How do you adjust your voice and tone for different customer journey stages and content types?

1 What are voice and tone?

Voice and tone are often used interchangeably, but they have distinct meanings. Voice is the consistent style and expression of your brand across all your content. It's how you communicate your identity, values, and message to your audience. Tone is the variation of your voice depending on the context, purpose, and emotion of your content. It's how you adapt your voice to suit the situation, the channel, and the audience's mood and needs.

2 Why do voice and tone matter?

Voice and tone matter because they affect how your audience relates to your content and your brand. They can help you build trust, credibility, and loyalty with your audience, or they can alienate, confuse, or annoy them. By using a clear and consistent voice, you can establish your brand identity and differentiate yourself from your competitors. By using an appropriate and flexible tone, you can create content that resonates with your audience and guides them through the customer journey.

3 How to define your voice and tone

Before you can adjust your voice and tone, you need to define them. This requires understanding your brand identity, your audience, and your goals. To do this, you must identify your brand values, mission, and personality; research your audience and create personas; choose four or five voice attributes that describe how you want to sound; and create a voice and tone guide that outlines your voice attributes, tone variations, dos and don'ts, and examples for different content types and channels. This will help ensure consistent and effective content across all channels.

4 How to adjust your tone for customer journey stages

The customer journey is the process that your audience goes through from becoming aware of your brand to becoming loyal customers and advocates. It typically consists of four stages: awareness, consideration, decision, and retention. At each stage, your audience has different needs, questions, and emotions that must be addressed with the right content and tone. When it comes to awareness, content should be informative, engaging, and helpful in order to capture their attention, spark their interest, and build their trust. During the consideration stage, content should be authoritative, confident, and empathetic in order to showcase your value proposition, address their pain points and objections, and demonstrate your credibility. At the decision stage, content should be clear, urgent, and supportive in order to provide clear instructions, highlight benefits and guarantees, and create a sense of urgency or scarcity. Finally, during the retention stage content should be friendly, grateful, and helpful in order to thank them, offer assistance, solicit feedback, and reward them.