Creating a Voice for Client Blogs
Creating a Blog Voice
It’s hard enough to create a voice for yourself when you’re writing, but what’s even harder is creating and maintaining a voice for a client. When you write for yourself, you know your values, your role, your audience, what you believe morally, spiritually, and scientifically, and you know your own boundaries. However, when you write for a client, that changes.
Do Your Research
Taking on the responsibility of writing for a client means that you are representing their entire company, and the legacy that they’ve built or are currently building. Because of this, you should know and understand all that they’ve already done for their company by reviewing past publications. The first place you should start is the client’s current blog.
By reading posts that your client has published, you are seeing what voice they’re using and have used in the past. Try to go back and read as many past blogs as you can, making sure you note how their voice has changed over time. The voice of their blog changing is a sign that they realized that one way of writing works better for them and the audience they’re trying to reach.
Creating a voice for a client is more than just seeing what words they use, if it’s casual or technical, whether or not they write with proper grammar or have a more relaxed, new age internet style of writing. It’s also about what topics they write about. You wouldn’t write a fashion blog post for an engineering company.
Know Your Audience
When anyone blogs, the main goal is to reach people who are interested in what you have to say, what you’re trying to sell, and/or what new and exciting information that you’re bringing to the table. These people become your audience.
For the most part, an audience is compiled of people who work in the same or similar industry as your client. The audience is expecting a certain level of professionalism in the blog, as well as looking for a comfortability with the information. Basically, they want accurate and informative writing that doesn’t sound like it came from a textbook.
If you aren’t sure who your client’s audience is, you can check out their website demographics using Google Analytics or other free tools like Alexa.com to see who frequents their site. Getting an idea of the “average” customer will help you down the road when you start developing personas to guide your content creation.
Hitting the right demographic is one of the most important aspects of creating blog posts for a client. If you’re writing for a demographic that hits 18-24 year old men, and the audience for the client is 50-65 year old women, you won’t get any results.
Building Your Voice
Let’s say you’re creating a blog for a client in the travel agency industry. This client’s blog has been getting roughly 10 visitors per post, who stay no longer than one minute. They are attempting to target 25-35 men and women demographic. However, their biggest consumers are in the 45-65 year old men demographic.
You can see that not only are the visitors not staying on the page long enough to read the content, but they aren’t hitting the right demographic. The voice of a post is controlled by who is writing, and often times, when someone is writing outside of their own demographic, it’s hard to connect to that audience.
It takes time to learn how to write for someone else, or even as someone else, but it gets easier with practice. As a 23 year old female, I often find myself writing towards a demographic much older than me, and of a different gender. The key is to build your writing style by taking experience from others.
Maintain and Grow Your Audience
As the company grows, the blog should also grow by bringing in more visitors, longer visit durations, and increased audience recognition. As your audience beings to grow, you need to adapt to maintain the steady stream of visitors. You may notice a need to change your voice during this time depending on the interests of the visitors.
Creating a voice is a delicate balance between who you are, who your client is, and who you’re writing for. But, building a voice is one of the most important things you can do for a client’s blog. You’re building a relationship with the audience and connecting to them on a way that they feel comfortable and informed. Just follow a few easy steps and do a little background research, and you can find your voice among the crowds of other blogs out there. Good Luck!
Creating Your Voice Checklist
1. Find out what’s worked in the past
2. Decide whether you’re casual, professional, or technical
3. Gather demographics of visitors
4. Decide on your target audience
5. Build your voice in your writing
6. Maintain and grow your audience
By Rachel Delaney, Chief Copy Writer
Rachel is ProspectMX’s writer, editor, and grammar nerd. Rachel comes to us from Millersville University with a BA in English and Print Media. She brings a creative mind and big ideas to the table. Her passion for reading, writing, and learning brought her into the world of internet marketing where she gets to combine her writing skills with a broad range of topics. Rachel uses her skills and upbeat personality to help our Content Marketing campaigns thrive.