One of the most successful ways of promoting what you do is creating or curating content and then posting it where your audience will find it. This will probably include at least one of your own online sites and some social sharing platforms. Wherever you are posting your content it’s important to present a consistent and coherent point of view that your customers and prospects can recognise as your own.

What is your message?

The first step to working out what your approach and tone should be is to define what you want to say to your audience. What do you believe is important, and how do you want to express this? One of the ways to stand out from your competition is to decide how you’ll express your values. Do you want your audience to regard you as a knowledgeable teacher, a reliable reporter, a companion to share their journey with, or do you want to use another approach? How do you want your audience to think of you as they consume your content?

Focus on your audience

Every piece of content you create should be focused on your audience and how you can help them. This means getting to know your audience, their situations, challenges, fears, needs and wants. Knowing your audience is another piece of working out how best to communicate with them.

What are you offering?

Being clear about the value you are offering can also help you decide your approach. Take a look at the products and services you offer and try to identify the core value that covers all of them. Perhaps it’s a means of creating or saving money, a healthier lifestyle, or how to free up more time. Looking at how you solve your audiences problems and issues can also point to the best way to present your message.

Be true to yourself

Working through the above factors should suggest how best to approach your audience. However the worst thing you can do is to decide to be something you’re not. If you feel your audience would respond best to an authoritative teacher, but you don’t have the knowledge or experience to fulfil that role it’s better to consider either a slightly different role, or to target a slightly different audience. If you cannot fulfil the role of an experienced teacher perhaps you could identify such people within your niche and act as a reporter, conveying what they teach and do. This could be a useful position, particularly in a niche where accessing such teachers is prohibitively expensive.

How can you tell them?

You should also be able to decide whether your audience responds better to a more casual or formal approach. You should also have an idea of the type of language and niche specific words or phrases that you can use.

Have guidelines

Having reached your decisions it is advisable to write them down. This is particularly useful if you are outsourcing any content creation, but it will also help keep your own output consistent.

Deciding on a consistent and coherent point of view and the tone and voice with which you are going to express it will make content creation easier and keep your message consistent across all your marketing channels. Perhaps more importantly it will mean you would have thought about what you stand for, who you audience is, and how best to speak to them. This can only increase your chances of success.