Category: Copywriting

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content marketing Copywriting messaging Strategy

ShmatGPT

What ChatGPT is great for: email invites

Look, you probably don’t need another hot take on whether marketers should be using AI-generated marketing content, by a marketing strategist, but here it is anyway:

I rarely hear anybody talk about the key assumption behind this tedious debate: the assumption that it’s a marketer’s job to produce a lot of content. 

When in fact, it’s the job of marketing to produce good content: ideally genuinely new ideas, presented in a fresh way, that resonate with the people you’re targeting.

From what I’ve seen so far, that’s the opposite of what AI does.

What, actually, is the job of Marketing?

ChatGPT regurgitates things that already exist out there, in ways that already exist out there. Assembling words with the highest likelihood of being used in collocation by the highest number of people. Sometimes, the writing is tolerable. Often, it presents utter shite with a level of confidence I can only aspire to. (George over at Radix has written a fine blog about “AI eating itself” with much more nuance than I can muster).

The output from this exercise is the definition of middling. The literary world’s equivalent of brown. If that’s what you think your marketers’ job is, then go ahead.

In my mind then, you have a completely different problem: that you don’t understand the de-familiarising power of unique words (or images, if you’re using AI for visuals) to help us see well-known things in a new light, or the function they have in engaging audiences, or the blank-everything-else-out effect that a genuinely new idea can have, or the responsibility you have as a brand that targets people to not bore them stiff. And yes, your responsibility to hire and train marketers that understand these things. Who can tell a good headline from bad, who know what a differentiator is, who can brief in and feed back on copy.

If you do understand these things, and still use ChatGPT, then you know that getting the prompts right takes such a level of customisation and tweaking that you might as well use that time to write the damn thing.

A ChatGPT experiment

So far, there’s only one use case I can see where ChatGPT being genuinely helpful, and that’s for functional content that follows a clear template. Invites, sign-up forms, things that have a formula. I’ll give you an example of an instance where ChatGPT has impressed me (and, in red, the bits I loved and the ones where I think it falls flat):

Prompt:

Write a sales email to a prospect in which I invite them to sign up to our webinar on the topic of best practice in Modular ERP. [simply because I had a chat about AI-generated content with an ERP client of mine last week]

What ChatGPT came up with:

Subject: Invitation to Webinar: Best Practices in Modular ERP

Dear [Prospect’s Name],

[it’s great that it signals all the core bits of information that need to be there, such as subject lines and placeholders for names, dates and times. You wouldn’t believe how many emails go out with the essentials missing. Wish it had given me a preview snippet for the email as well, and maybe a second subject line for A/B testing, but it’s pretty good.]

I hope this email finds you well. I wanted to reach out to you because I believe you would find great value in our upcoming webinar on “Best Practices in Modular ERP.”

[“Find great value” is terribly generic. Why/ why for me/what’s the value? Similarly, “finds you well” is tired language, plus double use of “find”. A good editor would spot that.]

In today’s fast-paced business environment, having a flexible and scalable ERP system is crucial for optimizing operations and staying competitive.

[“Today’s fast-paced environment”. I couldn’t believe it went there. The most telling sign of lazy writing. It says you should care but I don’t. It claims urgency without proving it. Absolute no-go. I actually have a voodoo doll in the likeness of that phrase that I stick pins in at night. But: I was impressed that it hit a crucial business benefit of modular ERP. Optimising operations is indeed something a well set up ERP does and I hadn’t briefed that in. I assume that means it’s what everyone says, though. “Staying competitive” is the same as “fast-paced environment”: it’s so generic a benefit – duh – that you should step away from it].

Our webinar will delve into the benefits and strategies of implementing a modular ERP approach, allowing businesses like yours to tailor their systems to meet specific needs and scale efficiently.

[My main issue with this paragraph is that it sounds good at first reading, and then you realise it doesn’t actually say anything. Meet specific needs indeed].

During the webinar, our expert speakers will cover:

  • The advantages of modular ERP over traditional monolithic systems [Loved that word. I suspect everyone uses it or it wouldn’t have made its way into this]
  • Key considerations for selecting and implementing modular ERP solutions
  • Real-world case studies highlighting successful implementations
  • Strategies for maximizing ROI and long-term sustainability [Great work if you can get it, but I hadn’t briefed that in and I’d want to check that I can actually deliver on case studies and ROI before I send this out]

Date: [Insert Date] Time: [Insert Time] Duration: [Insert Duration] [thanks for the reminders, this is useful!]

This webinar presents a unique opportunity to gain valuable insights and actionable strategies directly from industry experts. Plus, it’s completely free to attend. [Love all these AI-generated case studies and experts I don’t have, that really makes my job a lot easier. Wait, what do you mean, free. IT’S NOT FREE. by which I mean, you really gotta check the content of this stuff]

To secure your spot, simply click the link below to register: [Insert Registration Link]

If you have any questions or would like more information, feel free to reach out to me directly. We’re here to support you on your journey towards optimizing your ERP system.

[Switching between “I” and “We” is not a great look, but I do it on this website as well, so I’ll let it go]

We look forward to having you join us for this informative session. [the rule is “Show don’t tell”. That’s for them to find out, not for you to claim.]

Best regards,

[Your Name] [Your Position] [Your Contact Information]

ChatGPT Really isn’t Marketing’s Biggest problem

Okay, so on the whole this wasn’t bad.

I found it too long and generic, but part of that was down to the minimal briefing. If you’re writing a generic format like an invite, my take is you could save yourself a lot of time by getting ChatGPT to write it for you. But only if you then invest the effort into making it good, and importantly, yours. Saying things that are different and new, and unique to your brand. Also maybe injecting a bit of personality into that voice.

What it alerted me to was this: whenever it came up with bits that sounded industry-specific, but were actually too high-level to say anything much, that was a red flag for me: the way the technology works means that it can only have pulled this from existing content about modular ERP and these things must have been the safest common denominator. They’re the most generic things you could possibly say about the topic, and from my marketer’s POV, therefore useless. They don’t contain any differentiators or value propositions, or product features or audience insight – none of the elements that make marketing good, and specific to you. So I guess you could use it as a tool to establish the absolute minimum baseline of what others in your industry are saying. Then pivot the shit away from that.

My TL;DR point though is this:

It’s Marketing’s job to figure out what to say and to whom

…and ChatGPT can’t solve that for you (not yet anyway).

The real problem is that most companies considering ChatGPT have got the job of the marketer all wrong. They burden in-house marketers with producing all this formulaic crap that nobody reads, and they don’t challenge them to make it good, or give them the time to develop genuine differentiators. They literally think they’re in the business of producing words. If, at a time, where formulaic content production cost has hit quite literally zero, they can’t pivot away from that and start seriously re-considering the job of the marketer, I can only hope the market will punish them.

If, however, it makes them realise that the marketer’s job is to think about all the hard things – what we’ve got to say, why we should be saying it, and why people should care – then I, for one, welcome our LLM-powered artificial overlords with open arms.

Categories
Copywriting messaging

A B2B Marketing FAQ

A few essential B2B Marketing terms everyone uses but nobody ever defines

a lightbox shaped like a question mark lying on its side
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Except for the shortest-ever stint with an in-house team (where I learnt the hard way that I’m not made for days of back-to-back meetings), I’ve spent my entire career to date either agency-side or running my own B2B Marketing consultancy.

And I’ve had a few experiences with clients recently that made me realise that we marketers are guilty of the very same thing we tell our clients to stop doing: and that’s going heavy on the jargon when it comes to your own expertise. It’s the first rule of B2B tech (insert other niche as appropriate) marketing club. It’s simple: when you’re trying to sell people something, you should make it easy for them to understand your message, not make them learn a whole new language.

Owning up to jargon guilt

And yet, we marketers do the same thing when we talk about our own work.

There’s two reasons we make this mistake. The first is that a lot of the key concepts in marketing don’t feel like jargon. Positioning, messaging, content – these aren’t exactly terms that sound like you’re talking about the inside of a hadron collider (though we’ve got our share of those too).

The second is the same reason techies and other experts do it. We’re talking about our world, and it’s become second nature to us. Just like little kids, we struggle to understand that other people don’t know the exact same things we do.

I recently worked with a client who didn’t know the difference between messaging and copy. I’m going to admit that I did an inner eye-roll (not a real one as that would have been visible on zoom) first. But then I realised that I can’t assume that everyone I work with has the same experience I do. You might be working client-side, or maybe you’re an agency newbie, or you’re a non-marketer who’s been pulled into a project you haven’t signed up for. And you might find it helpful to understand a few concepts nobody ever defines because they sound so obvious.

This is the spirit in which I’ve put together this little FAQ – not to teach any of you marketing grandmothers to suck eggs (though, tbh, you all stink at egg-sucking) – but to actually hold ourselves accountable to what we promise to deliver, maybe challenge some assumptions, and hopefully, also invite some debate or pushback. So, here goes: 

Positioning

This is where you define the position of your company or product in the market, i.e. the field you want to play, to use one of those sports metaphors we all love so much. You take into account things like 

  • Your geography and any laws and regulations that might apply there (eg EMEA)
  • Your category (e.g. rebate management software) – if it already exists. If it doesn’t, many companies want to create their own. (This is incredibly hard to do though and I might explain why in a future post sometime)
  • Your target audiences (eg CIOs and COOs of small and medium enterprises)
  • Their pain points/the problem you solve for them (e.g data is so siloed that it can’t be used by the entire organisation) 
  • What outcomes your product delivers for each target (e.g. deal velocity, error-free automated processes)
  • What outcomes your product delivers for the entire business (e.g. faster time-to-market than their competitors)
  • What you’re selling against, ie your direct competitors and the alternatives your prospects have to your offer (e.g. they could continue to use spreadsheets)
  • Attitudes like misconceptions, fears, obstacles (eg “we bought a solution like this ten years ago and it didn’t integrate and compromised all our data”)
  • What they stand to lose by not buying it (e.g. they’ll leave money on the table)
  • Your look and feel, eg does your UX blow your competitors out of the water? Is your tone of voice edgier than the incumbent’s? Are you the app store favourite?
  • A few other things like your price point and/or pricing model, or delivery model 

Arriving at a positioning is usually a lengthy exercise that should involve at the very least competitor research, as well as stakeholder, subject matter expert, and customer interviews. It should also take into account past marketing efforts (if available) such as old messaging and performance data. Positioning is hard and gnarly and full moments of doubt and I absolutely love it. It’s my favourite marketing project to do.

A strong positioning is hugely important for both marketing and sales. First of all, it creates agreement on what your story is (though many lone wolf salespeople still make up their own), and who your best prospects are. Without positioning you can’t really create proper messaging or define a targeting strategy (eg who is a “Marketing qualified lead” or MQL; do we target them at a conference or on Linkedin?) or know where best to allocate your always-too-small budget. And it’s closely related to product development and roadmaps, too.

Having said that, you wouldn’t believe how many businesses don’t actually have a formalised positioning that’s written down and agreed on. Instead, a CEO or Chief Product Officer might have an idea of where they play and answers to all of the above, but they’ve never actually made the effort of spelling it out and sharing it with their marketing and product teams. Big mistake. Huge. Because it leads to uncertainty, misunderstanding, lack of direction, wasted budgets, and also: not enough good bloody leads. And also, it means nobody can challenge or update these ideas, and that’s never good. 

Messaging and the messaging house

Positioning and messaging work hand in hand. If you’ve done your positioning work thoroughly, your messaging will fall out of that. It’ll include your key value proposition, the benefits for your audience, what that looks like, and ideally some proof points, too.

While you might work with variations of your messaging for different targets (e.g. you’ll want to prioritise messages around ROI for a CFO or COO, but go all in on the fluffier benefits and employee experience when you’re targeting HR or the actual users of your product), you should have a core overall messaging framework defined for your offer. These frameworks come in different forms, from a simple Why/What/How, to the Why change/Why us/Why now model. One of the most common ones that you’ll probably come across is the “messaging house”. I’ve always found it a little naff to squeeze all that hard, grown-up, big-girl work into a template that looks like it should come with crayons, but it’s not a bad way to present a lot of information succinctly. I can’t share any of the ones I’ve created for my clients because I work under NDA. But if you image-search “messaging house” you’ll find plenty of examples (of varying quality) online.

One of the key misconceptions I come across is that people equate messaging and copy. 

Messaging is not copy. It’s a framework for agreeing on the key messages that you want to get across to your audience. It’s usually short (often bullet points, maybe all on one slide) and hasn’t been given the copywriter treatment. That means it doesn’t have all those beautiful headlines, examples, use cases and tone of voice that bring your brand to life. Very few people outside your marketing department will ever see your messaging. They will, hopefully though, see and read your copy.

So why do it at all? Again, it’s about getting everyone to sing from the same hymn sheet, and achieving internal agreement on what your story is first. It’s also useful for briefing creatives (copywriters, for instance) and approaching partners for joint value propositions.

Copy

Copy is what you create when you translate your messaging into a (usually client-facing) asset. This is where you expand on your messaging and fill in the details – the angles, the different applications, the secondary benefits, and infuse your copy with your brand tone of voice. This could be in headlines, social media posts, blog posts, ebooks etc

Here’s an example: Let’s say your product helps hospitals work more efficiently. Then one of your messaging pillars might be around cost savings, another around the patient experience and a third one about analytics on operations data. This messaging could be translated into headlines for an ad or subject lines for email (e.g. “Say goodbye to gaps in the staff roster”; “Optimise your hospital laundry schedule”); into thought leadership blog posts (e.g. “Why hospital efficiency isn’t just a funding issue: The measurable impact of optimised staff rotas on the patient experience”); into an ebook that demonstrates your authority on the subject (e.g. “7 metrics every hospital administrator should be tracking”) – you get the idea. Or if you wanted to go all in disruptor-style and coin a new industry standard, you could try and go for something like “Staff rosters don’t work. Why it’s time to embrace the continuous care operations model” (I hope that’s not a thing btw, I just made it up).

The point is, your copy will contain your messaging, but it does more than that: it will also deliver on other crucial elements of your marketing, like empathise with your audience’s situation; demonstrate domain expertise with the right industry terminology; make it easy, fun and engaging to read; and express your brand personality.

Content

Email, social media and blog posts, ebooks etc which mentioned above are all content formats. There are loads more of course, such as websites, videos and infographics, and Turtls and scroll-sites (and that mysterious thing Sales teams often demand from Marketing, the “two-pager”). All of your content should probably be copy-written (except for maybe some dry technical data where you might get away with just facts). Your content is your chance to demonstrate to your market what you know better than anyone else. While your messaging contains your key talking and selling points, content is where you expand on the claims you make in your messaging. It shows your expertise, and your belief in how to do things better. It’s where you deliver the goods. 

Creating good content, that is, the sort your expert target audience won’t dismiss as “marketing fluff” is actually pretty hard, and if you’re in B2B tech should always be done using the insights (though not necessarily the writing skills) of subject matter experts. 

While some stakeholders may want you to crank up the sales pitches in your content, I strongly advise against it. Fill it with valuable, actionable advice as much as you can and avoid claiming that there is only one solution to the problem you’ve identified and it’s – surprise! – yours. B2B decision-makers are being sold to morning till evening and they smell a sales pitch or thinly veiled pseudo-tips from a mile off. Content is your place to demonstrate your expertise, not just claim it.

If you’re still confused by content, don’t fret. The term ‘content’ has, over the past 15 years or so, been stretched to its limits to include everything under the sun. I would say that IRL most marketers use ‘content’ to refer to higher-investment (not just money but stakeholder and writing time, too), and longer-form pieces, such as blog posts and ebooks and video case studies. In some agencies, you’ll also find “copywriters” (for the conceptual, short-form bits such as ads and headlines and brandy, moody copy) vs “content writers” (who work on blog posts, ebooks and whitepapers). Classifying writers like that doesn’t really work for me, really, but I’m sure they have their reasons.

The funnel

One more thing to mention in connection with content is the funnel model. It’s unfashionable and outdated by now, and lots of people have (rightly) criticised the metaphor, but it’s still a concept you should at least have heard of when discussing content. The idea is that a prospect’s interest in what you have to say increases if you give them valuable content that’s relevant to their situation. But it also means you need to hook them first, and ideally with something short, snappy and sexy, before you expect them to actually read all of your longer-form stuff. You earn their attention over time.

So when you hear people talking about “top of the funnel” (or TOFU) content, they mean something attention-grabbing and relatively quick to consume, that’s interesting enough for the prospect to want to learn more (and click through to more, or leave an email address). Maybe a short video, or a manifesto. Middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) content is typically longer-form (eg an ebook) and substantiates the bold claims you made in your TOFU pieces. Bottom-of-the-funnel (you guessed it, BOFU) content usually delivers proof points (eg case studies, which we’ll talk about shortly). The reason it’s the bottom of the marketing funnel is because the idea is that by that point, if your prospects are still engaged, they’re ready to talk to a human, ie a sales rep. They’ve become a Sales qualified lead (or SQL) and can be handed over to that department.

Unfortunately, the real world isn’t quite as neat and logical as this, and I wouldn’t hammer the funnel metaphor too far, but the model is still quite useful when you’re thinking about your content strategy, ie the content you should be offering to your prospects, where your biggest gaps are, which of your low-performing pieces to tweak first, etc.

Case study

Case studies, sometimes called customer stories or client success stories, are pieces of content where you tell the real-life story of your product or company improving another business. They’re hugely important in B2B, because that’s where your marketing rubber hits the credibility road. You use actual customers to substantiate your claims and give their verbatim testimonials. This is huge because few things hold more weight than a product endorsement from a peer. Common formats are pdfs (yawn) and talking heads videos.

I believe that case studies are often wrongly given the step-child treatment and created as an afterthought, with not enough production value, when really, they’re some of the most hard-working content you’re likely to produce. Many years ago I wrote a blog post about the boringnesss of B2B case studies, which, if you’re interested, you can read here. 

Use case

One of the reasons I wanted to include case studies in this FAQ is because people tend to get them confused with “use cases”. It makes me feel petty to have to insist on the correct usage, but we’re talking about completely different things here. A use case is one of several applications for your product. A digital twin for instance, might be used to optimise the placement of wind turbines in the North sea, or to do predictive maintenance on a supermarket freezer, or to monitor drilling operations on an offshore oil rig, or to simulate the performance of a prosthetic limb before you actually build it. They are different applications of the same core product that often need explaining because just saying “it’s a digital twin” won’t make that obvious to everyone. If yor create a piece of content that explains each of these applications, you could call that a “use case”, I guess. And you could, of course, always create a case study or two for each of those use cases.

2500 words and we’ve barely even scratched the surface

That’s enough for today. Marketing has loads more terms in dire need of explaining, but for now, I’ve focused on some of the areas I know best. There are loads of obscure (also to me) terms in some areas of marketing where I’m not an expert (such as Demand Gen and Measurement) so I’ll leave it to others to identify and define the key concepts. But for now, I’d love to hear your thoughts – has this been helpful at all? What did you miss? Do let me know on the usual channels (and here) and I’ll be happy to update this to keep it alive, kicking and – hopefully – useful.

Update: if you’d like to ask me an anonymous, marketing-related question, you can do it here:

Ask me a question
Categories
content marketing Copywriting positioning

Grammar, shmammar.

The podcast where I tell the grammar police to do one.

Are you even a copywriter if you don’t faff about all morning only to have to work late to deliver what you promised? If you don’t find typos all over your piece the minute after you hit send? And if your clients don’t regularly point to some bit of your copy being ‘ungrammatical’?

David McGuire – who runs the lovely clutter of copywriters that is Radix Communications – has asked the very smart brand poet Rishi Dastidar to discuss the importance of grammar in B2B copy. And then I say some stuff too because I’m co-hosting.

Listen here if you like that sort of thing. (I won’t because I hate the sound of my own voice. Also, I’ve been told I sound Northern. Don’t tell my Bavarian relatives).

Huge thanks to David for inviting me. I had a blast. Pint on me next time you’re in London. Or Bavaria.

B2BQ&A 101: How important is correct grammar in B2B content?
Categories
content marketing Copywriting native advertising

A blast from the past

Some 1980s native advertising from Germany

I’m in Germany staying at my parents’ and have just been reminded of a type of native advertising we used to get in paperbacks, like this one.

From this sort of era.

You’d read about kayaking for a bit, and then all of a sudden, you’d come across some bonkers illustration that looks completely different from the others in the book.

The illustration would somehow relate to the topic of the book. In this case, paddling.

And on the next page, the copy would, with some considerable mental gymnastics and loads of metaphors involved (“keep your head above water”, “stay the course”, etc), bring the topic round to municipal bonds and where to buy them.

What I’m taking from this: Native advertising has always been clunky, even when it tried hard. (and didn’t take itself too seriously)

I don’t like the idea of being served an ad in a book I paid money for. And I doubt the ad made the book cheaper for readers to buy.

But 1) The targeting strategy seems solid: people interested in kayaking for pleasure, or even toying with the idea of buying a boat, probably have some disposable income, if only a moderate amount. It makes sense to suggest they invest some of it.

And 2) I love how hard the copy is working here. See the paragraph above (despite the clunk).

Even better (though not related to the ad): the positioning for this series of sport-related books: “Mehr Spaß am Sport mit Programmen von Profis und Kniffs von Könnern”.

Punch and alliteration go a long way.

I couldn’t find any information about the success of these ads, but they did run for a good 20 years, apparently. And I don’t know how they would have attributed ROI back then. But I’d love to find out how people felt about them. If you’ve got any insights, let me know. But it might take me a while to respond. I’m going kayaking.

Categories
Copywriting tone of voice

Notes on tone

"You lucky bugger" on a post-it
Enough with the sprinkles.

Why tone of voice is a stance, not a sprinkle

In this post, I’ll argue that it’s not useful to think of tone of voice as an ornament. Think of it as an attitude instead.

This post has been stewing for a while. Last summer I had some feedback (from an absolutely lovely client) that I found baffling. It led me to sit down and put into words what I believe to be true about tone of voice. I didn’t write it in one go though, which meant that my initial huff dissipated somewhat and my jumbled pile of blog notes ended up sitting in a draft doc for a while because life happened. And one day, as I was browsing through my former employer Velocity’s marketing blog, I saw that Doug Kessler had, of course, already written a piece that said something quite similar to what I was going to say. And had done it beautifully. Damn him.

That made me question whether the idea had ever been mine in the first place, or if maybe I’d already read Doug’s piece but had forgotten about it, and was thinking myself original when I really wasn’t. I didn’t like that thought and ditched the post.

Well, I had lunch with Doug last week and told him about it. He graciously encouraged me to write it anyway. So I did and here you go. (You can find his piece here, but I’d rather you read mine first).

Marketers are latching on to tone of voice – and that’s not always a good thing

Last year, I started working with a new client, who, during our first couple of meetings, kept emphasising how important tone of voice was for them. That they wanted to sound unstuffy and non-academic, and were happy to push the boundaries. That’s great, I thought. Let me at it.

The first couple of pieces I wrote had really low word counts, and not much room to develop any conversational copy while also including all the information that needed to be there. So it was only when I wrote a chunky ebook for them that I realised what they understood “tone of voice” to be.

Let me explain why I think they got it all wrong.

Your readers are tacitly allowing you to sell to them – under the condition that you also provide solid value.

So imagine your standard middle-of-the-funnel type ebook that includes buying advice for its readers – “here’s what you should be looking for when evaluating this kind of software”-type stuff. If you’re a B2B tech copywriter – and even more so if you’re a buyer and regular reader of such content – then you know that this buying advice isn’t entirely impartial. At some point, it will definitely play up a capability that sets the business publishing the ebook apart from its competitors, and emphasise how indispensable it is.

Now I think that’s fair enough. As a reader, you’re aware that it’s a branded ebook given to you by a business with a selling agenda – and you’ll forgive them for trying to sell to you if you still get good stuff out of it. That is if honest, useful advice and deep domain knowledge go along with the selling. It’s the tacit agreement that makes content marketing work. (Bear with me. I’m going somewhere with this).

Now add a sprinkle of tone of voice.

So with this ebook, I had a bigger canvas to develop tone of voice than I’d had with the previous pieces. I aimed for high energy, peer-to-peer, and no-nonsense, and – probably to ingratiate myself with my client – included quite a few phrases that I have now come to think of as “tone of voice cheats” (like calling the reader “you lucky bugger”, referring to software as their “cool new toy” and such. The kind of thing you get loads of from B2C brands like Innocent or Oatly). I hang my head in shame.

Because, as unintended consequences go, these things came to bite me on the bum. As you may have guessed, my client simply loved-loved-loved the cheaty bits – in fact, the main feedback on my copy was to dial those up to eleven – but they cared a lot less for the high-energy, peer-to-peer, and no-nonsense attitude.

They ended up asking me (twice!) to sprinkle in more cute-but-ultimately-hollow expressions. And they also had another amend: they wanted me to remove one particular bit of copy that I felt encapsulated everything we were trying to do with tone of voice in this ebook. It was the phrase in square brackets (x being my client’s category):

“Invest in a platform specifically made for x. [We sell such a thing, so of course we would say this – but hear us out.]” 

Their reason for wanting it gone was that “it sounded too salesy”. I found that truly baffling. It’s the opposite of salesy. It’s a wink. It’s acknowledging that there’s a sales agenda, and promising that we’re not going to abuse the privilege of having their attention.

And now that’s exactly where I was going with the above: it’s this stance that I was trying to express with the phrase my client cut. The acknowledgment that both writer and reader are grownups and that we’re not going to bullshit each other. It’s the total opposite of a cheap verbal flourish, and I believe it’s the true essence of tone of voice.

Tone of voice is a stance

Tone of voice is an attitude that expresses how you feel about your audience. It’s made up of the zillion assumptions you make about them: about the world they live in; what they know and what they don’t; why you’re creating content for them; how you think they feel about your business; how much you think they might resist your message; and so on. That makes it incredibly complex. (Which is why it’s also hard to create tone of voice guidelines that are more than crude approximations.)

  • For instance, if you respect your readers’ expertise, you’ll write in a way that takes them seriously, without lecturing them.
  • If you think they’re pressed for time, you’ll keep it short.
  • If you think they might not understand that obscure accounting term you’ve devoted a chapter to, you’ll explain it in a non-jargony way.
  • And if you assume some of them might already have an [x] solution and are highly unlikely to buy yours, you might actually tell them that they’re not your key audience and offer them a kitten meme instead.

Real tone of voice is always there, whether you’re aware of your attitudes or not. It’s not something you sprinkle in after completing draft one. And that means that it can do you a disservice, too, because stance is nearly impossible to fake. Like an old water stain under cheap paint, a not-so-gracious attitude towards your audience (for instance, an overt sales agenda that’s trying to disguise itself) will always come through in your content. For example:

  • If you think your readers are dumb, you might resort to sweeping generalisations in your copy.
  • If you’re trying too hard to be liked, your copy might become cutesy or gymmicky (like mine did).
  • If you’re doing content for content’s sake, your readers will feel your lack of direction.
  • If you’re worried you’ll give away a secret, they’ll feel that you’re holding back on value. (Don’t worry about that by the way. In 99.99% of cases tech marketers aren’t talking about anything their competitors don’t already know).

And the thing is: these are the attitudes that make content deeply unsexy, threadbare, and weak. No amount of sprinkle will change that. Because they mean that you haven’t invested in a stance that’s worth your readers’ while.

So if you want to create impactful copy, make sure you do the hard work: check your knowledge about your audience, where you believe they’re at with their thinking, and how you feel about sharing your expertise. Sprinkles are cheap. Stance is gonna cost you. But it’ll pay, too.