5 Tips for Achieving Brand Voice Consistency When Outsourcing Content Creation
Brand voice is the unique personality and tone you use to communicate with your customers. It’s what makes your brand feel familiar to customers and distinct from your competitors. Whether you’re working with freelance writers or content agencies, ensuring brand voice consistency requires thoughtful planning, clear guidelines, and effective collaboration.
When your brand voice is inconsistent, you can confuse your audience, dilute your brand identity, and undermine the trust and familiarity you strive to build. Read on for practical tips for achieving a consistent brand voice when outsourcing content creation so each piece represents your brand and resonates with your audience.
Benefits of Brand Voice Consistency
When your brand speaks with a consistent tone and style, it becomes more memorable and relatable, fostering stronger connections with your customers. Here are three essential benefits of maintaining a consistent brand voice.
Brand Awareness and Recognition
Brand voice consistency builds a clear picture of your brand in the customer’s mind, which helps build brand awareness and make a lasting impression.
The Trust of the Familiar
The mere exposure effect, also called the familiarity principle, describes how people choose a product or business simply because they’ve seen or heard about it several times. Repeated exposure creates a sense of comfort and safety while reducing uncertainty.
Building Relationships Across Platforms
Brand voice consistency ensures your message is delivered clearly and effectively across all channels. Since shoppers tend to research information and compare products on multiple digital platforms before making a purchase, your clear and consistent messaging helps usher them through your marketing funnels.
People like knowing what to expect from a brand, which translates into a strong relationship between brand voice consistency and trust.
Challenge to Creating a Consistent Brand Voice When Outsourcing
Engaging a diverse and disbursed team to produce consistent, on-brand content requires strategy and planning. Here are some of the common challenges to overcome:
- You are immersed in your business and its operations, but outsourced writers may not have the context you take for granted. They aren’t intrinsically aware of your values and target audience.
- Writing styles vary, and you can’t expect different writers to nail your brand voice automatically without set guidelines.
- A lack of instructions and examples can lead to confusion and inconsistent content. This extends into editing, where clear and specific instructions produce the best results.
- Scalability can be a limiting factor if you’re relying on one or a small team of writers to maintain a consistent brand voice. If they are too busy or unavailable, your options are limited.
How to Achieve Brand Voice Consistency at Scale
How do you maintain a brand voice? Achieving brand voice consistency at scale includes creating clear guidelines, providing helpful project briefs, and building long-term relationships with quality content providers.
Here are five tips to help you get outstanding outsourced content.
1. Have a Style Guide
A comprehensive style guide is the foundation for achieving brand voice consistency across all your content. Your guide should define your brand’s personality, tone, values, and preferred language style. It can include specific guidelines on word choice, phrasing, formatting, and grammatical rules.
2. Provide Quality Examples
Providing real-life examples of quality content gives tangible references for writers to use. Include blog posts, articles, or social media content that exemplify the tone, language, and style you want to achieve.
3. Include Clear Project Briefs
The project brief is your opportunity to clarify specific goals for the writer of a piece of content. Your content brief may include the target audience, specific subtopics, key points you want to see included, any unusual formatting requests, relevant keywords, and supporting materials that can help writers better understand your content goals, business or industry-specific nuances, or brand.
4. Review Content and Give Feedback
While the purpose of outsourcing content creation is to save time and resources, it’s still essential to build in some time for content reviews and feedback. This step may seem counterintuitive, but it’s a relatively small time investment that pays big returns in brand voice consistency and high-quality output.
The time you spend reviewing and providing feedback is a fraction of what it would take to create the entire piece of content from the ground up. You’re leveraging the expertise and efficiency of professional writers while maintaining control over the final product’s quality and consistency.
5. Develop Long-Term Relationships
The longer a skilled business writer works with you, the more efficiently they will produce content and the less oversight they’ll need. Building a long-term relationship with a content agency or freelancer can streamline your content creation.
Even so, you don’t want to rely on a single writer or a small team. Workload, illnesses, or vacations can interrupt your ability to create content.
Instead, work with more writers than you need to maintain your content pipeline. A roster of writers well-versed in your brand voice allows you to adapt and pivot assignments as required.
Skilled Writers at Your Fingertips
Are you looking for a content writing service that can offer dedicated writing teams, a three-step editorial process, and account management support? At ContentWriters, our team of experienced writers and editors is committed to understanding your brand’s voice and delivering high-quality, on-brand content that drives engagement and meets your objectives.
Connect with us today to discuss how we can support your organization’s success.
Joan Weisman’s strong research skills, SEO knowledge, adaptability of style and voice, and passion for staying current make her an asset for freelance web content, SEO, and copywriting.
