Have you ever taken one of those quizzes where you have to guess the brand from a snippet of their copy? The vocabulary and turns of phrase they use are consistent enough for you to be able to pick them out of the lineup… sometimes.
Your clients’ brands might not be getting featured in the quizzes, but their style of writing still becomes familiar to their audience, and it’s a good idea to keep it consistent.
Getting a consistent tone of voice when you outsource
How do you keep that same tone of voice when you outsource your content writing? In this article, we share four strategies to keep the style consistent.
1. A solid brief
Step one for any WordHound project is filling in a content brief. This gives us the information on what you’re looking for, and where all of those great resources are hiding. There’s space to include pitch decks, social posts, and inspiration from other brands. This article walks you through it.
2. A client call
When you partner with WordHound as your white label content agency, you also get Ang as your content manager. When you sign a new client for content, they have the option of booking a call to talk through the website content or content plan. On that call, we use Otter to record and transcribe the conversation, so we can go back and pull out phrasing and vocabulary later on. When we start with the client’s words it’s much more likely to sound like them. Or, as one put it:
“Wow, it’s like me but better!”
3. Same client, same writer
We have a small team of writers who are all brilliant generalists. We match the client with the writer who best fits their needs, and we keep them together whenever possible. The longer the client stays with us, the better the writer gets to know their business, the industry, and the tone of voice. This strategy has proved successful for our client, Rowse, who have worked with the same writer for so long now that she’s an expert in electronics and pneumatics.
4. Proofing for ToV
In terms of tone of voice for a particular client, the proofing process will include a check of the client’s own material by both the writer and the editor. Once we’ve got to the point where the client is happy with the style and tone of what we’re producing for them, the proofing process is straightforward – you can see in more detail how it works in this article.
However, if a client’s usual writer is unavailable or on holiday for a particular job, we will of course have a nice little stash of approved articles to send to the replacement writer, which they can use for matching the client’s preferred tone. In this case, extra care is taken with the proofreading and editing to make sure the new writer has hit the mark.
Making the client smile
In a nutshell, the aim of the exercise is always to put a cheery grin on the client’s face. We want them to read what we’ve created and think, “Yes! This is what I would have written if I had more time, or indeed the inclination! Hooray!”. The way we get to that point is to keep their preferred ToV at the front of our brains at every stage of the process. And it literally always* works!
*Apart from that one time 😬
