How to choose your voice and tone

We have recently started looking at developing a Content Marketing Strategy here at Learnium. As specialists in collaborative learning, there is plenty of insight, tips and advice we would like to share with the world.

At the beginning of a content marketing plan, you have to make a number of decisions, including:

While we could answer some of these questions in minutes, we couldn’t answer the last one so quickly. In the end, this how we came to our final decision.

When making a decision, looking to others is often a good starting point. After all, they have already come to their decision, so perhaps you can draw inspiration from this.

We looked at other startups. They all had the same style. Informal. Verbs were contracted. Sentences were short. Nothing was ambiguous. There was no flowery language.

The thinking here was clearly that the more simple, clear and spoken the language is, the more accessible it is to a general audience.

This was precisely the thorn in our side, as we knew the audience for our content blog would be a group of specialists.

The guide from Gather Content insisted that no writing should be done without a solid style guide in place.

Looking into style guides, we discovered that larger organizations have their own style guides, which are often adopted by smaller companies, such as Learnium.

Some style guides which have proven popular among startups include:

These guides are comprehensive and cover a range of styles, depending on your needs.

However, they are again for a very general audience. Anyone can use MailChimp. Just about everyone reads something by the BBC from time to time. The AP style book has been adopted by so many organizations, you probably read an article written according to its rules several times a day.

So where does that leave Learnium?

In the end, we decided to turn to our target audience. We asked them for samples of what they read. The results were clear and unambiguous. Being the specialist group that they are, they read specialist literature.

This meant that our own writing would need to follow this style. It should contain:

So in the end, we are producing academic blog posts for academics to read in an academic style.

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