Chris Duarte explains the difference between brand voice and tone, then walks through five steps to build a voice-and-tone program: keep guidance simple, create a searchable sample library, publish guidelines both internally and publicly, set up collaboration channels for content creators, and retire or revise content that doesn't fit.
Questions this video answers
Chris Duarte.
"5 Tips on How to Create a Great Brand Voice & Tone" (Salesforce on Salesforce).
April 21, 2022.
Five tips.
Within two weeks of discovery.
Chapters
This is my voice and my tone. This is my voice. This is my tone. Hey, everyone, My name is Chris Duarte, and today we're talking about voice and tone. What is it? Why does it matter? What's the difference? Let's go over the basics and then I'll give you five tips that we use here at Salesforce that you can take to build out a voice and tone program for your business. Now, this is a new series we're calling Salesforce on Salesforce. It's a look at our marketing, sales and service businesses with helpful tips on topics like how to launch a product, how to engage your sales team, how to deliver self service, and more. Now, voice and tone are one of the most important investments that you'll make in your company's brand. And having a clear and well defined voice and tone that you apply consistently across the content you make, that's one of the strongest ways to reach and engage your audience. Now, if you're new to voice and tone, the first thing you need to understand is that voice and tone are two different things. Your voice is a reflection of your brand. It's an expression of your personality, personality and your values. And your tone is the feeling and emotion of your words. It's the way you express yourself. So right now, you're hearing my voice, which quite frankly probably sounds a little like Trailhead. That's the product I work on here at Salesforce. I try to be direct, honest, and helpful. Occasionally, I'm a little bit weird. Hopefully all of that is coming through the tone I'm using for this video. It's informal and courteous and upbeat. I'm not normally in front of a camera, so I'm dialing it up a little bit, but this is still genuinely me. A company's voice and tone works the same way. Their voice aligns with their brand personality and values. And their tone, that's the way they express themselves. Now, a company's voice shouldn't change unless there's a rebrand in the works. But a company's tone, it changes all the time. It has to. For each audience and situation, we need to revisit our tone. The way we'd say something in a blog is different than the way we'd say something in a Knowledge article. And the tone we use for architects is different from what we do for administrators. In each of these situations and audiences, a different tone is needed, but the voice stays the same. So, for example, in a Knowledge article about Slack, we'd include step by step instructions to complete a task. But in a blog post we might also include this fun tidbit. Slack is actually an acronym that stands for Searchable Log of All Conversations and Knowledge. Tip number one make it simple and memorable do you remember the saying I before E except after C? That's a common way to remember how to spell tricky words in the English language, and it's effective because it's simple and memorable. The most successful voice and tone frameworks are just like that. If you've got more than one person making content for your company, or if you're hiring an outside agency to help you, you're going to need those people to understand your company's brand and style guidelines, and they have to be able to apply them consistently. If your guidelines are lengthy, complex or inconsistent, then it will be really hard to use them and a trade secret. If your voice and tone guidance has more than five key concepts to remember, it's probably too complicated. Tip number two Create a library of samples. Once everyone understands the guidelines, you'll need to show how the guidelines work. In practice, you're going to need to show people what good looks like. To do that, create a searchable library with samples of your voice and tone done right across your different content types, videos, blogs, knowledge articles and other content. Keep your library up to date with your latest and greatest content. Now my advice to you on this as you add to your library, explain what makes each piece of content so good. This is going to help new people to better understand your guidelines and better equip them to create content aligned with your voice and tone. Publish your voice and tone guidelines Once you have your guidelines written and you've started your library of samples, you need to publish them where people can find them. Now you can publish on an internal site or in a collaborative document, or you can pin the guidance to your Slack channel for your content creators. Make sure your guidelines are available to everyone who is creating content for your company, and be prepared to update your guidelines over time. A word to the wise Go big and publish your guidelines on your website for everyone to see. This does two important things. Number one, it helps people better understand your brand, and number two, it makes it easier for you to work with external agencies and consultants. Tip number four Collaborate with your content creators. When you're starting up a new voice and tone program, your content creators will have questions. They'll want to get quick feedback on their ideas, pitch new content, and talk to each other. So create a collaboration channel where they can work together. They can share proposed content drafts with each other. Give each other feedback and work together to hone their skills. By collaborating online, you're creating a searchable reference tool for future content creators as your company grows. Now here at Salesforce, we have Slack channels for all of our writers. In those channels, we work on content together and give each other real time guidance and feedback. I'm in those channels too, pitching my own ideas and giving feedback with our community of writers. Retire Bad Content if you've already created content that doesn't align with your newly established voice and tone guidelines, now is the time to take it down. You can temporarily retire it, revise it, and republish it, or you can simply put it away for good and focus on building the new. If you leave content out there that doesn't align with your voice and tone, you risk confusing your audience and damaging the trust you're working to build. Now our recommendation is use data to determine your strategy on what gets revised and republished versus permanently retired. For example, if a content asset has high engagement on social media, then take the time to revise it so that it better aligns with your voice and tone. Now on Trailhead we take brand seriously. Any badges on Trailhead that aren't up to date on our brand guidelines, we fix or retire them within two weeks of discovery. Well, there you have it. Five tips to help you get started building out your business's voice and tone. Click the link on screen and check out more resources down in the description and we'll see you next time.
