Real-Life Examples of Core Themes

Let’s look at a few real-life examples of core themes. Table 5-1 presents the results of my team’s analysis of the content these brands consistently publish in their owned channels. You will also find a brief description of what each of these companies does.

A practical way to analyze your competitors’ themes is to look at the content hub’s categories and commonly used tags. This content hub, as I pointed out earlier, is often the brand’s blog or magazine. This straightforward method can quickly shed light on a given company’s core themes because it is common practice to surface these as content categories or tags.

Aside from being a content manager myself, I have mentored hundreds of creators in the process of unveiling these core themes. Along the way, I have found a technique that helps anyone, at every level of knowledge, come up with an actionable list of core themes to create content around. Let’s explore this in the next section.

The Four-Question Technique to Find Your Own Themes

To start this process, write a list of words or phrases that answer each of the following four questions:

• What issues does your target buyer face in a normal day?

• If your brand were the name of a section within a bookstore, what books would we be able to find there?

• If your target buyer suddenly had a need for a product like yours and sat in front of her computer right now, what would she type in the search bar to find a solution?

• If your product/service came with a dictionary, which terms would it contain?

If you have completed this exercise correctly, there should be a list of topics to craft your content strategy around. When we look at issues that your target buyer faces in a normal day, we are considering the pain points that might drive someone to purchase your product/service. In creating content around these issues, your brand will become a thought leader. Whenever this potential buyer experiences the issue at hand, she will turn to you for trusted advice.

The second question points to the bookstore idea as a way to help you think in terms of long-form content. If you are building a brand for a tech device, for example, try using that same name to refer to a section within a bookstore. What kinds of books would those shelves contain?

It might be helpful to visualize the scene.

You just walked into your favorite bookstore, and one of the aisles contains a section named after your brand. You lean closer to the shelves and begin taking note of the books the store has included in this section. These titles are all related to the brand in a way that someone familiar with you will find the material incredibly useful. Which books did you find?

Perhaps this is simpler if you consider another brand—say Apple. If there were an “Apple Section” within a bookstore, you would probably find books like Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success or Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products.

Similarly, if you were creating content for a brand called “e-DIY,”¹ and thought of an “e-DIY Section,” you would relate it to books like Martha Stewart’s Encyclopedia of Crafts. The point of this exercise is guiding you to a set of in-depth resources that you can look at to nail down a list of themes that are relevant for your brand. Grab any of the books you have listed and you will find a comprehensive table of contents to inspire your own pieces.

The third question is related to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We will look at this topic in depth in Chapter 13; however, understanding that your readers are also active searchers is crucial for content success. If someone had a gluten allergy and desperately wanted to eat some pasta, which phrases would they type in the search bar? Did the expressions “gluten-free Italian restaurant” or “gluten-free pasta in (X city)” come to mind? Good, we are making some serious progress. Although not necessarily a joy ride, the process of optimizing what you publish so that it is eventually found is completely logical. Wearing the SEO hat is probably one of the most important lessons a content manager must learn in the era of 24/7 connectivity.

Our fourth and last question will help you to find a list of expressions and technical terms that are part of your industry’s jargon. And, trust me here: every single industry has one. If you are having a difficult time noticing the unique, specialized words you are using, try explaining it to Mom. Or your middle school neighbor. Just go for someone who does not spend nearly as much time working in your space. Those conversations should point you in the right direction for what needs to be explained.

After you line up that list of complex terms, it will help you to create a content strategy aimed at beginners in your space. Unlike what we would like to believe, not all buyers are 100 percent prepared to make full use of what we sell. Not all of them have years of experience at what they do. Some buyers are just aspiring to get closer to how you actually picture them: area experts. Some see you and your content as a gate to becoming increasingly better at something. Therefore, including basic definitions as part of your content strategy is a way to broaden your reach and widen your market.

Brand Voice

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What do you feel when a brand talks to you like a robot? Using expressions—like the one you just read—creates an invisible barrier between you and your audience. Lifeless terms and the distance they convey can prevent your customers from listening to your message and engaging with it.

Can you think of any opportunities for which your brand could adopt a more genuine voice—the kind of words you would expect from a human being? There are dozens of tiny interactions in which you get the chance to relate to your audience on a human level. At the end of the day, people will relate to people, and if your brand sounds like people, they will relate to you, too.

Put simply, a brand’s voice is the overarching, unique style with which it communicates. It is what makes your audience go, “Oh, they said that for sure,” or “That sounds so (brand here).” The goal when developing this voice is to arrive at a way of saying things that expresses your brand’s personality. Consider your answers to the following questions as you shape a unique brand voice:

• Are you more formal or casual?

• How do you use slang or local expressions?

• Do you have a preference for American or British English? Or any other local variation of the language you are using?

• Do you use emojis or GIFs in a certain way?

• Has your brand made up its own words?

Exercise: Finding Your Brand’s Unique Voice

Defining your brand’s voice for the first time can be both an exciting and uncertain experience. It’s exciting because you are figuring out what your brand sounds like and exploring the characteristics that will help you engage with humans. It’s uncertain because starting from scratch presents its own challenges: there is nothing to spin off, build from, or learn from. I have found that this exercise often resolves those questions for teams that are just getting under way. Here is how it works:

1. You will need index cards or printouts with at least 100 tweets sent out by different brands. The brand’s name must not be visible. During this exercise, I normally provide a preselected group of tweets chosen, as described in a moment. A Twitter analytics tool like Twitonomy can easily show a brand’s most retweeted, and hence most popular, messages. Here’s how those tweets should break down:

   1. Twenty-five popular tweets from brands in the same space.

   2. Fifteen popular tweets from brands in an unrelated space that target a similar audience.

   3. Fifteen popular tweets from celebrities or influential individuals followed by your intended audience.

   4. Twenty-five popular tweets from large media outlets with a broad audience (think accounts like the Huffington Post, the New York Times, CNN, and the BBC).

   5. Ten popular tweets from brands in any space that excel at support. It helps to come up with a list of five and pull two tweets from each.

   6. Ten popular tweets from brands in any space that excel at voice and tone. It helps to come up with a list of five and pull two tweets from each.

2. For every message, answer “absolutely,” “maybe,” “no,” or “never” to the question: “Would your brand ever say this?” Save the cards to which you said “absolutely” in a special pile. Similarly, group those to which you said “never.” If you are going through these with a team and find a significant difference in opinions, vote to decide where each message should go.

3. Look at the “absolutely” pile: what kind of person would say this? Take note of this description because it points to your brand’s overall voice.

4. Look at the “never” pile: what kind of person would say this? Take note of this description because it points to the type of voice your brand should stay away from. In providing this direction, it is also indirectly defining the voice you are aiming for.

5. Consider which scenarios would be ideal to use the messages in your “absolutely” pile. If it helps, sort the cards by assigning them to any of the following situations.

Voice Versus Tone

Remember this as you are thinking about voice and tone: although a brand communicates using a single voice, it can make use of various tones to adapt to each communication situation. If you completed the preceding voice exercise, you are probably beginning to notice that the “situation buckets” we used actually refer to a brand’s various tones.

Table 5-2 deminstrates how a single brand’s voice could play out when applied in different tones.

In Table 5-2, we begin with a raw message about hummingbirds and see it recreated it using three different tones. The original story that the brand was trying to convey was “Hummingbirds are the world’s hungriest birds.” For the conversational tone, we appeal to a casual statement that you could share with someone else in person. It is empathetic, and appeals to personal habits by saying “you might think you eat a lot.” To reproduce this message using a funny tone, we exaggerate a person’s sense of hunger with the phrase “starving to death.” Then, we bring up the fact that hummingbirds can genuinely die if they do not eat, and that should be enough to make the two of you soulmates—another exaggeration. For the last tone, informed, we stick to the facts and provide a specific number to quantify just how much a human being would need to eat to match a hummingbird’s diet.

Sample Experimental Tones

Let’s discuss these tones for a moment. You will find yourself using variants of that voice to address issues in different contexts, in different environments, and for different segments of your audience. Although there is a seemingly infinite list of tones you can adopt, I have categorized them into the aforementioned three large buckets: conversational, funny, and informed. Hopefully, this will make them much easier to remember and implement. Do remember that all three of these include many different tone variations, some of which we’ll look at shortly. That said, consider applying one or more of these whenever you create a new content piece.

Switching Between Tones

Switching tones can be an effective method to engage people. One of the most useful techniques to jump from one tone to the next is to consider the questions presented in Table 5-3.

Because tones are contextual, it really helps to adapt each of the scenarios in Table 5-3 as places or situations to which your brand would genuinely be exposed. Instead of considering a café, for example, it might make more sense for your brand to get inspiration out of a happy-hour conversation. Instead of thinking about a comic strip or meme to apply a funny tone to your message, it might make more sense to imagine a standup comedy scenario, or even an animated GIF. In the end, it is all about helping yourself (and your team of creators) adopt the right mindset to facilitate applying these tones every single day.

Watch Your Mood!

A word of caution about tone: avoid confusing the creator’s mood with the persona that you are trying to create for your brand—especially when you are that creator. God knows there are days when I wake up the most antisocial, monosyllabic person on the planet and yet I still need to pull off that conversational style. You would be surprised at how some humorists literally need to force that funny bone out of nowhere at best, and depression at worst.

That is why tuning your tone before you begin creating anything is so important. If you are the creator, do whatever it takes to get into that mood. If you are managing a team of creators, send them ideas every now and then to make sure they can get themselves to that place from which they create.

Documenting Your Voice and Tone Guidelines

For this whole voice-and-tone strategy to be scalable, you need to be able to communicate it clearly. When you are a team of one, finding the right tone is always sort of a monologue situation. When dealing with multiple writers, however, articulating expectations is crucial. If your brand cares about the way it is portrayed, maintaining a certain voice and tone will definitely turn into a prerequisite.

That is when developing a Voice-and-Tone Style Guide becomes essential. Assuming that you just read this sentence and freaked out (“More work?” “How long is this gonna take?” “I do not have the bandwidth for this now”), bear with me as I share a lean approach to coming up with these guidelines.

Let’s make this as painless as possible: coming up with a Voice-and-Tone Style Guide should be a team effort. You shouldn’t be expected to create a set of guidelines out of the blue and then ask the rest to oblige. That isn’t how it works. A very effective way to do this is by using a participative approach. Identify the different areas of your business that will interact with an audience:

• Support

• Partnerships

• Social media

• Blog

• Executive team

• Public relations

• Other functional areas that you can think of

Then, introduce this initiative as something that will benefit the entire team and help onboard new members. Find some time to meet with team leaders in each of the preceding areas. This can be a short call, and the more prepared they come, the better will be the use of everyone’s time. Ask them the following questions:

• How does our brand’s voice come through in the area on which you are working?

• You speak to a subset of our audience. Could you describe it?

• What channels are you using to reach out to that audience?

• Which principles guide the way in which you communicate with that audience?

We discuss more about maintaining a constant voice and tone in Chapter 12, when we introduce Content Quality Assurance.