How can you determine the right voice for a client's social media?

1 Understand your client

The first step is to understand your client's business, industry, target market, and objectives. What are their products or services, and what benefits do they offer? What are their unique selling points, and what challenges do they face? Who are their ideal customers, and what are their needs, preferences, and pain points? What are their goals, and how do they measure success? By answering these questions, you can get a clear picture of your client's brand identity and value proposition.

3 Define the voice attributes

The third step is to define the voice attributes that you want to use for your client's social media. These are the adjectives that describe how you want to sound and feel to your audience. For example, you might want to be friendly, professional, humorous, authoritative, or inspirational. You can use a voice chart to list the attributes that you want to include and exclude, and to provide examples of how to apply them in different situations.

4 Create a style guide

The fourth step is to create a style guide that documents your voice guidelines and best practices. This reference tool is essential for maintaining consistency and quality across your client's social media channels. Your style guide should include voice attributes and examples, tone variations and scenarios, grammar, punctuation, and spelling rules, vocabulary, jargon, and slang dos and don'ts, emojis, hashtags, and abbreviations usage, as well as content types, formats, and lengths.

5 Test and refine

The final step is to test and refine your voice based on feedback and results. You can use tools like surveys, polls, quizzes, reviews, comments, and analytics to measure how your audience responds to your voice. You can also compare your voice with your competitors and industry leaders to see how you stand out or blend in. Based on your findings, you can adjust your voice to improve your engagement, reach, and conversion rates.

Finding the right voice for your client's social media is not a one-time task, but an ongoing process. You need to keep up with the changing trends, preferences, and behaviors of your audience, and adapt your voice accordingly. By following these tips, you can create a voice that resonates with your audience, reflects your client's brand, and achieves your goals.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?