Brand Tone of Voice Online: Use Your Web Writing Style to Build Customer Loyalty and Increase Sales
- London: Tuesday, May 18
- Toronto: Thursday, August 12
Catherine Toole
Full-Day Tutorial
What do we want from our customers online? We want them to love us. We want them to buy from us - or at least ‘buy into’ us. We want them to navigate our site with ease, enjoy the experience and keep coming back. We want them to tell their friends how great we are, so they’ll visit too. It is the words on our websites and the way in which key messages are expressed play a huge part in encouraging and enabling them to do this.
Brand tone of voice is best explained as the way your company or brand would ‘speak’ if it were a person. Most companies will have a brand book or language guidelines which outline certain adjectives and phrases which are on and off brand. Most of these style guidelines relate to print activity. To roll out a brand tone of voice accurately and consistently online is often a far bigger challenge. To deliver on-brand content which is also usable, appeals to the time-poor scan reader, is optimized for search and yet focused on ecommerce objectives takes real expertise.
This tutorial is for anyone who wants to maximize the value of taking their brand tone of voice online. You’ll learn how the way in which your brand or organization ‘speaks’ on your website or in emails can persuade people to do really valuable things:
- completing a form
- signing up for emails
- using online customer service rather than calling up
- choosing which product or service is right for them to buy
You’ll see how some of the most famous and successful brands, from Apple to Innocent, use brand tone of voice to help build customer loyalty, differentiate themselves from the competition and deliver excellent online service.
Whether you have existing brand guidelines or not, by the end of this session you will have defined your online tone of voice and have a wealth of practical tips on how to use it to your organization’s advantage online.
What You’ll Learn
- What it means to have a brand tone of voice and its commercial value online
- How to develop your own tone of voice and employ it consistently
- How to develop guidelines and train content producers to use them
- Keys to rolling out and monitoring tone of voice
Course Outline
- What is “tone of voice” and why does it matter?
- How can a brand have a voice?
- How do companies work tone of voice to their commercial advantage?
- When brand guidelines are not enough
- How to get from brand values to tonal values
- How to get from tonal values to a tone of voice and specific language rules
- Developing and defining a voice
- Why a strong tone of voice is more than just a list of adjectives (that everyone else is using, too)
- How to build and define a voice that can be used repeatedly by multiple content creators
- The power of examples (especially negative examples)
- Spectrums of nuance: Dialing up and down values on a tonal wheel
- Context, lexicons, guidelines, user personas, and other useful tools
- What are the challenges of communicating a brand tone of voice online?
- The special challenges of communicating tone in digital media
- How to communicate a voice successfully online without sacrificing usability or SEO benefits
- Putting tone to work: Practical tips and techniques
- The importance of content selection
- Emphasize benefits, not features
- Selling through the telling detail
- Use plain language
- Choose punctuation wisely
- Not just for product pages—rolling out your tone of voice online
- “About us” content
- Transactional service messages
- Online forms—reassurance text
- Error messages
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lectures, Q&As, practical exercises, and extensive examples of Web and email copy written in a specific tone of voice.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides
Who Should Attend
This course is for anyone who produces, manages, or influences a brand’s digital content. A basic knowledge of the principles of writing for the Web is assumed.
Instructor
Catherine Toole is the founder and CEO of the British digital copywriting agency Sticky Content.
A former press journalist, she has spent the past 12 years specializing in Web and email content projects for a
wide range of clients, including the UK government, Nokia, HSBC, Orange Business Services, Regus, Heinz, AOL,
Xerox, London Stock Exchange, Hilton Hotels, Sony, the UK Post Office, and Europcar. Sticky Content also
provides content strategy, Web writing training, and copywriting services to many of the UK's top digital agencies.
A well-known speaker and blogger in the UK, Catherine is currently coauthoring a book on the
“nine new rules of ecommerce,” which will be published internationally in early 2010. She sits on the
British Interactive Media Committee.
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