Finding your brand's voice
If you have ever started to create a social post for your business and found yourself stuck staring at your keyboard or cell phone, you are not alone in your online writer's block of misery. Maybe it’s a bit of performance anxiety or perhaps you are just simply at a loss of what to say. Taking the time to craft a voice for your brand can help to guide those social posts and relieve the stress of creating content.
What to write about
Know your customer, their pain points & interests
To be able to speak to your customer’s values, you need to understand who they are and what they care about. It’s more than just knowing the demographic, like their age and gender, it’s about understanding what they invest their time in and what their pain points are in life (especially the pain points that your product/service solves.) Taking the time to understand who your customers are in a meaningful way beyond just the product you provide them is the key to being able to create consistent on-brand copy, without all the headaches.
Have a variety of pools to pull inspiration from
Your customers and followers (aka potential customers) are multidimensional and they have many interests and passions. They probably don’t want to follow an account that is repetitive or salesy, so talking about on-brand activities and topics that your customers will value can help to create more variety in your options of things to post about. I like to think about it as having a handful of different pools/ topics that I can pull from to keep me inspired.
If your company is based on vegan values, your pools of interest could be animals, nature, environmental issues, and plant-based lifestyle tips. Having these pools to pull from can help with the inspiration process during content creation and social media management.
Stay social on social media
Nobody wants to follow a product, they want to to be part of a community (it's in the name, social media.) Once you understand what pain points your business solves for people, you can create a community that shares that common pain point. This encourages a feeling of belonging in your social platforms and provides a space for people to engage in topics that are related to your product or service.
How to say it
Learn how they talk, what languaging to use & create a character in your mind
Creating a character to speak to while you write your social posts can help to keep the contents of your copy conversational and friendly. When we get tied up in writer's block, we tend to come across as bland or stiff, or sometimes our message becomes repetitive and stale over time.
If your company sells high-end CBD bath bombs, your audience may be very vast in diversity. By creating a well-researched Customer Profile to 'speak to' will help to keep your brand consistent, casual and creative.
Watch other accounts that are similar
Spend some time with your competitors, and your customers. Follow the influencers that are influencing your followers and start the slow process of learning how they communicate to their audiences.
But please please please, be authentic
Learn from others, but be aware of falling into a pattern created by many others before. I have really enjoyed podcasts until I heard another podcaster who sounded exactly like them - and suddenly I can't tell who, if not both, are super fake. It was disappointing, so make sure that you are absorbing and learning but also staying true to your authentic brand’s voice. Whatever you as an individual human bring to the table, is what makes your brand’s voice authentic. Embrace it, and use it as a tool.
