how to create your "voice"
good morning media folks ☀️
There’s a lot of shit newsletters out there. And it usually stems from one thing... voice.
Now voice can mean a lot of things. It can mean how you write, how you tell a story, what imagery you use, your editorial strategy, branding, how you engage with your audience... and more.
For you to build a successful media business today, you need to speak the language of your audience. And you need to do it tastefully. So in this issue, we will discuss how to do this.
We’ll cover how to define your brand voice, consistency, storytelling techniques, engaging your audience, how to refine, and the long-term impacts.
defining your brand voice
The first step is to find out who your audience is. Don’t assume (which most publishers do). You need to be assertive in getting this information.
In its simplest form, surveys are a good idea. But you can’t expect your audience to submit responses just because you want them to. You have to earn it. And earning it takes some work. What they need to understand is why they should be submitting these surveys. And more importantly, what (and who) is this for?
I’ll give you an example. I recently worked with a prominent LinkedIn influencer (about 300k followers) and 100k email subs.
What we did was break a welcome sequence down to be able to earn those responses.
here’s how it went:
- once you acquire an email, send a welcome email immediately
- after 7 days, send them your top articles viewed
- after 14 days get more personal, tell your story, and introduce yourself properly
- after 1 month, ask them to reply about their experience so far (keep this short)
- week 6 - 8, time for an ask. send them a demographic survey to get more info on your subs
- 4 months in, send them another survey. this can be a little deeper (their experience with the content, more demo data, etc...)
- 1 year, time to thank them. send them a small gift of appreciation for being a subscriber for a year
This does everything you need. Clarifies your mission, helps you understand your audience, and provides insight into how you should speak to them.
Then get organized. Put together a brand voice chart based on your reader's responses. What tone do they respond to the most? When you write about certain topics, how do they respond? Lastly, what are some of the personality traits that you’ve uncovered based on the survey responses? Build out a persona and speak to those personas.
Understanding the metrics behind this will help with this too. We will touch on that shortly.
consistency
Being consistent is easy if you build a system around it. Based on your learnings, build style guides around your voice. What’s your tone and who are the people you speak to? How do you talk about certain topics... What topics don’t you touch?
The rest is easy from there. Because you’ll be able to create unified messaging once it’s etched in stone. And you want to have unified messaging across all channels (newsletters, social, website... etc). This keeps the consistency that you’re audience is used to and for those that are new.
As you scale, it’s extremely important to train new team members on this. They have their own voice of course, but you need to create likemindedness around your brand voice. Because your team is also evangelists for the brand, and they need to speak and act according to the guides to keep engagement with your audience up.
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storytelling
Please don’t be a robot. And that means using AI to write your content. Yes, you can use it to create ideas, but if you’re using it to write your content you’re going to lose. You have to remember... the person behind the other computer is a human. And that’s your audience. So you need to keep yourself in check.
The most important thing to build a true brand voice is storytelling. Get very good at this.
There are a couple of ways that you can approach this. The first is personal experiences and anecdotes. That’s what your welcome sequence is for. It’s to help you build a relationship with your audience and create an emotional attachment to your content. What keeps them coming back is if they know the person on the other side.
The next is to create relatable content. Things you’re audience is familiar with. Your audience demographic surveys will tell you how to approach this. It will tell you what their interests are, and other information about them where you can provide industry-specific analogies that help understand complex topics and engage with them deeper.
The last piece is to entertain. Entertaining can mean a ton of things. You don’t have to be a comedian, but you need some juice behind your voice. Something that makes you stand out. A methodology I always live by is writing like you speak. That’s one of the best ways to connect with your audience. It makes things easier to understand and more fluid. And inject your personality into it! I swear in my newsletters all the time. That’s who I am.
Someone who does this exceptionally is theSkimm. It started in 2012 to give millennial women the information they need to navigate life's most important decisions. So the founders wrote the newsletter in a smart, snappy, and relatable tone full of pop culture references and humor that resonated with their millennial audience. And it gave them a strong brand identity that still stands today.
engaging your audience
Your readers have a voice and believe it or not... that’s a part of your brand.
Showcase them. Give them a voice in your newsletter. Because you're probably similar to them. And they probably believe a lot of the things you believe in. Most publishers don’t do this. And I’ll never understand why.
Engage your readers differently. Ask them for their insights, and share them with the community. You can leverage UGC throughout the newsletter, in the welcome sequence, on social and more.
You can use polls but do them tastefully. Make sure they’re relevant and share with the audience.
For example, if you’re a finance newsletter, and you’re talking about mortgage refinancing, poll your readers about what their experience has been like and then share the results with your audience. Don’t keep it to yourself. You’ll foster loyalty and community with your readership because they’ll realize that other people are like them.
Social proof is your best friend. It can help bring in a new audience, and also keep your current subscribers engaged. Find ways to use it everywhere you can.
refining
This is pretty standard... keep track of your metrics. Overall click rate, deliverability, opens, reader feedback, how it’s being shared, and more. You always need to pay attention to this to understand its effectiveness. If you’re metrics are dipping, it’s likely due to something that’s changed in your voice or how you’re approaching your readership.
Don’t be afraid to update your brand voice guidelines. People change, and so do you. And if you feel like taking a different approach is a good idea, then do it. And make sure to understand its effectiveness as you go.
If you do this right (or even focus on it a little bit) the impacts can mean increased loyalty, brand recognition, and differentiation from other newsletters out there.
Which also means more engagement and $$$ in your pocket.
see you next week,
shaan
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