There are situations where it’s important to align your own marketing voice with that of another brand. Perhaps you are a reseller of their product or services, or perhaps you’re a simply trying to compete in a market with a niche audience.
Purpose:
To align your organization’s voice with that of another brand.
Toolset:
AntConc, web scrapper / web browser
Sources of Voice
There are three primary sources you can take your information from for constructing a clear voice. These include the target brand’s:Internal marketingWebsiteSocial content
The first of these is going to be the most definitive resource for promoting a product – if it exists and you are given access to it. Otherwise, the second two options are a suitable alternative.
Statistical Significance
Not all the data you find is going to merit mentioning in a brand voice guide. In fact, the bulk of it is going to be useless. In order to differentiate between what you should adopt and what you shouldn’t, you’re going to need to have a basic grasp of statistical significance.
Here, statistical significance means that a word must feature at least 5% of the time. That means that if you have a collection of 4,000 words, it should exist at least 20 times. 5% might seem a lot but actually isn’t. If an organization has a clear brand voice, core language should be consistent throughout their content.
Collecting a Lexicon
Either use a web scrapper or copy & paste the brand’s website into a text (.txt) document. To avoid your data from being skewed, go through the content and delete any boilerplate. This includes any copy that is featured throughout the website (menus, footers, headers, etc). Once you have all the website’s content in a text file, you can then load it into a corpus analysis tool. Perform a word count analysis.
Find word’s that have statistical significance and sort them into the categories of Noun, Verb, and Adjective. If there is a word that may fit into two of these, check its concordance lines to see how the word is being used.
If you decide to do this with a brand’s social content, bear in mind that a larger corpus is needed. Most web pages contain less than 500 words, meaning that core pages from a brand’s website tend to total less than 10,000 words. A social corpus should contain at least twice that.
The Statement and the Sentence
The statement is a three or four word phrase that embodies the language and phrases that a company uses. It can serve as a central crux to a brand voice and is helpful for content writers to get a feel before delving deeper.
You can find the statement by taking a noun, an adjective, and a verb, and putting them together in a way that makes sense. To really take this to the next step, go back to AntConc and check for collocations. This will help you to build a clearer idea of when and how the target brand uses different words together.
The sentence is like the statement but longer. In the sentence, try to work in as much of the lexicon as possible to create one, long example of the brand’s voice.