social media Archives - Crocus Communications

02/03/2016 By crocuscomms 2 Comments

10 Simple Steps To Auditing Your Website

It’s a given that we have a website for our business these days, whether it’s a tech startup or a museum, a beauty brand or a consultancy; the quality of both the design and the content, however, varies significantly.

Those of us who are solopreneurs or early-stage startups are likely to be managing our websites ourselves, and although there are many platforms and tools out there now that make this possible it can still be difficult to reach the professional results that we are after. Even when we can afford to work with an agency, it’s important that we ourselves understand what it is we want in order to properly brief them.

Here are 10 simple steps to auditing your website in order to identify areas of improvement that you can address yourself or pass on to your agency.

1. The strategy

a. Who is your audience?

All effective marketing, and this includes your website, starts with a clear understanding of the “who” that you’re targeting.

Who is your ideal client or customer? What insights do you have about them, in terms of both demographics and psychographics? What are they looking for when they arrive on your website?

Understanding who your audience is and what they want is crucial to being able to meet those needs on your website.

b. What are your objectives?

Before we start reviewing your site, we need to understand what it is that you’re trying to achieve.

When it comes to your overall marketing efforts, are you looking to establish yourself in a new industry, to increase awareness of your product or service, or perhaps to increase engagement with your brand? How does your website fit into your overall ecosystem and what is its role? Is its function to demonstrate your credibility and establish trust? Are you trying to generate leads and build your email list? Is it about making sales online or driving people into your physical stores?

Make sure you’re clear on the objective of the website before you launch into the rest of the audit.

2. The home page

When a potential client or customer arrives on your homepage, you want it to be immediately obvious what it is that you actually do. If there’s any element of confusion, even your ideal customer may leave in frustration or indifference and your bounce rate (the % of people who leave your website having only viewed that one page) will be high.

What’s the ONE message you want your visitor to get, above all others? What’s the next step, the action that you want them to take? Is your home page currently meeting your objective?

This can get a little tricky if you have different customer targets and different service offerings all on the same website. The goal is the same, however: be as single-minded as you can be.

EXAMPLE: The 4-hour work week

This is an unusual example but potentially very effective. Tim Ferriss, of Four-Hour Work Week fame, has created a home page with a START HERE box where you are immediately encouraged to sign up for a bunch of freebies. To persuade you to do this, the rest of the page includes a promise of “10x your per-hour output” along with quotes from prominent media outlets including the New York Times and some impressive stats from Amazon. If you’re not convinced, he still has a simple navigation at the bottom pointing you towards his TV show, his blog, and his podcast.

3. The navigation

It’s not just the dreaded Millennials, everyone today has a short attention span. You want to guide your website visitors quickly and seamlessly along the desired path to their ultimate destination.

If they’ve arrived on the home page for the first time, what’s the next step you want them to take? If it’s a returning visitor who’s already done their research and now wants to buy, do you offer a fast path to purchase with a minimal number of clicks? What if they need more information, is it easy to find the FAQs or to get in touch with customer services? Is the menu at the top of the page self-explanatory? Keep things simple and straightforward.

Again, this can get more complicated if you have different paths you want users to follow depending on who they are and what they’re looking for, but even here: keep things super simple, make the message very clear, and provide a natural next step for each of your customer segments.

EXAMPLE: Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary’s website has a clever “First-time here?” button to direct new visitors that appears on your first visit only, at the top of his page. The rest of his menu is super clear: Blog, Recent Press, Books, Events; and the final item in the menu is a strong call to action “Hire me to speak”. You can go straight to one of those menu items, or you can keep scrolling down, where you’ll be able to sign up to the newsletter, find out more about Gary’s story and his media appearances, and follow him on social media.

4. The content

Does your website contain content that is relevant and engaging for your visitors? Does it answer all the questions they’re likely to have?

You want to create content for your site that sits in the sweet spot between your business objective and your customers’ needs. Understanding who your visitors are and where they are coming from will help you to create relevant content that answers their most burning questions and keeps them coming back to your site. Think beyond the most obvious brand and product content and ask yourself: what problems can you help to solve?

A part of this equation is what your users are actually searching for online. You can use Google Keyword Planner to see the search volume on different keywords and phrases in your industry. Sign up for a free account here.

5. Social media

You want people to be sharing your material, whether it’s a blog post, a podcast, or another type of content. Have you implemented sharing buttons so that it’s easy for your users to post directly to the main platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and so on?

Are the images and text being pulled correctly when you do share? You can use the Facebook Debugger tool to check why content is not being properly shared on Facebook.

Apart from sharing, you probably also want people to follow you on social media so that you can continue talking to them. Is it clear on your website how to follow your Facebook page, your Twitter feed, your YouTube channel, or whatever your main social networks might be?

6. Other channels

Speaking of your social media networks, are you being consistent in the look and feel of your brand across your various channels? If personal branding is important for your business, are you using the same or similar profile pictures across the board? Are other tangible elements like your logo, colours, fonts, and background pictures consistent?

Ultimately what you’re trying to do is create a distinctive and cohesive brand experience for your consumers over a period of time and over different media. In theory, this means that if you hide your brand name then your consumer can still identify the elements as being associated with your particular brand.

EXAMPLE: Kimra Luna

Kimra has recently come to the fore with an impressive story of going from unemployment benefits to making a 6-figure income online. She now has a very strong brand, which is instantly recognisable first of all thanks to her own personal look and secondly due to the colours, fonts, and overall look and feel of her materials. You can love it or hate it, but it’s a cohesive brand.

7. Your images

It’s all very well to have a lot of text that explains the details of what you do but a picture, of course, tells a thousand words. Images on your site will help you to tell your story in a much more emotional way.

Look at the photos on your site and ask yourself: What are these images telling me? Are they bringing to life the benefits that you offer your clients and customers? Are they representative of the kind of people you work with? What emotion are they stimulating in you? Are the colours warm and comforting, light and inspiring, or dark and menacing?

Don’t undo all the good work you’re doing with the written content with dull or off-putting imagery.

8. The data

a. Behavioural data

Google Analytics can be quite overwhelming for a beginner, and even for website professionals: there’s more data than you can dream of ever needing! The best way to approach this is to identify a few key metrics that will measure what you want to measure. In fact, most of these metrics that you should be looking at when you’re starting out will appear on the main landing page of Google Analytics:

Users – Unique visitors to your website

Pages/session – Average number of pages that someone will visit in one session

Average session duration – Average time spent on the site in one session

Bounce rate – % of people who leave the site having only visited one page

% New sessions – This is the proportion of people who are visiting for the first time.

If you scroll further down the page, you can also see the demographics of visitors including their language and country.

Looking over to the menu on the left, the Acquisition section can be very interesting. Click on the Overview and you’ll see where your visitors are coming from: organic search, paid search, social media, direct (typing in the URL), or referral from other websites.

Another section that can be useful is Behaviour: in the Overview you can see the pages on your site that have the most views.

b. Technical data

If you’re a little more technically advanced, you may also want to review the speed of your website with one of these free tools and address the areas identified as issues:

Google PageSpeed Insights

Pingdom Website Speed Test

GTMetrix Website Speed and Performance Optimisation

9. Mobile

Look into Google Analytics to determine the split of visitors who are viewing your site on their desktop versus on their mobile. This will vary by industry but the overall trend of course is that more and more website traffic is mobile driven. You want all these things that we’ve looked at so far to apply on mobile too: clear messages, simple navigation, easy to find what you’re looking for.

Use Google’s mobile friendly test to get a quick feel for whether or not your website performs in this area; and, of course, you can try using the website on your own mobile!

Rather than create a whole separate mobile site, which will require a different design as well as different content, the best approach is usually to have a responsive website. A responsive website will adapt to the screen size of your device – website providers like WordPress have a number of readily available responsive themes that do all the work for you.

10. Updates

Now we don’t want to just make these improvements to your site and then leave it for another five years… Likewise there’s no point in launching a blog, or creating lots of social media profiles, if you aren’t going to be creating content for these on a consistent basis.

What can you do to make sure that the website is updated on a regular basis, both in terms of content and usability? Can you schedule a regular website audit in your calendar? If you have a team, who is responsible for updating the site? What structures can you put in place to make sure that your website is maintained at the professional standard that you set for other areas of your business? Set yourself up for success with a systematic approach.

Download this free overview of the 10 simple steps to auditing your website HERE.

If you feel you need help in this area, get in touch to arrange a professional website audit that will give you clear recommendations on how to improve your site to support your business objectives.

24/02/2016 By crocuscomms 1 Comment

10 Steps To Creating A Killer LinkedIn Profile

Last week we talked about building your personal brand, and in the professional world we said that nothing beats LinkedIn. There are over 400 millions users with 2 new members joining every second (Source).

In a way it’s like an online CV, but with greater possibilities to tell your story. It’s worth spending some time on this, even if you’re not looking for a job right now: you can get your profile in order so that it’s all set up for when you really need it. In fact, this is not even really about getting a job, it’s about making connections and having conversations.

As you work on optimising your profile, always consider the bigger picture; think about what you’re aiming for rather than what you’re doing today. For example, if you’re looking to change direction in your career, maybe move into a different industry or a different type of role, then try to highlight the aspects of your profile that fit this new direction. Identify key transferrable skills that will be important in that new role, and emphasise the most relevant responsibilities and achievements.

Oh, and if you don’t want all your connections, including your current employer, being told about these changes that you’re making to your profile, then make sure you set the privacy settings to not notify your network!

So with that in mind, here are 10 steps to creating a killer LinkedIn profile:

1. Get a professional picture

Please don’t leave the default LinkedIn silhouette, it’s really a barrier when you send a connection request or when someone wants to engage with you. People with profile pictures are 14 times more likely to be viewed (Source)! Likewise, don’t use that selfie from your last night out, or a full-body picture of you doing a 360 on your snowboard, and don’t include your wife, your kids, your dog and your goldfish. This is not about spending lots of money on a professional photo shoot, although getting a professional to take photos is not a bad idea. The bare minimum is that the photo is not blurry and actually looks like you; after that, it’s a case of communicating who you are in a professional way. Oh, and smile! The format on LinkedIn is square so think of this as well when you’re choosing and uploading your picture.

2. Create a custom headline

The headline that appears under your name is possibly the most important element of your profile, and is the only thing that someone will see, along with your name and picture, when you appear in search results. LinkedIn will automatically just choose your latest job title and company but this may not be the most effective use of the space. Consider using keywords instead, or try some version of this formula: WHAT you do, for WHOM, and HOW; and, if you can, add some evidence to back it up. This approach is also helpful if you are unemployed, as you are drawing your attention to your skills and your value (instead of putting “unemployed” or “seeking new opportunities”).

Here are some real-life examples, each of them ranking in the top ten among my own connections:

Profit Specialist – Helping Business Coaches, Consultants & Accountants to ATTRACT, WIN & RETAIN more profitable clients
Early Stage Investor | Purity, Health & Wellness | Consumer IOT | Hardware Startups| Connected Devices | Smart Appliances
Thought Leader | Innovator | Entrepreneur | Company Founder | Professional Speaker | Digital Startup Mentor
Global Relationship Builder | Mobile App Expert | 8 k+ Connection | Director – Algoworks | ex CTO | ex Founder | Angel

Try to avoid the realm of the cheesy – phrases like “social media ninja”, “digital guru” or “change maker” have lost all meaning and these are not the words that people are using to search for you. Note also that there is a 120-character limit.

3. Craft your story in the summary

This is where you can really showcase who you are and what you do, weaving your knowledge and experience into a cohesive story. Think about who you’re talking to, what key messages you want them to get from reading this, and perhaps a next step you want them to take; add your email address if you want them to get in touch. The summary should be written in first person (“I work with…”), and it’s your opportunity to tell us who you are and to pique our interest so that we look at the rest of your profile. Highlight your key achievements and if necessary explain any gaps or things that might not otherwise make sense. When it comes to including keywords, here and throughout the profile, think carefully about what people would search for if they were looking for someone like you. Have a bit of a search yourself and see what people with similar backgrounds are putting in their profiles.

4. Add descriptions for each of your previous positions

First of all, include all your previous jobs. Then, you have space to write about each of your previous roles, so don’t leave it blank with just the title and company listed. No need to write an essay, but do try to provide more context, what exactly your job entailed, and what you concretely did. Focus on your results and key achievements, which are much more powerful than simply listing your tasks; but of course don’t share confidential financial information from your past employers. As with the summary, you can bring each position to life by including video, images, presentations, and so on that will showcase your work.

5. Bolster your profile with recommendations

Ask your previous employers and peers to write a short recommendation for your past roles. Maybe don’t do it for your current job, or at least wait until you’ve left (a reason for staying on good terms with your past bosses). These recommendations are much more impactful than the endorsements of your skills (see #7), which are very general and often come from people you’ve never even worked with. Depending on your relationship with the person making the recommendation, you may also mention the areas that you’d love for them to include – perhaps your results on project x, your leadership on event y, or your collaboration skills as demonstrated in z situation.

6. Complete the additional sections

LinkedIn allows you to add other relevant sections so use this opportunity if you can. Add awards that you’ve won for your work, showcase projects and presentations, include any certifications that are important for your industry or role. You can also add other information such as organisations of which you’re a member, any volunteering activity that you do, causes you care about, and opportunities you’re looking for.

7. Get your skills in order

Even just listing your skills makes your profile 13 times more likely to be viewed (Source).The endorsement system on LinkedIn can be a little random, however, and you may end up with an incomplete and misleading picture of your skill set. Identify the skills that you want to feature prominently on your profile and add these if they are missing. Ask colleagues to endorse you to move these higher up in the ranking (or move them up yourself, and you’ll soon be getting endorsements for these new skills too). Clean up existing skills e.g. there’s probably no point in having nine endorsements for “global marketing” and three for “international marketing”. You can’t merge these unfortunately so consider deleting the less important ones. Note that you can list up to 50 skills but only 10 will be featured prominently.

8. Connect with people

LinkedIn is a place where you can be a little less restrictive in terms of the people you connect with – unlike, say, Facebook, where you probably want to keep it to people you actually know. The whole point of LinkedIn is connecting with people, so be open to accepting requests from strangers when their profile looks interesting and relevant. If you’re the one sending the request, PLEASE write a personalised message to briefly explain why you are connecting.

Joining groups for professionals in your field or industry is also a great way to stay in touch with the latest trends, make new connections and create future opportunities. Choose a few that look interesting and engage with them regularly – you’ll find that some groups are pretty quiet but if there’s a healthy discussion going on then you’ll get the most benefit out of the group.

9. Create valuable content

We talked about this already last week in our article on 7 First Steps To Establishing Your Personal Brand Online: don’t just create your profile and leave it there. Start engaging with other people’s content – “like” articles that your connections are posting, comment on them when you have something to add to the discussion. Share articles that you think will be interesting for your peers. As you get more comfortable, you can start to create original content too: publish articles via LinkedIn Pulse and these posts will appear at the top of your profile. Your articles will demonstrate your expertise in your field, reach a larger audience as they get shared among your connections and beyond, and make your profile rank higher as well.

10. Keep it updated

It goes without saying (or at least it should) that you’ll need to update your profile to keep it relevant and fresh. There’s nothing worse than a profile that clearly hasn’t been touched in three years.

Knowing what to write when you’re in actual fact unemployed is always going to be tricky, but lying about still being employed is not the answer. If you left a company last November, it shouldn’t still be listed as your current role today. You shouldn’t be sitting around waiting for that new opportunity to land in your lap anyway, so if you’re keeping yourself busy volunteering, doing some consulting or freelance work, or perhaps studying, then make sure you include this. 42% of hiring managers surveyed by LinkedIn viewed volunteer experience as equivalent to work experience (Source). Note that you can actually move many of the sections around, so you can bring the relevant sections higher up to highlight these.

So those are our 10 steps to creating a killer LinkedIn profile. Follow these and you’re more likely to be found by potential clients and employers, you’ll look professional and convincing when they do find you, and new opportunities are much more likely to come your way.

You might want to consider the one-month free trial of LinkedIn Premium, which promises additional features including a bigger profile photo and a larger search result listing. Even if you don’t continue with it longer term, the trial gives you access to information about professionals like you along with recommendations on keywords to put in your summary, key skills, and groups to join.

While we’re at it, you can customise your public profile URL as well so that it becomes www.linkedin.com/in/yourname. This looks more professional when you’re sharing it with your connections or if you include it in a job application. You can find the instructions in the LinkedIn help centre.

17/02/2016 By crocuscomms 4 Comments

7 First Steps To Establishing Your Personal Brand Online

It’s all very well to market your business and your product – but what about marketing yourself? It may feel “icky” to think of yourself as a brand, and to promote yourself as such, but there are many benefits to doing so.

Establishing your own personal brand online allows you to tell your own story as you want it to be told; to establish yourself as a thought leader (a little bit icky again?) in your industry; to create something bigger than the business and the product; and to produce real value for your followers. It can be a critical component of your business ecosystem when you’re an entrepreneur but also when you’re applying to a job, and recruiters are likely to look you up online and see what they can find. Rather than wait until you’re looking for a new job, get a head start today – so that when you need it, it’s already there.

Here are 7 first steps to get you started in establishing your personal brand online:

1. Define your story

Before telling your story, you’ll need to work out what that story will be. Try asking yourself these questions:

What are your core values?
What are your personal strengths and skills?
What do you want to be known for?
What are your unique personality traits?
What will make you stand out versus your competition?

Choose the key elements from your answers to these questions and craft a short paragraph that you can use as a basis for all your communication online.

To get really crisp and concise about what it is you do, you can try the following “elevator pitch” formula: What do you do? For whom? For what purpose? E.g. I do x for people who y so that they z.

2. Audit your online presence

Now that you have the story you want to tell, let’s take a look at what story you’re actually telling today. Start by Googling yourself and see what appears first. Is it your personal Facebook profile? Click on the image tab: which photos of you are listed here and are they the ones you want to come first? You can set up Google alerts to monitor new mentions going forward.

Next, go through your various profiles and platforms and see what story you’re telling there. Note down any areas that need updating. If you have lots of inappropriate photos on Facebook then visit your privacy settings and make sure that all photos and posts are restricted to your friends.

3. Review (or create!) your LinkedIn profile

There are so many different social networks out there but for the professional world the main one you want to worry about is LinkedIn. We could write a whole post just on optimising your LinkedIn profile but here are some quick tips:

Get a professional photo
Customise your headline
Write a clear summary
Describe each of your past and current positions
Get recommendations from past employers
Add your key skills

4. Claim your other social media profiles

They say Twitter is dying but for those of us who use it the benefits can be huge, including staying on top of the latest news but also publishing our blog posts and, importantly, connecting with our peers and with potential clients in our field. When selecting the right social network(s), you need to think about who you are, what your business is, and who your clients are. For example, there’s no point in setting up an Instagram account if you hate taking photos and don’t like sharing aspects of your lifestyle publicly. Likewise there’s no point in getting into Periscope and Snapchat if your target audience isn’t on there.

You may also want to claim your handle (your name) on new networks to make sure that you protect your own brand and prevent other people from using it, even if you aren’t yet active on there.

5. Create a personal website

A LinkedIn profile, along with other social networks, can be a great start but if you want to get serious about building your brand online you really need a website. It doesn’t have to be fancy, it can be just a couple of pages with a short bio, your CV, and your contact details and links to your social network profiles. You can create something quite nice just on Tumblr or you can try something like WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace. Get a custom domain name (www.johnsmith.com rather than www.johnsmith.wordpress.com) and get someone to proofread all the copy for you, especially if you’re not a native English speaker (that goes for all online platforms, in fact).

6. Use a professional email address

Please, please, PLEASE don’t use a Hotmail address for professional contacts. It’s embarrassing. Really. Gmail is the standard these days so at minimum you should get something like johnsmith@gmail.com. It’s even better if you can secure your own domain name. You’ll get this automatically if you have your own website, e.g. john@johnsmith.com or why not workwithjane@janejones.com. Eventually you can even add other email addresses to reflect the size of your business, for example, you can have media@johnsmith.com, careers@johnsmith.com, and so on.

7. Produce valuable content

It’s nice to have a presence on different networks but if you stop there no one’s actually going to know that you exist. Start by commenting on, and sharing, other people’s content; but then you need to be creating and publishing valuable content for your peers to read and engage with. It’s completely up to you which format you choose here. If you enjoy writing then adding a blog to your personal website could be a good idea; this will also get you appearing higher in search rankings. If you’re more of a verbal person, why not try podcasting or vlogging? The medium will also determine which platform you choose, for example, YouTube might be interesting for video, or maybe Periscope. Whichever format and platform you choose, be purposeful: each blog post you write, each tweet you send, is adding another piece to the puzzle that is your personal brand so make sure you’re building something cohesive and effective.

A note on business cards

Do we still need business cards in today’s online world? It’s always so exciting to order beautiful business cards and letterheads but think about when and how you’ll actually use them. If you plan to go to a lot of events and networking is an important part of making contacts in your business, then it may not be a bad idea to have something tangible to hand out to people. If so, you should include your name, a meaningful job title that tells people what you do, and key contact information such as your website (and/or LinkedIn profile), email and Twitter handle. Don’t spend a load of money on fancy cards that your contacts are simply going to throw in the bin – unless your business is a creative one and having an “out-of-the-box” card could be part of getting clients.

16/01/2015 By crocuscomms Leave a Comment

5 Digital Marketing New Year’s Resolutions you absolutely should keep in 2015

We’re already well into the New Year, and it’s now that all your good intentions may be beginning to falter. Are you still going to the gym? Eating that celery? Leaving work early? De-cluttering the house?

And what about in business? Did you call out any big goals or strategies for this year? Are you planning a re-stage of your website? Are you seeking to increase conversion? Are you building your organisation’s capabilities? Here are 5 New Year’s resolutions you absolutely should keep in 2015 when it comes to marketing your business…

1. Find your purpose

Consumers now are looking for much more than just a product benefit or brand name in order to give you their money and their loyalty. In fact, it’s not just consumers but employees as well: 60% of Millennials are looking for “a sense of purpose” when choosing which company to work for. Dove has been running their popular Campaign for Real Beauty since 2004, while 2014 saw the powerful Always #likeagirl campaign, which came out of research commissioned by the brand that found that 50% of girls report a drop in confidence after their first period. As an example of what not to do, just look to Victoria’s Secret perfect “body” fiasco, which led to a backlash with women responding that #iamperfect, thank you very much.

Brands like Toms and Warby Parker are also now showing that it’s possible to do good, with a social mission right at the heart of their business model, while making a profit. So what meaning can you bring to your business? What do you believe in? What’s your underlying purpose? Why should consumers care?

2. Embrace the newsroom approach

People are engaging (or not) with your brand 365 days of the year: they’re complaining on Twitter, sharing on Facebook, creating wish lists on Pinterest. Sometimes you just can’t plan ahead – remember the Oreo Superbowl #blackout? Static strategies written in PowerPoint last year will do you no good and agility is key, especially as the environment in which your business is operating is so rapidly changing. One big success of 2014 was the Adidas ‘All in or Nothing’ campaign during the World Cup. It was expensive but arguably paid off spectacularly, making it the most talked about brand and hashtag #allin while Adidas was even the sponsor for both teams in the final. The approach was also risky, and engaging real-time with consumers does bring with it any number of pitfalls: see J C Penney trying to be funny during last year’s Superbowl and Delta’s ignorance during the World Cup, or Build-a-Bear wanting to mark the anniversary of 9/11.

You may get lucky with a few interns who come up with something funny now and then, but to be really successful in real-time engagement you need a robust combination of planned, anticipated and reactive content, with a multi-functional team ready to respond with the right message at the right time.

3. Get geeky about data

In order to engage in real-time marketing, you’ll need the right information and data at your fingertips. The internet is a gold mine of customer intelligence, but companies are not yet taking full advantage of this. Attempts at re-targeting are annoying rather than helpful: adverts for products you’ve already bought, hotels you’ve already booked are following you all across the web. Then there was the case of Target congratulating a girl on her pregnancy before she had even told her parents. Oops.

Analytics are critical to understanding how your website is performing, what content people are engaging with in social, and what you should be doing to improve.

4. It’s all about integration

Consumers don’t think about your brand in silos: every interaction on desktop or mobile, Facebook or Twitter, online or offline, should be seamlessly working together as one holistic experience. If a product is out of stock, the shop assistant should be able to take you onto the website and order it online for you – likewise, when browsing an eCommerce site, you expect to see availability in your nearest store. And integration is not just about the digital and the physical world: we are also seeing a need to integrate across different parts of a business, with marketing having to align with everyone from customer service to PR to legal; work on content creation feeding into web and SEO, social media, email; different social media platforms needing to work together; and so on.

You may need to drastically think your organisation in order to address these changing needs of the business.

5. This really is the year of mobile

Every year has been called out as the year of mobile for as least the past five years if not more, and yet we’re still not reflecting this shift in our activities. Mobile has already overtaken overall desktop traffic on the internet. Half of Google’s search queries come from mobile but many websites are still not responsive for different screen sizes (Google recently a mobile-friendly testing tool for a quick check of how your site is performing). More than 70 per cent of Facebook activity is now via mobile but many brand pages have apps that only work on desktop.

It really is time now to take mobile seriously, with mobile-driven, short-form video on the rise, mobile payments becoming more and more common, and proximity messaging and hyper-targeting more and more effective.

So will you be sticking to your New Year’s Resolutions? You’d better, if you want a business that thrives in this fast-evolving digital landscape.

06/11/2014 By Anna Lundberg Leave a Comment

Shut Up and Let the Brand Speak: Finding Your Tone of Voice

We talk a lot about content in the online space, creating content, distributing content – but how do you make that content authentic and ‘ownable’ for your brand or company? Whether you’re writing 500-word blog posts on your website or 140-character tweets, it’s not just about the type of content that you publish, but the style of that content. Here, copywriter Alex Genn shares his thoughts on why defining your tone of voice is so important, and how you can go about doing so for your own business.

Tone of what?

We’ve all heard the term bandied around but what does it really mean? To me, tone of voice is the definition of how the brand speaks (in the written word). Brand language is how we put the tone of voice into practice. And it’s as much part of the brand as the logo, values, packaging or services. Usually it’s expressed through the written word, on the page, online, in social media, in videos (as voice over) or wherever. There’s also cross-over into design. The brand language can define where and when you capitalise words, how you punctuate, the format of dates and times, and anything else that’s written down.

What’s it for?

The tone of voice expresses your brand’s unique personality, reflecting the values, objectives and offering of the company. Crucially it does so in a consistent way. This re-assures the reader (customer) that the brand is trustworthy. So in the same way that you would have brand guidelines to ensure the logo always uses the same colour pallet, your tone of voice allows you to create a brand language guide that can ensure the brand expresses itself consistently.

How does it work?

Tone of voice is one of those things you’ll already be aware of but don’t really notice, at least not until it’s pointed out. For example, if you think about Innocent Drinks, their tone is light-hearted and earnest. It brings to mind a chatty, fun friend, who cares about your health. Now consider IBM; their tone is serious, traditional and austere. It feels like a consultant concerned about your business. The tone of each is very different but absolutely right for their business and for their customers. And both serve to re-enforce who they are as brands, as well as their understanding of their customers’ expectations of them as a brand.

What About Me?!

So here’s the tricky question for every business, large and small: how do you find your tone of voice? Well, the real question, and sorry to get philosophical, is actually: who are you? We need to define who the brand is first. Once we know that, we can understand their personality. And once we know the personality, we can define how that ‘person’ would speak.

It’s very common for companies to be so busy with the day-to-day business of servicing clients and selling their services that things like branding don’t ever move off the back burner. Especially when getting the brand defined seems so often to come with an enormous bill from a branding agency. And of course more than that, it can be contentious. After all, it’s easy for everyone at the company to agree about what you sell. But how do you find a consensus for who your brand is?

1. Who’s in?

The first thing you need to decide is, well, who’s deciding? Create a stakeholder group, making sure you include everyone senior or who would want to be involved, as if they only get involved later on they can de-rail the process, undoing all your hard work.

2. Brass tacks

Once you’ve got your stakeholder group, you need to start your company soul searching. You may have done this already; you might have already defined the company’s core values, its mission and its objectives. You might know exactly how these are perceived by, and relate to, your customer and staff. If so, great, if not, you need to get cracking.

3. Making it human

Once you’ve agreed on how these key aspects of your company are understood, and connect with your customers and staff, you can move on to thinking about your brand personality – this is how you discover who your business is, to define how it speaks. This might feel like an odd process, applying something distinctly human to an organisation, but it’s crucial to establishing something that people can relate to, after all, people relate to other people, so it makes sense to give your organisation relatable human qualities.

4. Giving it a voice

Having defined a personality that everyone agrees fits the company’s values and objectives, you can move on to express how that personality talks. Is it serious, austere and wise or fun, impulsive and quirky? Whatever you decide, the language will fall naturally out of the personality. You’ll need to consider carefully everything about the way you use words, phrases, punctuation and grammar. For example, a light-hearted conversational tone will use more relaxed grammar, shorter sentences and words, and colloquialisms. Conversely a more serious tone will use traditional grammar, longer sentences and words, and generally more formal terminology.

5. Setting it in stone

Once you’ve defined your voice, you need to make sure it relates to where it came from. So have a look at those values we talked about earlier. How does the voice you’ve chosen express them? Which phrases and ideas express each value best? Create some examples. Of course you need to make sure these also reflect the personality. These are the building blocks of your brand language document. Give everyone in your organisation (or at least in marketing/communications) access to this document and it can ensure consistency across all your brand communications.

Remember this is a creative process. Have fun with it!