How to Ensure a Consistent Brand Voice Even if You Have Hundreds of People Writing Content
I’m always encouraging life science marketers to think about how they can get more people to share the load and contribute content for marketing.
Eventually, without some guidance, that leads to another challenge – maintaining a consistent corporate voice. Lack of consistency is damaging to your brand. And if you’re spending money on localization, it can do some significant damage to your budget as well.
So how do you ensure that your content sounds like it all comes from one company when you have dozens of writers inside and outside your company contributing? Maybe you have a style guide that people refer to. Or you simply rely on the review and editing process to tighten things up.
In this podcast, I spoke to Steve Rotter, the CMO of Acrolinx about how companies can create consistent content on a large scale. We discussed:
How a voice can differentiate your business
Establishing the right voice for your company
Steve’s best advice on rolling out a new voice so content creators will remember and use it
How Illumina generates custom protocols in 4570 possible combinations without sounding like a bag of doorknobs
Links:
Illumina Custom Protocol Selector
Don’t Sound Like Everyone Else: 12 Essential Elements to Create a Consistent Brand Voice
Intro Music stefsax / CC BY 2.5
Outro Music spinningmerkaba / CC BY 3.0
About my guest:
Steve Rotter is the Chief Marketing Officer at Acrolinx. Acrolinx has a software platform that helps companies create great content at skill by ensuring all their content is produced with a single voice. Steve has previously served as VP of Global Marketing at Brightcove, as a Director of Marketing at Adobe and as a company founder at Q-Link (acquired by Adobe) and Paradigm Research
The Transcript
This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.
Chris: Hello everyone, welcome to today’s podcast. My guest today is Steve Rotter. He is the Chief Marketing Officer at Acrolinx. Acrolinx has a software platform that helps companies create great content at scale by ensuring all their content is produced with a single voice. Steve has previously served as VP of Global Marketing at Brightcove and as a Director of Marketing at Adobe among other significant marketing roles and even as a company founder. And today, we’re going to talk about ensuring a consistent tone for your brand. So Steve, welcome to the podcast.
Steve: It’s great to be here, Chris.
Chris: So lots of companies, of course now, content marketing is a big thing, and there’s a demand for a lot of content which means you need many, many people helping to produce that content and that can create some problems. So what are the risks of having multiple people creating content for your brand?
Steve: Well, I mean that the stakes are really high, right? I mean if you think about why all this is happening in the first place is that you and I and probably everyone listening to this podcast, we buy things differently now. We don’t go into a store and just immediately talk to a sales person. We don’t necessarily make purchase decisions based on these face-to-face interactions. We base it on content. And that content in many ways becomes the lifeline between a company and their customers. And, so they have a lot riding on it. And at the same time, there’s been this surge of content production going on so that not only is content being controlled and distributed through a single point within an organization, but everybody is producing content.
Whether it’s people blogging on behalf of the company, whether it’s product managers, for example, writing content or even third parties or freelancers or contractors coming from every part of the organization. So the stakes are high, and the complexity there is really were things start to break down. So the risks, you could imagine what those would be. The wrong tone of voice of a company. Even using words and phrases that don’t make sense for that brand yet, that person’s style wrote it that way. Or, even more extreme cases, the risk of having renegade content go out, that isn’t compliant with either legal requirements or at least internal policy guidelines around statements that the company makes. I guess the risks are high and it’s only getting harder and harder for companies to manage that.
Chris: Right. Well, yes. With a lot of people, there are those challenges. Even in some examples, I think you and I discussed previously just about inconsistent usage of key terms and so on.
Steve: Yes. Just a funny example of one company that we think about, we analyzed their content, we said, “You have 30 different ways to say turn the computer on in your documentation. And it could be push the button, click this, turn that,” but it’s all done differently and in many ways, that may not seem like a big deal, but extend that to another very large company that the group worked with as an example that was making a major strategic decision to enter into the on-demand or cloud software as a service segment and they were making lots of acquisitions in this area, and they were continually acquiring customers, acquiring companies and had more and more writers, writing about their strategy. But if you think about it, even just that simple concept of how do you phrase that you have a cloud strategy? Do you say, we’re software as a service, do we say we’re SaaS, do you say we’re on-demand? Even that becoming inconsistent starts eroding that brand credibility, it erodes their communication, it becomes incredibly more expensive to manage and maintain. So lots of problems happen downstream when people start becoming a little bit more casual and loose around the way in which they communicate, especially for large organizations that want to speak with one voice.
Chris: Exactly. And I can imagine this might seem nit-picking, but if you’re a global organization and you’re going to translate those things, if you have 20 different ways of saying it, that’s a lot more work on the translation and then having…
Steve: It is. Yes, you’re right. Absolutely right. But, it’s not nit-picking at all. Some people in the audience might be directly responsible for those localization budgets. They know. Those people know how expensive it gets to translate multiple documents into multiple languages, and just the reuse alone. One of our customers said they’re saving millions of dollars by just reusing the similar words and phrases that have already been translated and already been reproduced. Why reinvent that, that phrase and word again? Something as simple as saying, “Apple is the number one computer maker,” and then something, someone, another writer says, “We’re the number one computer maker,” or “The world’s number one computer maker is Apple.” Well, those three things are different in the eyes of a translator and therefore you’ve multiplied your expense times three just by not using a phrase that’s already been translated into multiple languages. So this is just a quick example, but I think it really does hit another pain point, directly resulting from this content inconsistency.
Chris: Okay, and then at the opposite end of the spectrum, if we clamp down too hard or without thinking about how we want it to sound to our customers, you have the opposite problem which is failing what people might call the Pepsi challenge. Can you tell your content from someone else’s if you took off all the branding and logos?
Steve: I love that expression, right? It’s the litmus test of whether or not a content is on brand. A really interesting way to think about is is if I took a logo of a familiar brand, let’s say it’s Coca-Cola, and I put it in front of you – we all see these on bad PowerPoint presentations, where someone just cuts and pastes a logo on the screen but they didn’t really do a good job, and it’s just distorted, and has like the edging wrong or something. There’s an immediate reaction that we all have which is, “That’s not how Coca-Cola should be represented. That’s not on brand for them. That’s not how they would want to be perceived.”
And in the same way that that visual representation of the brand, that translates directly into their content. If your content is not on target with the same voice and tone, you’re going to know. I mean, imagine you’re buying the new iWatch, everyone goes out and gets excited, you buy the iWatch. And you look at the manual, and it looks like something you might find in a toaster that you bought, with 30 different languages, great printing, and 8 point font, you’d be shocked. You look at it and say, “This isn’t Apple, this isn’t how they want to represent their brand. This is not their voice.” And I think many people would have that reaction for all sorts of different products and companies that they’re associated with.
Chris: Right. And I’m sure as an example, Apple wouldn’t want to sound like Samsung either. They wouldn’t want all their content to be indistinguishable from, not just that you will get the wrong impression, but that you would be not separating yourself from other companies. And I think, in our industry, because it’s somewhat, honestly fairly technical, there is a tendency to say things in a very narrow, corporate way. And I think there are opportunities for people to distinguish themselves by thinking about what their tone can be and how they can create a different experience for their customers and add some emotional component to it without putting off their customers by sounding silly or frivolous. But you can still have a tone and I guess that’s what we’re going to talk about next.
Steve: Yes. You’re right though. The tone can be a differentiator. It can be just as powerful, in fact, it can be even more powerful. Because once people get past the logos and the visual representation of a brand, that interaction really starts coming through the words. And we still often overlook those, right? We think that we’ll spend time on a brochure or something, and it’s all about the design and the visuals, not realizing that ultimately, these companies are already familiar with us and they’re looking at this. That’s graded first, it might attract them to pick it up, but once they get past that, it’s all about the words.
Chris: Right. So how does a company go about defining and creating a tone for itself? I will link to this. There’s a worksheet that your company puts out or a document called “Watch your tone,” which I think is very helpful. It describes a lot of what we’re talking about, but also walks a company through a procedure to define… well, I’ll let you talk about it.
Steve: Sure. I’m glad you’ve mentioned that. I mean, to get people a background on this, it’s a combination, e-book and workbook. And it’s not just our opinion, we know that this is a topic that’s near and dear to a lot of subject matter experts. In the e-book, we have contributions from really absolute thought leader in the space, people like Anne Handley, Doug Kessler, Andrew Brendenkamp, and those are all listed at the front of this e-book. But what we do is we walk through a systematic approach that goes from what is tone and how do you identify it for your organization, all the way through very practical, here are some worksheets that you can actually use in your company, as you go about the exercise and the effort of defining this.
Now specifically to get at the first step of this process. It has to start with those company values. Right? You have to think about what can you stand for as an organization? What are those core distinguishing marks that really make you different? And as we think about that, we guide people to say, “Look, just pick three values.” And I’ll give you an example of let’s say, I’ll just take a hypothetical company and their values were “We want to be known as being very rigorous in the way that we talk about our business. We want to be idealist. We want to come across as people with a vision. And we want to also come across as being curious.”
So, those are kind of elements or foundational values of their tone that would turn into specific writing styles, that might turn into types of styles that might be more asking questions or looking to the future more as opposed to concretes like, “We manufacture rubber connectors for this, and this is what we do.” Sometimes, that might be just very factual, when they wanted to be known as is more aspirational. So again, as we go through this, that’s really, the starting point was just saying, “Okay, what are those core values that you want to embody in your content?” And that becomes the starting point for the rest of the conversation.
Chris: Right. And what I liked about the e-book workbook was that for a lot of the companies, and I know this is true in our industry, there are going to be three core values that are going to be shared across the industry. So in our industry, one of them is going to be accuracy, of course, for analytical or life science type things. But once you get past those three, then there’s an opportunity for three more that are the ones that will allow you to distinguish yourself, right?
Steve: Right.
Chris: And then what’s nice about it is that you give examples when you mentioned there the “rigorous, idealist, curious”. There were some examples of what that would sound like, how would you phrase things, and equally important, in fact, maybe more important is how you wouldn’t say something. And so it makes it very clear to someone, like, “Okay, here’s how we are going to talk about a product or a service.”
Steve: Yes. And that’s really important because that turns into the words you choose, even for communicating the exact same topic. I’ll just give you a couple of examples since we think about a let’s just say that you want to communicate the history of your company. You could say, “Established in 1878. We were a family firm with a proud heritage of excellence serving and instilling its attention to detail.” And that’s more formal, or you could say, you could take that exact same topic and say, “We’ve been around a long time, but we still care about going the extra mile and getting all those little things just right.”
Same essential message but in a different way, and the workbook section of this really walks through those different areas and says, “Okay, well, here’s a way you can say this more flowing versus punchy or more warm and detached.” There’s no absolute right or wrong, right? You can’t just say every tone should look this way. I think it really comes down to thinking what tone works best for your audience. Start with your audience in mind and your core values, and you’ll start identifying those tone levers that make sense for them. And then it’s really about implementing and getting consistent with that.
Chris: Right. And another thing that I appreciated in there was that, this would come up in people’s mind. Now, we’re going to have this consistent tone across all our content. But are we going to write every type of document, in other words a slide deck, a customer service email, a blog post in the exact same way, so that it sounds completely the same?
Steve: Yes. I mean, you can’t, right? And that’s one of the things because you have to take into consideration very seriously the context of what that unique piece of content, where that piece of content will live. Here’s a really good example. In fact, there’s a really fantastic presentation, I think it was done by Doug Kim and Jessica Reading of Microsoft and it was called, “Don’t talk nerdy to me.” And it was all about their move to replace the traditional perceived tone that Microsoft had and moved to a more conversational tone that was certainly demonstrated by other companies in the technologies sector already.
And it was based on very deep research, and they realized, after all of this research, that engineers are people. And they like to have a communication that is maybe, not just necessarily completely factual, that might be somewhat engaging and entertaining. And one of the examples in the presentation that they give is the infamous Blue Screen of Death from Microsoft. It used to come up with some incredibly cryptic code, maybe a countdown timer, and something telling you your memory state. Whatever it said, those of us that have experienced it can see in our eyes exactly what that looks like. And then they showed they new warmer, friendlier, Blue Screen of Death that comes up in the latest operating system.
Now, going back to your question, even though your desire is to be more personable and maybe a tone of voice that is more approachable, that’s a very serious situation when your product fails and you can’t take that so lightly that it becomes obnoxious. Right? You don’t want to be cute or trying about something that instantly becomes an absolute situation when the person receiving that communication, their heart’s racing a little bit, they realize they lost two hours worth of work. And they’re not going to sit back and go, “Wow! This is really cute that you put this message up, but it’s not what I want to see right now. I want to feel like you really are empathizing with my situation. That this is serious to you as it is to me.” So, again, just to your point, even though you have an established tone, and you have those guidelines, it’s not a one-size-fits-all.
Chris: Right. Exactly. And I think there’re some guidelines in there. And my next question is, now, you’ve established a tone. You’ve gone through the exercises, you know what your company voice is trying to become, and few companies are probably starting this on day one, so it’s going to involve a change for somebody, if not, a lot of people. So how do you roll out a new tone and get people to adopt the new guidelines?
Steve: Yes, this is where it gets tough, right? Because to your very opening statement where we’ve set the stage for this conversation, content’s coming from everywhere. So how do you all of a sudden, let’s say a new CMO joins the company and says we need a more kind of tone that looks like this. Well, if you’ve got two writers sitting down the hall, that’s a pretty easy thing to do. “Hey two writers, we’ve got a new tone. Let’s start writing this way.” That very rarely happens though, and when that two writers is 2000 or 20000 people creating content, it becomes a much more complex issue.
So we do offer some guidance around this, I mean obviously, the human change management issues here of having this be, first of all, memorable. If it’s just, “Hey, we have a new tone. Here’s the 8 point font document telling you all about the new tone. Please follow these guidelines.” That’s just going to get read and forgotten pretty quickly. But if there’s a why behind it, “Hey. Here’s why we need to make this change, here’s why this is important, and here’re some examples of how this content will look.” Now, all of a sudden, you’ve got people’s attention. Right? Then all of a sudden, you’ve got them to embrace not only that there’s a change in the way in which we want to communicate, but there’s a reason behind it. And that’s where the second level down and after the why is really getting to the operational aspect of that.
And in many cases, that just comes through training and reinforcement. We like to say that there’s technology that helps people to do this. And certainly, that’s one of the reasons why some of the largest companies in the world embrace technology like Acrolinx. It’s just simply that, which is “Look. There’s no way we could get 2000 or 20,000 people to understand this immediately. So, we’ll install some software that essentially guides the process of writing in the way that as people are writing, it will say: You know what? This is a nice way to write this and we read it differently. So here’s how you should think about it.” Those are practical things, just try to do this at scale, it’s just become very hard to manage with just training and task management.
Chris: Would you say, your single best tip is the memorability part of it and explaining the why?
Steve: I would. Yes, I mean, as much as I’d love to say, “No, it’s all about software.” I mean if people don’t really buy into “why”, they’re not going to do it, and it’s going to fall short. That’s true with anything though, especially any large scale organizational change and ultimately if that why is deeply rooted in conviction and it’s deeply rooted in a vision for where the company needs to be, then people will get it and will get behind it.
And that’s true of major organizational initiatives but it’s absolutely true, I’m telling you, because that comes out in so many different things. It comes out in the way in which a customer service agent would respond on the phone. It comes out in the way in which someone would send an email to a client that is struggling with using the system. It comes out in the way in which you present it the very first time you meet someone at a trade show. It embodies everything you do and how that company is positioned. And again, the worst case scenario is that tone or voice is different in every single of those experiences. And all of a sudden, the company has no tone, they have no differentiation. So that’s why, again, we like this idea, this concept of speaking with one voice.
Chris: Great. So I know we’re coming close to possibly the end of your time and I want to get in to this case study from Illumina which is a company in our life-science industry, and I’ll try to tee it up. You can tell me about the details and I’ll ask you about their goals and so on. So Illumina has a protocol selector on their website, and it asks you for example, what sequencer are you using and what reagent kits you’re using and possibly I think what types of DNA you might be sequencing. And based on a number of selections, compiles a protocol document for you to execute an experiment. And the challenge, I think, was that all those parts of the protocols, for example, preparation, reagent mixing – whatever it is, were written by different people. And so they had this challenge of pulling together a large document with eight different source components and having it sound like it was written by a single person. So, if I got that right…
Steve: You set it up perfectly. I think again, as I have looked at different content challenges, I absolutely have to tip my hat to the Illumina team. This was one of the best examples, most creative examples of how our software can help be a part of a bigger solution. And again, a full disclaimer here at the beginning. We are not a technology that stitches together PDFs on the fly, things like that. That’s a lot of hard work encoding that they did behind the scenes.
But, I will tie in our part of it just because I think that the whole story is a challenge that most people on this call and listening to this podcast probably struggle with, which is content complexity. And if you look at the numbers, I’ll just rattle through the different… The audience they serve is coming to their site, and they have a specific experiment in mine, but they need a document that supports that initiative. Well, if you look at the combinations of four different instruments, two different sequencing methods, six reagent kits, 20 kits for preparing the samples, three different indexing methods, and 15 methods to analyze the content, you do the math, they have 4570 different combinations of those documents, or those content pieces.
Now, there’s no way possible, even with the largest of teams you could keep 4570 individual documents authored and in shape, localized and perfectly aligned with the current updates. They knew it was impossible so they realized, they had to do a reset on that entire problem. So, they created those content blocks, using different authors, multiple authors, but the glue that held that part together was the software, our software that would essentially make sure that the tone and the phrases and the words all sounded like it was written from the same company.
So that way no matter who came to the site, and selected any one of those options, and this is how they made the selectable menu list, any one of those 4570 options didn’t matter, they would all stitch together seamlessly into something that read like it was from the same author. And that was really I think the magical part of it. It was that using that kind of technology to create this on the fly. It never would have been possible if those content pieces were not really written in a way that sounded the same. All you had is 4570 things that looked like a bag of doorknobs.
It could’ve gone much worse. In fact they didn’t have that in place because, then all of a sudden, you just mechanised an automated process for creating a franken-content. So, you get hats off to them, thanking through all the issues and it was a tremendously successful case study. I think they presented this in a couple of other conferences, and it has been incredibly well received with much visibility from other people that are struggling with this kind of challenge.
Chris: Yes. My hats off to them. Just for the amount of effort they put into a protocol generating document and I’ve written about before how important it is to think about the content that goes out to your customers after the sale. Because, making them happy when they’re using your product is the cheapest, most effective marketing you can do. And yet, I think about the potential for doing something like that, for creating your outbound marketing content and the volume of that that exists out in the world, it seems like there could be a huge amount of value, all the way through your content funnel, if you will.
Steve: You’re right. I mean, and again I think the more content that gets created for any product, you know, whether it’s pre-sales, or even deemed as post-sales, that all goes into someone’s purchase decisions, and in many cases, what is unfortunately viewed as post-sales content often goes into a person’s pre-sales decision in that whether or not they’re going to even buy. And in many cases, they’ll look at that content and say, “Am I going to buy this product, and I’m going to look at what kind of support and service I’m going to get after the fact, not because I need it to fix a problem, because I don’t even have the product yet, but I want to get an idea on how this company will treat me if I become a customer.” So, in many ways, you could envision that same scenario like a little bit ahead and being able to stitch together a product specific portfolio of content that takes into account their needs as an early stage buyer, as a middle stage buyer, and even after they’ve purchased and bought the product.
Chris: Right. And another thing I’ll point out… and it is not my intention to promote products on this podcast, but I do like to make people aware of possibilities. What I like about this is at Words 2 Wow I’m always thinking about how can we can make content production easier? So, two things happen here. One is a lot of people who are asked to create content aren’t really excited about the idea, because it takes work. And when you ask someone to produce written content, they think hard about it. Because they know it’s going to last a long time. And they may or may not feel like they’re a strong writer. But having something like this at their disposal that can make part of that easier is I think very important for them. And the other aspect of it is pulling things together and then when it’s written in that way, it has to shorten the review process because it’s just going to flow smoother, there won’t be as many corrections or disagreements about how do you say a certain thing. And so I think there’s a lot of advantage to be gained by implementing a style guide at the very least, something like that to help people make content production and review simpler.
Steve: Yes, I mean, it’s really well said. One of those common reactions we get from people after they install our software for example is – imagine a large organization, hundreds of content producers and dozens of editors, well the editors are coming to us, and originally it might have been like, “Oh. Is this going to put me out of a job?” And then all of a sudden they realize I’m actually, for the first time ever, I’m able to do the job I really like to do. I’m not checking for commas and punctuation and bad grammar. I’m actually talking about the story and the style, and looking at this because I don’t have to look at those granular details as much as I had to, I can focused on maybe even a higher level aspirational goal of making that content even better. So, it works out and to your point, it accelerates the whole process.
Chris: Yes. I like that. I think, based on my personal experience in the industry, that would be hugely valuable. Because a lot of times, you’re in the position of just needing to get it done. It’s good enough. And in the back of your head you’re thinking, “We could make this so much better.” And now I think, if people are smart about it, and they think about these things, there is a way to elevate the quality of their content across the board.
Steve: Yes, I agree with that. That’s our goal too!
Chris: Well, I want to thank you very much for your time today. That was a really enlightening conversation, I’m sure that people listening to this podcast are going to appreciate that, because I know it has been a challenge everywhere I’ve been, and I can’t imagine there’s anyone who doesn’t struggle with getting their content to sound – 1) consistent, and 2) engaging in the way they’d like.
Steve: I really appreciate you inviting us to the show, Chris. This has been great and thanks for letting us share a little bit more about what we’re doing with your audience.
Chris: Well, it’s my pleasure and I will link, I will put a link of course to the “Watch your tone” document and a couple of articles that you sent me in the show notes and people can find you at Acrolinx which is A-C-R-O-L-I-N-X .com. All right. Thank you Steve.
Steve: Great, thanks Chris! Have a great day!
Chris: You too. Bye-bye.
