Today, your customers have a nearly unending variety of solutions available to address whatever business challenges they face. Whether you’re first-to-market in your industry niche, or you’ve built a better mousetrap and want to take the market by storm, you’ve got a lot of noise to overcome.

To really capture the attention of your intended audience, you need to know three basic things:

1.       What they need (And yeah, this should always come first!)

2.       What you want to tell them

3.       How to communicate it

Now, any smart marketer who has done some research and thought about messaging probably already has # 1 and #2 covered, no problem. It’s when they get to the HOW that they often stumble and fall.

Finding your true corporate voice―the one that’s going to reach out and grab your customers’ attention, even in a ridiculously loud marketplace―is one of the hardest things to do correctly.

Here are some suggestions to help you find the right voice for your copy:

• Divorce yourself from what everyone else is doing. It’s really easy to just look at your most successful competitor’s voice and tone and just pull a big, steaming pile of “me too” out of your hat. But don’t go there: The best you might get is a few of your competitor’s sloppy seconds (eeew!), and the worst you’ll get is completely ignored by everyone because you chose not to differentiate.
• Be true to your brand.  Now it’s time to just get sensible. If your offering is targeted at resolving the legal concerns of CPAs, or fulfilling the government mandates of HR organizations, you should probably set all the fun, quirky stuff aside. If your customer and your brand are both pretty buttoned-down by nature, be true to that―you can still have a voice that is unique, and that resonates without sacrificing your credibility.
• No role-playing. Are you perpetuating a false voice just because you’ve been doing it for so long and you THINK that’s what your customers expect to hear? Think about this: If your current “voice” isn’t consistent with the reality of your company, customer, or market, are your customers really hearing you, and are they buying? How much in opportunities and sales revenue have you already sacrificed because you forgot your mom’s age-old advice to “just be yourself?”

Finding your corporate voice isn’t about manufacturing something that doesn’t exist; it’s about getting real. When you find the real voice of your company, your real customers will start responding.

Make sense? If you still need help, contact me, and we can chat personally about what you need.