How can you create a consistent tone in your B2B campaign?

Having a brand archetype has helped me and my teams develop a unique, memorable, and consistent tone throughout all our marketing programs. Once you've defined your archetype, it also helps to have a character that embodies it, whether it's one you make up, a character in pop culture, or a real person. Then for every campaign you put together, think: What would [character] say? How would they say it? (Obviously, you need to customize it for your company.) It takes some time at first to find your groove, but once you're comfortable with your archetype, it's easy to get the tone right and keep it consistent. It can really elevate your brand and drive consistency throughout all company materials.

We’ve developed a quiz to help clients identify their brand archetype (of the 12). This allows a consistent tone for everyone who touches the brand. It’s simple and effective.

Define your tone by considering your audience, industry norms, and brand personality. For B2B, aim for professionalism, expertise, and trustworthiness while injecting personality to resonate with your audience. Align tone with your brand values, adopting a conversational yet authoritative voice. Adapt tone to suit different platforms and content types, ensuring consistency across campaigns for a cohesive brand image.

Get rreeeeallllyyy specific. Who is your target market fit? How do they talk? How do they act? What makes them smile, laugh, feel joy, what moves them. Talk like them. Just sit in the room with them. And emulate the temperature of the room. Are they feeling what you are saying when you type it, or storyboard it, or put the ideas on paper. Before you audit it. Sit in the room with them in your head. If you don’t feel like you are hitting the mark there. Ask someone from a completely different department’s thoughts. Or heck, ask a friend. Your defined voice is already out there. Speaking spoken in rooms everywhere. Just try to tap into its sounds by empathizing with it. Then stepping into authority.

Maintaining a consistent tone in marketing is straightforward when handled by a single marketer. However, as the team grows, it becomes crucial to establish a Tone of Voice (ToV) document. My recommended approach includes: ?? Starting with a preface that underscores the significance of consistent tone. ?? Listing your company values to ensure alignment with the tone. ?? Identifying four adjectives that accurately describe your desired tone, making sure they resonate with your company's ethos. ?? Clearly defining what your tone is NOT ?? Providing concrete examples, along with dos and don’ts ?? Closing with helpful tips This framework ensures your ToV document is a valuable, frequently used resource for maintaining a consistent tone.

You can audit your content by gathering all existing material, assessing its relevance, checking performance, optimizing for search, identifying gaps, ensuring quality, and refreshing high-performing content for better engagement and alignment with your goals.

Read your content out loud. No seriously, pick up an email, or an LI post, or a letter to your client. Define the goal of that post. Then pick a coworker and read it out loud. Were you trying to upsell Black Friday tvs? Were you trying to excite them about not having to watch football on a small TV anymore? Did your customer persona hear it and connect? Literally read it out loud, try to give it the inflection it was written with, and then ask your coworker, did this hit the mark? Ask someone closest to that customer persona or find a real version of that. Ask them. Don’t try to brute force it or get fancy with it. Just ask. If yes, keep doing that. If no, keep trying until the target audience gets excited too.

Evaluate your existing content to see if it consistently exudes the same or similar tone. It is very important to revamp / redo any content dissonant with the defined tone. The target audience should get a consistent impression of the brand, its attributes and its purpose.

Creating a defined pathway to revise your content helps you keep track of the important edits and makes sure you create relevant content. Here's the step-by-step guide to create a workflow to revise your content: 1. Add fresh POV, depth, expert quotes, screenshots, infographics, video tutorials, links and testimonial 2. Remove fluff, content gaps, dead links and outdated info 3. Identify differences in style in the existing pieces by referring to the new style guide you've created 4. Read the content aloud to check the tone. Alternatively, use grammar checking tools or sentiment analysis tools like Idiomatic, Repustate or Lexalytics 5. Choose a grammar checking tool like Grammarly or Quillbot to run grammar checks across your content

Revising content during a campaign ensures relevance, accuracy, and resonance with the audience, enhancing effectiveness and impact.

It is critical to make a master list of content assets that you need to showcase your brand. Once you have this list start ticking off by comparing against available content. Some of the existing content is likely to need a redo to be consistent with the defined tone. You may need to create new content too, to bridge any missing pieces in the master list.

One of the big challenges in this is adoption, implementation and auditing. This is not a one-time exercise, rather an ongoing effort to encourage employee advocacy. Every single team member, client facing or not, shud have a consistent brand tone that has enough scope for their personal style too. Given the social nature of business, the employees digital fooprint impacts your B2B campaign as well. So every business must have an active internal brand campaign that aligns all teams, new or old, to your organizations values, tones and brand identity.

This is personal to me lol. Gather your team in a storytelling session around a campfire (or virtual equivalent), recounting past campaign adventures—how challenges were conquered and victories celebrated. Dive into the quest ahead, detailing each member's role as a character in a thrilling saga. Through interactive workshops akin to exploring uncharted territories, weave real tales of marketing conquests and challenges. Encourage a guild-like collaboration, where each member contributes unique skills to overcome hurdles. Embrace a spirit of camaraderie, allowing innovation within the campaign's epic narrative. This narrative-based training fuels their courage and creativity, readying them for an extraordinary campaign journey.

Simple, clear and comprehensive brand guidelines are essential. This guidelines document should include the vision, mission, brand purpose, and brand identity. The tone of the brand should be in alignment with the brand identity. The downstream definitions of fonts, colors to be used in collaterals should also be included in the brand guidelines document.

Please note that there is no one fit for this. Monitor performance through key metrics aligned with campaign goals. Use tools like Google Analytics for website traffic, conversion rates, and user behaviour. Social media platforms offer insights on engagement, reach, and audience demographics. CRM systems track lead generation and conversion rates. Email marketing tools provide open rates and click-through data. Regularly analyze these metrics, adjust strategies based on insights, and refine campaigns to optimize performance continually.

It is important to measure if the target audience is resonating with your stated brand identity and tone. Your brand should be relatable and eventually endearing to your target audience. Website traffic, views of thought leadership content, social media interactions (impressions, likes, comments etc.), response to email campaigns, subscriptions of newsletters, response to paid ad campaigns, conversion of call-to-actions on your content etc. are some of the performance metrics. Its also important interview some of your key clients, partners, investors and even employees to take their feedback on whether they are perceiving the intended tone in all external and internal communications.

Adapting your tone for the market and the motion is critical. Your tone, brand, and voice should have some complexity and ability to bend with the times. Nobody want's authoritative tone to learn and explore a new product. Each thing will need a bit of a twist. But setting your brand up with a complexity of ranges will enable you to play to your and the audiences needs.

As with a musical cambiata, also called "changing tone, the B2B landscape is constantly evolving, and so should your tone. Regularly monitor the industry trends and adjust your messaging accordingly. Stay agile and be willing to adapt while staying true to your brand identity.

If you come up with detailed guides, but they're long and painful to read, your team won't adopt them. Make your brand guidelines simple, and give clear examples. Processes that are too detailed and complicated do not get adopted. The adoption of a process is the measurement of how good it is.

1. Have guidelines for how you should sound, with specific examples. 2. Practice this regularly. 3. Have checks to ensure content and messaging meets brand standards. 4. Have a campaign lead or project manager who checks for consistency across ads, channels, pieces of content. 5. Monitor and revise for continual improvement.

Campaigns need to be grounded in clearly defined strategy. Keep things simple. Outline the persona you're writing for, some insights about why they would care, and connect the dots between your campaign and their mindset/perspective. When you outline your campaign assets, makes sure everything is aligned to the same strategy, from copy, to images to landing pages, and offers.

Create straightforward, simple brand guidelines with HEAPS of examples. No one wants to read a 30+ document that's over complicated and too detailed. Instead have lots of examples across different mediums, this will allow everyone to absorb and adopt the tone with ease!