Everyone can agree that having a blog is good for your business.  Blogs are a great way to share your voice, display your expertise, solidify your branding, and show who your company is in a relationship-building way.

Whose Voice Are We Talking About?

You, the person you are, have a personality and a way of speaking. There are topics you’re excited about and fields you’re an expert in. You have a particular vocabulary that suits you. This all makes up your voice.

Before moving forward with a business blog, you need to know whose voice is speaking. If you yourself are the sole personality your customers want to access, use your own voice. This will be the case if you’re a public speaker, a writer (not a company of writers), or a guru in your field like Robert Kiyosaki and Dan Savage. Also the right fit for comedians like Ellen Degeneres or Ali Wong. At one of these people’s website, you expect to hear their personality come through in the writing. You’ve come looking for them, and will probably be disappointed if you find what is clearly some other writer.

There are businesses that are big enough and have a big enough writing staff, that you want to have a voice that is you, but it is you in your role within the company. You: the pastry chef. The head lifeguard. The human resources manager.

 

Group Voice

Also, in many cases your business blog is not supposed to be written in your voice. Writers need to speak in your business’ voice. Who is the company? What does the company value? What language does your company speak and what are the company’s areas of expertise?

This is especially true if there’s a small (or tiny) writing staff, and the writers are covering all topics together. Here you need to create the illusion of a cohesive identity for the company by becoming one personality together.

 

Know Who You’re Talking to

Even when you’re writing as your own authentic self, this is not your diary. You’ll need to stay in your role as an expert by knowing how you relate to your audience. You wouldn’t talk to a 50 year old man the same way you talk to a 5 year old child. In the same way, your blog cannot talk to wholesalers the same way it would talk to end users.

Consider who you want to read your blog, and talk to that person or those people. Only.

 

Blog writing voice: No need to pretend to be extra fancy, UNLESS it fits with your brand's voice.

No need to pretend to be extra fancy, UNLESS it fits with your brand’s voice.

Building Your Blog Writing Voice

Now that you know who you’re speaking for and to, it’s a good idea to clarify for yourself what your voice is really going to be like on this blog. Create a description of you voice that you can keep in the office to reference as you write. Is your online voice professional? Serious? Sarcastic? Do you tell a lot of G-rated jokes? What reading level do you speak? What consistent perspective do you take on topics? Keep fine tuning this voice.

We recommend you match the reading level you write in to the reading level of your ideal reader, or just below. To find out what reading level your writing is, use a free tool like readable.io to measure your text on various scales. If you find a piece of writing online that has the level of complexity or ease that you’d like to duplicate, you can copy and paste it into readable.io and aim to match that reading level in your own writing.

 

For further reading to fine-tune your voice, here are some articles that vary slightly in messages, and together build a good basis for creating your voice:

How to Find Your Company’s Voice

4 Steps to Finding Your Brand’s Voice

Finding Your Brand’s Tone of Voice

 

D-Kode Tech can plan, write, and post blogs and images for your company. Contact us today to explore options in blog writing, digital marketing or web/app development.