go after through content, as well as identify any optimizations that can be made on existing content. You can also use these tools – as well as something like Google Search Console – to track your performance on Google for the keywords you choose to use.

For a successful collaboration on a project, effective communication cannot be ruled out. It helps to enhance satisfaction and relationships

I find it useful to implement peer review through which team members review each other's content before finalizing it. Providing each other constructive feedback based on the brand voice guidelines is an effective way of sharing the company's brand voice understanding.

Giving your Web Content Team the Creative Freedom to produce relevant + interesting written descriptions, and structure your Site in a way that flows and makes it easier for Users to navigate and connect with your Brand, will allow you to have a great framework to then provide inputs / edit. Communication with Teams doesn't have to be on formal documents, for example, we've received briefs over WhatsApp because we understand it's quite convenient to pop a text @ end of day. We'll pick it up in the morning and even encourage that constant open channel for us to quickly ask a clarifying question, share screenshots or links as we make req changes. Essentially, being agile when it comes to Communication + Collaborations heightens Creativity.

What is also helpful is having a monthly brainstorming meeting to exchange ideas and discuss new trends and tools. Especially when the team is working hybrid or remotely, a monthly brainstorming meeting at a fixed day and time via zoom is very powerful and productive.

When sharing your brand voice with writers, it's also important to keep your target audience in mind. Your brand voice should align with the audience you're speaking to. I recommend developing customer personas that embody the characteristics and preferences of your ideal readers. This enables writers to produce content that deeply resonates with the intended audience.

From a writer's perspective and, following through on the thread from communicate, collaborate, customisation, consistency ... there should be some wiggle room for creativity. Syncing a brand's tone without holding back the value-add element (wordsmith) that can be captured from the writer's flair, originality and creativity ...