Scaling Your Brand Voice

Your brand’s tone of voice represents the essence of your company. It’s the character of your business put into words. Your tone of voice tells your customers and employees whether your organization is serious or lighthearted, formal or casual, academic or down to earth.

But you can’t just develop a tone of voice and move on. The only way for your company’s brand voice to be useful is if you successfully scale it. That means getting everyone in your company to apply your brand voice in their work.

So how exactly do you scale your brand voice? A new report from Content Science and the AI-powered writing software company Acrolinx details the steps you need to take to scale brand voice successfully. 

The report covers:

• What it means to scale brand voice
• Why it’s essential to scale your company’s brand voice
• How to scale brand voice
• How to deploy brand voice across your organization 
• How to use technology to scale brand voice
• How to sustain brand voice at scale

Here is an overview of top tips and insights from the Scaling Voice report. 

Why You Need a Strong Brand Voice at Scale

Establishing and scaling your company’s brand voice is not just essential, but it is also the only way your company can compete in today’s emotion-driven marketing landscape. Tone of voice at scale will help your customers, users, or readers instantly know and feel connected to your company no matter where or how they are interacting with it. And the consistency of your messaging should make your brand voice easy to spot. This creates great customer experiences and is the foundation of customer relationships.

How to Scale Brand Voice 

Before you can jump into scaling your brand voice, you need to make sure you have a solid foundation. This means you must have:

• Clearly defined brand values
• A coherent brand voice
• A style guide
• A cohesive content strategy
• Content governance plans or processes 

Once you have those foundational elements, you’re ready to start scaling. Deploying your brand voice at scale requires distribution, technology, and training. 

Distribution: You have all the voice rules and resources ready to go, but how do you give everyone in your company easy access? One of the best methods is to publish the style guide and related resources in a center of content excellence (CCE). A CCE is can:

• Be the go-to on content standards.
• Provide a variety of training resources, playbooks, and documentation.
• Share lessons learned about impact.
• Facilitate peer review.
• Manage changes to voice guidance.
• Facilitate technology selection and adoption.
• Set and track key performance indicators (KPIs).

Technology: Today, technology can play a significant role in helping you scale your brand voice. In fact, without the right technology, scaling your brand voice is impossible. Software platforms for optimizing content have been available for about a decade. But advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) have made this type of software much faster and more powerful. 

The major players in this software space include Acrolinx, Grammarly, and Writer. These software platforms not only check spelling and grammar, but also terminology (including technical terms and brand names), style, tone of voice, and keywords (for search). (The Scaling Voice report provides more details about using technology to scale voice and real-world examples of multinational companies that are making this happen.) 

Training: Getting enterprise-wide buy-in and use of any new brand voice, style guide, and technology is as important as the guidelines and software themselves. Your company likely has staff across various types of roles and departments creating content, including employees who are not part of a content team and may have little to no content training. To launch a successful brand voice rollout and training program:

• Treat a brand voice rollout and training program like a marketing campaign
• Designate brand voice champions across the organization
• Offer a mix of training options
• Make training ongoing 
• Consider how you will roll out across different countries

How to Sustain Brand Voice at Scale

To ensure your brand voice is having the intended impact and that employees are adhering to it, you will need ongoing tracking. Looking at changes in metrics like open rates, click-through rates, time on page, page views and so on can give you an idea of how things have changed—particularly if you measured them before you changed your tone.

You can also measure and track the performance of your brand voice through content effectiveness software such as ContentWRX. ContentWRX combines both information from analytics and feedback from visitors to create a score that you can use to gauge your current state of content effectiveness. This type of tool can even allow you to ask your customers directly about your brand voice.

Ready to Scale Your Brand Voice?

This article explains how to start thinking about scaling your brand voice. If you are ready to take action, download the Scaling Voice report from Content Science and Acrolinx for in-depth next steps, guidance, and case studies.