Reaching out to potential customers can be a complicated business these days. There are many marketing channels you can use to reach them, from all the different social media platforms to blogs to physical media.
Working out the content of your messaging is one thing. But you also need to consider your tone of voice. Your tone of voice should reflect your brand identity and core values, but may need to change slightly according to the marketing channel you’re using and the type of audience member you’ll find there.
As an experienced copywriter — both freelance and for a growing startup — I’ve written my fair share of content for different platforms. I’m here to give you some top tips on using tone for different marketing channels.
What is tone?
Tone refers to the character of your writing voice, usually adjusted for your context and audience. The tone you pick can have a big impact on what your audience takes away about your brand or persona. You can write in a formal tone to seem knowledgeable, professional, or more respectful, for example, or in a casual, informal tone to seem relaxed, youthful, or friendly.
Tone is comprised of a variety of technical and stylistic features. These can include vocabulary choices, grammatical variations, syntax (word order), sentence structure, and punctuation.
For example, compare the following sentences:
The first is clearly more formal in tone, using more complex vocabulary, a longer sentence structure, and an emphasis on scientific knowledge.
The second speaks to the audience more informally, using an imperative and exclamation mark to grab their attention, and shorter and simpler words.
In general, marketing advice is to create a consistent tone for your brand to increase an audience’s rapport with your company. However, given that different marketing channels will have different types of users (with varying ages, desires, habits, lengths of time browsing, for example), it’s not hard to conclude that you might need a different communication style for each one. So, it’s important to examine tone as part of your strategy for reaching your target audience.
How does tone change for different marketing channels?
When you think about your prospective customers, you should have a good idea of what sort of people they are. If not, make sure you spend some time on your target customer profiling — this should form the cornerstone of your marketing strategy! It’s really important to understand the basic characteristics of your target customers, including their age, gender, habits, and desires. These can help you craft your content to hook them in.
A vital aspect of your target customer profile is understanding and defining where you can reach them. Does your target customer spend hours on Facebook? Do they casually browse Reddit? Are you a business-to-business (B2B) brand with professional customers who use LinkedIn to find new partners? Or, is your customer base glued to Instagram?
Knowing where your target customers spend their time is crucial. You’ll also need to think about whether they are likely to open email marketing, read specialist blogs, or regularly search for new ideas.
This is research you can undertake yourself, especially if you have an existing customer base. You could also work with a market-research agency, or use industry reports to understand the trends. You could even use an AI tool like Wordtune Read to condense these reports to make them quicker to read.
Of course, most people are using multiple communications channels at any one point. Especially nowadays, when the majority of people have a range of social media and web browsing apps on their mobile, everyone can consume information on the go. This means your target customers might respond to marketing on a range of channels.
You’ll need to hone your content to be suitable for each platform. TikTok, for example, is a video-only platform where you’ll need to grab your audience’s attention in just a few seconds. Conversely, an email newsletter or blog will give you the time and space to go into detail using text and images.
You also need to consider what tone would work best for each platform and audience. You could consider using an AI tool like Wordtune to play around with how to express your content. With Wordtune’s tools, you can quickly and easily transform a base text (e.g. a blog post, or piece of copy for your website) into a more formal or informal style, or expand on the text to make it more developed.
The best tone for the most common marketing channels
Tone of voice should be crafted for each channel with consideration for the messages you want to put across, and your intended audience. Below, I’ll run you through some of the main marketing channels, with some suggestions for which tone may be most appropriate. However, you may need to tweak these depending on the characteristics of your target customer.
Social Media
Social media is an ever-evolving sphere, but the current top channels are used by millions worldwide. When crafting your social media posts, you will need to consider style and tone in order to appeal to your prospective customers. Some of the most popular social media channels include:
Instagram has around 78 million monthly users. Over half of these are under 34, and both Millennials and Gen Z rank Instagram as their favourite social media app. In the United States, about 55% of users identify as women and 44% as men.
Because Instagram is an image-based app (primarily photographs, but now also videos, known as Reels), you don’t have much space for extended/developed text. So, a simply expressed, clear message will work best, both in your caption and in your video script.
Instagram has lots of user-generated content, which means ordinary people posting about their daily lives and hobbies. This means a relaxed and casual tone will help your marketing fit in with what people see on the rest of their feed.
Twitter skews more male (only 30% of users are women), with nearly 92 million users in the US. The user-base is quite young — around 39% of users are 25-34, and around 62% are under 34. 61% of users say they visit the app for news and current events.
Twitter posts are short (up to 280 characters, although in some cases can now be longer) and need to pack a lot of information into a small space. So, you’ll need a concise and clear style. Twitter itself also recommends adopting a conversational tone to encourage other users to interact. This can take the form of informal language and short sentences. Strong calls to action, questions, or polls can also be effective, as they encourage people to respond.
Facebook is still a hugely-used site, with nearly 3 billion monthly users. It’s the favourite platform of a slightly older age group, 35-44, with younger users less likely to use it.
Facebook can be a noisy platform with lots of different types of content, so you need to grab your audience’s attention quickly. You might want to do this with imperative language that creates strong calls to action, questions that incite curiosity, or jokes. As Facebook’s demographic is so wide, you may need to hone in on a certain niche and craft your language to suit one or a few groups of people in particular.
TikTok
TikTok is rapidly growing in popularity; it was the second most-downloaded app in the world in 2022. 78% of users log in for fun or entertainment purposes, and the app is particularly popular with a younger age group. Crucially, 49% of creators on the platform are 18-24.
TikTok content is comprised of short videos which often reference other content on the platform by using viral sounds, dances, and memes. Successful content will be light-hearted and funny, ideally prompting users to stay on the video and share it with their friends.
LinkedIn is a professional social media platform which links businesses and employees, making it particularly suitable for B2B marketing. This means that maintaining a professional tone is important if you want to give your brand credibility in this space. With 875 million members, it’s a great way to reach a business audience.
However, you may also want to give your posts a human spin, so adding elements of humor, or writing from the perspective of a particular person in your organisation, might capture attention. For example, you could have your Head of Marketing narrate a day behind the scenes of your latest campaign, or a personal testimonial from an intern. Writing in a “realistic” human voice can make your content feel less salesy.
Reddit has over 4.8 billion monthly users. With an emphasis on text posts in themed communities, it’s a great place to foster conversation and word-of-mouth referrals. 70% of Reddit users go to the site to learn about new brands, for example. 72% of its user base are male.
Because your Reddit posts will appear in a feed of user-generated content, using a casual tone is probably advisable. Arousing user curiosity is also a great idea; many people come to Reddit to read about the themes and ideas they are passionate about. So, including interesting facts and questions can be a great idea. For example, asking users to “Ask Me Anything” (a popular format on the site), or prompting them to add their own ideas for a new product.
Other social media platforms
These are just the most popular examples, but there are many other social media platforms out there. Twitter has a number of competitors in the micro-blogging space, like Mastodon. There are also social sharing sites like Tumblr and Pinterest, and more niche community spaces like Goodreads (books), Twitch (video games), or Letterboxd (movies).
As you develop your content strategy for other platforms, think carefully about which segments of your target audience will use each one. Researching the demographics of each platform is a good place to start to understand who might be using them.
You can also take a look at other promoted and brand posts on these platforms to find out what other companies are doing. You’ll want the tone of your posts to fit in with the rest of the content on the platform.
Company website
The tone of voice you use on your company website will depend on the values and personality you most want your brand to embody. For example, you might decide to showcase your commitment to sustainability, or embody a friendly and welcoming vibe. As your company website will be used by a wide range of people, you may want to stick to accessible language, avoiding too much jargon.
In addition, you should think about the emotion you want to evoke in your audience — trust, excitement, or amusement, for example. Your tone in different sections of the website might vary to produce this effect, with each section having its own specific goal. For example, on a page asking users to complete a query form you might use an encouraging and friendly tone, suggesting that they will get some value from doing so. Or, on a page describing your product’s components, you might strike a more formal, authoritative tone to show your brand expertise.
Blog
Blog posts can help drive traffic to your site and build your audience’s trust in you as an authority in your field. A knowledgeable and clear tone can help transmit information more effectively to the audience, increasing the value they get from your blog, and making them feel more positive about your brand. You could include nutritious recipes on a blog for a health supplement brand, for example, or beach travel suggestions for a company with a summer clothing collection.
Alternatively, you could consider highlighting case studies and creating compelling stories for your blog about how real customers have used your product. These can be written in a more conversational tone to make them seem more authentic and engaging.
Guest posts
If you’re invited to write a guest post for another blog, it’s a great opportunity to showcase your brand to a new audience. Check if the hosting blog has a style guide that sets out how to create the best tone of voice to fit in with their site. However, you will also want to inject some of your own brand voice in there, too. So, try to strike a balance to preserve the personality of your brand at the same time as meeting the host’s requirements.
Email marketing
Emails can form a key part of your marketing efforts, but there are many different forms they can take. The tone of voice that will work best will depend on what you want to achieve with this marketing channel.
If you are releasing a weekly newsletter of tips and useful links, for example, you’ll probably want to cultivate a friendly, positive yet authoritative tone. Or, for B2B marketing emails, a more professional and formal tone is probably appropriate. For cold outreach, consider using a friendly and approachable tone that helps create quick rapport, as you don’t have long to build a relationship.
Ads and published marketing material
Adverts, whether printed, audio, or video, need to be attention-grabbing. Your tone will need to be quite persuasive and convincing to nudge the audience to act. Humor and irreverence can be memorable; on the other hand, if you want to convey a sense of expertise, a more formal tone might be suitable.
Published marketing material such as reports and brochures will normally adopt a more formal tone to cultivate a sense of trustworthiness and authority. Whereas printed flyers might be more casual, both to save space and to create a quick, positive feeling.
Conclusion
Using tone for different marketing channels in varied ways can help you reach each segment of your prospective audience. While building a consistent brand voice can help create a connection and rapport with your target customers, it’s also important to vary your tone according to the platform you’re using. In this way, you can both fit in with the typical content of that platform and capture the attention of your leads.
As you develop your marketing materials, think carefully about what tone you want to create. With a few tweaks to your vocabulary, syntax, sentence structure, and punctuation, you can reach more of the people you want to target, more effectively.
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