1 Exercise That’ll Help You Craft a Brand Voice Your Audience Will Love

When I’m not writing blog posts for Contently, I’m a Dungeon Master for a group of my friends that play Dungeons and Dragons. My friends role-play as fantasy characters in a world that feels like The Lord of the Rings combined with Magic: The Gathering, and as the game master, I’m tasked with roleplaying every other character. That means I do a lot of made-up voices.

I can tell when my friends are getting bored—their eyes gloss over and they check their phones—so I try to vary my character voices in order to make the world more colorful. Each voice has to sound recognizable and familiar, but also exciting and memorable. For instance, I recently had to play a half-orc rogue, so I gave him a California surfer bro vibe. Keeps everyone on their toes.

If you’re a content marketer like me, you’re probably excited by the idea of developing a voice for your brand. It’s a complex art puzzle; you have to find a voice that your entire content team can emulate, and make sure it’s a voice that your target audience wants to hear. In an industry where every brand believes its voice is relatable, casual, and knowledgable, yours has to stand out from that crowd too.

At Contently, we’re big time geeks for brand development, so we recently condensed the process of brainstorming an editorial voice into some instructions and a handy worksheet. You can see a part of that worksheet below.

We’ve found that developing a brand voice works best in a group, but be careful with group brainstorm sessions. You always want to leave room at the top of each jam sesh for creatives to think on their own. Don’t worry—the worksheet walks you through this.

To download the full brand voice worksheet and the rest of our Brand Awareness Bundle, sign up for the Content Strategy Series today!