Find Your Brand's Voice: Write Copy That Differentiates You From The Competition

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Mike, and I'm here to help you find your brand's voice. Nothing is more frustrating than working really hard on a piece of writing, then looking at over and realizing it doesn't sound right. It sounds maybe too awkward. Maybe it sounds a little serious. No matter what, it doesn't sound like you or the brand that you've envisioned for yourself. It's really hard to get your point across in as few words as possible. It's even harder to make that message unique and interesting. But it doesn't have to be that way either. You just need to define your tone of voice. So what exactly is tone of voice? Think of it as the way you sound when you write. For example, you can think of like Nike's just do it. We all know it. It's inspirational, it's authoritative and it really motivates you to get out there and go for a run. But doesn't have to be that way either. It could be that really funny, fun-filled sign you see in front of a coffee shop that makes you laugh or smile and convinces you to ultimately go in and buy that cup of coffee. The way your words sound affect the way people perceive you, they set you apart from everyone else. In this class, I'm going to help you do just that. You might need help sounding more like really engaging and charismatic person you are in person. Or you might need help defining what your brand should sound like for maybe a new startup or your personal portfolio or freelance career. No matter what it is, I'll help you find that unique voice that will make all of your writing better. Here's how we're going to go about doing it. First, we'll define your brand's muse. That's the person you think best represents your brand's voice. We're going to use them as a starting point. From there, we're going to get into the real work. That's turning that muse that you selected into a few simple defining principles that will codify your voice and your writing. Finally, we'll take your hard work and turn it into a short sentence that will help you start writing in your voice anytime you're feeling stuck. At the end of this class, your final project will be to take all of that hard work we did and turn it into a one-page sheet that you can then use for anything, whether it's emails, whether it's social posts, whether it's website copy, you name it. It's a document you can go to, you can reference and you can use it to make sure that everything you're writing, it's living up to the voice that you've created for your brand, for yourself. Now, all along the way, I'll share with you the tips that I've learned from doing this in the advertising business. I'm a copywriter, I'm a digital advertising creative and I've worked with a lot of leading brands to help them figure out their voice for various projects including Nike and Clif Bar. If you're wondering if this class is right for you, or maybe you're hesitant and think you don't have enough marketing experience for it, don't worry. I truly believe this class is for everyone. We all have a voice and we all know how to write. All you need to do is bring those things together using pen, paper, and a little bit of dedication. This sounds like something that would interest you, then keep listening to my classes and keep learning. If you have any questions along the way, drop me a note. I really look forward to helping you find your voice and I cannot wait to see what yours comes out sounding like. Thanks again for checking out my class, I look forward to seeing you in it. Thanks. Bye. 2. What is Tone of Voice?: Hi guys, welcome to the class. I am so excited to be able to help you in figuring out your tone of voice. We're going to have a lot of fun along the way and I cannot wait to get you there. For this first class, I want to just revisit the idea of what tone of voice is, and I've been calling it TOV 101. Now, TOV is short for tone of voice. I might use it through these videos so if you hear it, then, now you know what it is. Just to recap from the first video, from the introduction, tone of voice is the way we sound on paper. It's what differentiates us from all of the competition out there. To emphasize this point, I want to look at car shares. We all know Lyft and we all know Uber. Really when you think about them from a product perspective, they don't do anything all that different. You might pick one over the other just on which one is saving you a dollar on that particular day. But when you go to their websites, we can truly see how they differentiate using their voice. For example, when you go down to their three main points, the first one they have is more or less the same for both brands. They say this idea that in basic English, 'Hey, we live on your mobile phone, by the tap of a button you can get a taxi to come and pick you up' That's all they're trying to say but they have two uniquely creative ways derived from their voice that bring it to life and it represents their brand. Lyft, for example, says "Rides on tap." It's fun, playful and feels kind of hip. Whereas Uber's is a little bit more straightforward, "Tap a button, get a ride." It's instructional, it's clear, it's simple, and it has a little bit more authority to it. It really represents the two brands really well when you think about them just holistically. Lyft, clearly used to have a mustache as their logo, there all about fun. Uber has always been a little bit more about luxury and catering to maybe a little bit more of an executive type audience. This is why tone of voice is so important. It really sets you apart. Now, I hope this lesson has helped clarify that a little bit. Obviously it's short and simple. Next class we're going to get into helping you find yours by starting to figure out who your muse is. Carry on to the next video. I'll see you there and we'll start talking about your muse. Thanks guys. Stalk you soon. Bye. 3. Find Your Muse: Hey, guys, welcome to the next class. In this class, we're going to figure out your brand's muse. That's the person that you think your brand or your voice is most similar to that we're going to use as a starting point to really codify and to find your voice. Now, in the last class, we talked a little bit about how Lyft and Uber, while selling the same product, have very unique and different voices. Lyft, for example, is a bit more friendly and hip, whereas Uber is a little more straightforward and locks in the way that they talk. Their muses are also reflecting of that. Lyft, they have a millennial or a hipster as their muse, whereas Uber's might be a C-level executive. Another really great example of a brand who clearly has a muse is Nike. Think about some of Nike's headlines, there is no finish line. "Wimps need not apply. Kiss my airs. Find your greatness." These all sound like inspirational phrases that a coach might tell you. For Nike, I would argue, their muse is a coach. Now, for you, your muse does not need to be a profession or some sort of general archetype. It can be, but it can also be a celebrity or a character that's fictional. Could be a cartoon character, it could be a movie persona, it doesn't matter, as long as they have a unique voice that is interesting and something that we can break down and fully understand. Let's talk a little bit more deeply then about what makes a good muse and what doesn't make a good muse. Let's use celebrities as a start too, because I think that's a really easy place to begin with. There are a lot of celebrities out there. I remember, I was working on a project once and I was using this as a tool, and someone had asked, "Well, we could use someone like Paul Rudd. He's funny." But the problem with Paul Rudd really is that yeah, he's funny, but I don't know if I wrote a Paul Rudd quote out on paper, if it would actually sound unique to him. On the other hand, you could take someone like Matthew McConaughey, who has a very distinct way of writing and you can instantly recognize it in paper. For example, look at this quote, "I'm a football fan, a sports fan, a fan of competition." It has that McConaughey loop to it. It's not necessarily grammatically correct. It's not necessarily makes full sense by itself. But at least it's interesting. That's what we're aiming for with a muse. It doesn't need to be 100 percent perfectly you, but it should start to build a character that you can then draw inspiration from. Now, your task for this class is to use the worksheet that I've put in there for how to build your muse. It's really simple. All you have to do is find a picture of your muse, find a compelling quote from them, and give me a brief explanation of why they are your muse. Once you do that, then we'll be good to go on to the next lesson, which will be taking a part of that muse, and defining what makes their voice unique and how we can transfer that to you. See you in the next lesson, I hope this was helpful. Thanks. Bye. 4. What's a Tone Principle?: Hey guys, welcome to the next class. In the last class, we talked about finding the muse for your voice. Now, you could have picked a celebrity, a person you know, could even be a fictional character but whoever you chose, what we're going to do in this video and the next video is figure out how to take that muse, using them as inspiration to define your tone of voice through a few tone principles. What exactly is a tone principle? Well, an easy way to think about them as an adjective or a descriptive word that defines your voice. We'll use, for example, that Nike quote that we had from the last class. "Find Your greatness." We said that their muse was a coach. If I had to look at this quote and this muse, I might say the three words that best describe it are no-nonsense, short, and inspirational. Another great example is this James Bond quote here. I'm not going to read it out loud because it's super long, but it's a pretty funny one and you can see that this could be very different. It's not really all that serious at all, it's a little sophisticated in the subject matter, and it's incredibly conversational. The tone of voice principles I might use for Bond would be sophisticated, witty, and conversational. Now, your tone of voice principles will be whatever fits your brand and voice best. In the next video, we're going to get into what makes a good voice principle versus what makes a bad one, and we'll use that to help us figure out the three that we want to use to figure out our brand. Cool? See you in the next class. 5. Defining Your Principles: All right guys, this class is almost done, which means it's time for a challenge. You've already figured out who your muse is. You've learned about tone of voice principles and hopefully you've used the tips and structures that I've given you over the last two videos to find the three words that really define your brand or your own unique voice. Now we write. What I want you to do is I want you to define each of your three tone of voice principles using that voice that you already know you have. It sounds tricky, but I know you can do it. To help you, I'm going to show you how I did this for myself. Let's first look, what are Mike's three tone of voice principles? Well, my word bank principle is conversational. My structure is concise and my emotion is clever. Concise, conversational and clever. That's how I write for me and my brand. Now the challenge is, what does that sound like? There's a lot of people who could be concise, conversational and clever but what is clever, conversational, concise to Mike that's different than another person. This is why you need to define your principles. You already know when you selected them why you selected them. Now it's just a matter of using your voice to put that on paper. Here's how I did it. Concise, it's how I write. You can see how in that sentence it's a short sentence and it's clever because it's playing off with the idea of concise. For conversational, I wrote this; I keep it simple with simple everyday language. Again, really simple language. It really emphasizes that. It's not too long and again, it's got a little bit of that cleverness in the way that that sentence is structured. Then the last one; clever. What do I mean by clever? Word play? Game on. Again, it's concise. It uses some cleverness in it and it shows that for me, clever is really about using words in a fun way. All of these things come together to make my tone of voice and you can see it through those three sample sentences there. Now, sometimes you might write something and it might lean more into one principle and less into another. That's perfectly okay, and in fact, it should do that. As you're trying to write these, if you want an extra challenge, try to make sure that each one weighs its principle the most. Like concise, it's how I write. Uses conciseness to write that sentiment in the shortest way it possibly can. Go ahead, give it a go and I hope you have some fun writing this, because in the next video, we're wrapping this all up. We're going to create your cheat sheet and you're going to be able to go out there and write in your tone of voice everywhere. Good luck. I can't wait to see what you come back with. 6. Good & Bad Tone Principles: Hey guys, welcome to the next class. In the last class, we talked about what defines a tone of voice principle. In this class, I want to talk about what makes a good principle and what doesn't. So I have a few simple rules that we'll go through and we'll use these then to help us in defining the tone of voice principles that match up with our amuse and define our own unique voice. So rule number 1, use words that make sense for writing. I once had a client and one of their tone principles was adventurous. Adventurous is a great word. However, I don't know what adventurous writing sounds like. Try to avoid words that are great for people, but aren't great for writing. So if you do have a word like adventurous, try to analyze it and think about what else could that word mean. An adventurous person is someone who maybe likes to take risks or is optimistic because they're always looking at the road ahead. So optimistic or positive might be really good principles for an adventures person, that fit a little bit better with defining your voice. The second rule is to keep it simple. Avoid having more than three principles. I highly recommend three as your maximum, four at most, if you absolutely need it. The reason being that the more principles you have, the more complicated and difficult it is to write in that voice because you're trying to make so many things together. Then your voice just starts to sound muddy and confused. Rule number 3 is avoid words for principles that are too similar to one another. So if one of your principle is lighthearted, don't make your second principle funny, they're too similar to each other that it makes your voice more one-dimensional than it should be. The fourth rule is very similar. Avoid opposites that contradict each other. So again, if your voice is funny, don't make another principle serious. They don't really mesh well together. You're going to have a really heard time to write in a tone of voice that's both funny and serious at the same time. So those are the rules that I have. In the next video, I'm going to give you, guys, a strategy that I love that allows you to find three words that are completely distinct that follow all of these rules to help you define your voice, so that it's super easy to then apply it to everything that you write. So follow me to the next video and we'll go from there. Talk to you soon. Bye. 7. Structuring Your Tone: Hey guys, we're almost there. We've found our muse, we've learned what a tonal voice principle is, and then I gave you a bunch of great tips that I use to make sure that you find really strong, good word choices for your tonal voice. Now, I want to teach you a structure that I absolutely love. It's a pick of three words that affect three different aspects of how we write. It's that simple. Essentially, you find one tonal voice principle that talks about word choice, one that talks about length and structure of how we write, and the third one is emotion. Now let's go in and talk a little bit deeper about each of these three areas. First, word choice. When I say word choice, I mean what is the bank of words that make sense for your brand. Are you a brand that uses sort of more sophisticated scientific language or are you more conversational and you write using everyday language? Both of those are great. Pick a tonal voice principle that has a language or word bank that comes with it. The second area is length and structure. This one's simple. Do you use short sentences or do you use long sentences? It's all about understanding the rhythm of your voice. It's a lot of short sentences, great. It could be a mixture of the two but pick a tonal voice word that really will help you understand the structure of how you need to write. The third one and most important is emotion, and this hits on what you want your audience to take away when they read your writing. Are you funny? Are you inspirational? Are you serious? Are you professional? Whatever that emotion is, you want to have one that you really own, that defines your voice. Think again about Nike's, theirs is all about inspiration, whereas Lyft's is all about fun. Find that emotion that you really want to hit on and use that for your third principle. Let's end this video here and we'll move on to the next one where we will start to talk about how you write in your voice. 8. Assembling Your Reference Sheet: Hey guys, how's that challenge? I hope you found it as fun and rewarding as it probably was well, challenging to do. The trick with writing in your tone of voice is you need to write in it over and over again. It's going to take time to really refine it and really perfect what you want it to sound like. But I think you've already gone and made some really great steps just by creating three principles that will hold you to a certain standard every time you write. Now, there's one last thing we need to do and that's put together our reference sheet that we're going to use as our final project, and what's going to help us whenever we're writing so that we can keep getting better and stay true to this voice that we've decided reflects us. Your cheat sheet is going to consist of three different sections. The first section will be your muse, once you have that picture of your muse, and that quote right at the top, use this as inspiration. The next section will be your three tone principles, put them up there with their definitions, you can then use these to refine any piece of copy you write. Then the last section is your final task to complete this class, and that is a one-sentence about me. Now, that sounds really hard but don't worry, I actually don't want you to write a full about you in one sentence, instead, I want you to write one sentence that you can then write off of. This will help you anytime you're stuck and you're looking at a piece of paper that's blank. This will also allow you to use your voice right off the bat, so your last task is just that, write your one sentence about me and put it at the end. Once you do that, then move on to the next class and we'll talk about how to use your sheet, and I'll thank you for all of your hard work and dedication. Thanks guys. See you in the next video. 9. Using Your Reference Sheet: All right guys, you did it. You're at the end of this class. Congratulations. It's really awesome. Thank you for all of your hard work and attention as you've gone through all of these videos. I really appreciate it. Now, that you've done all that and you have your cheat sheet, let's just talk real quick about how to use it. I want you either to print this thing out or save it on your computer, whatever is easiest for you, but always keep it handy when you're writing because your cheat sheet is what's going to help you in staying in your tone of voice whenever you write. Use that muse at the top for inspiration to get into the right head-space. If you have audio of the quote, play that because it's going to help you get that cadence and tone so that you can start writing in it. Use your tone principles to check anything you write and make sure that you're meeting the standards that define your voice. Finally, when you're stuck, use that final sentence that about me conversation starter to really bring yourself to start writing and getting into your voice. Doesn't matter if it takes you five sentences after you started to finally get to what you want to say for that particular document but at least it gets you in the right zone and writing in the right style that's right for you and your brand. I wish you the best of luck going forward and again, thank you so much for taking my class. I really appreciate it and I hope you and your tone of voice serve you well. Best of luck. Take care. Bye.