Maintaining Tone of Voice Consistency Across Markets & Audiences
August 2, 2022
In episode 122 of the Customers Who Click podcast I spoke with Rachel Spedding, the Head of Copy at Photobox, one of the UKs biggest online photo printing companies. In this episode we explored how brands can speak to different audiences, even in different languages, while still maintaining that same tone of voice and brand consistency.
It's pretty rare to find a photo company who are charging full price, so we need a point of difference.
Differentiation is key, especially in highly competitive markets, and while you may have to introduce discounts to keep your pricing at a similar level to competitors, its essential to have those points of differentiation that convince customers youre the better service for them, and keep them coming back.
Rachel is the Head of Copy at Photobox. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or head over to https://www.photobox.co.uk/.
In episode 122 of the Customers Who Click podcast I spoke with Rachel Spedding, the Head of Copy at Photobox, one of the UKs biggest online photo printing companies. In this episode we explored how brands can speak to different audiences, even in different languages, while still maintaining that same tone of voice and brand consistency.
It's pretty rare to find a photo company who are charging full price, so we need a point of difference.
Differentiation is key, especially in highly competitive markets, and while you may have to introduce discounts to keep your pricing at a similar level to competitors, its essential to have those points of differentiation that convince customers youre the better service for them, and keep them coming back.
Rachel is the Head of Copy at Photobox. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or head over to https://www.photobox.co.uk/.
Key highlights:
01:22 - 12:30 - How Does Photobox Keep Customers Clicking? - Photobox customers love a discount, and its a category where everyone discounts quite heavily, so its key to find differentiators.
Photobox focuses on 3 key pillars. Ease of use, Quality, and Speed of delivery. The discount might be how you find the business in the first place, but they want to ensure that the experience you have is why you keep coming back for more.
13:12 - 17:43 - How to Maintain Brand Tone of Voice Across 11 Languages - Having English and French teams help as they can cross check with each other for that consistency, and then they use an agency to translate into other languages. The agency uses AI to learn and product content in their tone of voice, with the specific words they use, but there’s always some feedback from customers, or even internally that a certain word didnt really make sense in the context. So they go back to their international copy guide and make some tweaks. It’s not going to be perfect, but they keep trying to improve their systems.
18:36 - 28:04 - How do Copywriters Produce Relevant Content for Different Channels - Working really closely with the other marketing teams is really important. Understanding the differences between Facebook, PPC, email etc is really important so that they can produce the copy that works best for them. Teams cant be siloed, they have to share insight and their experience, but it also works both ways. If it turns out that PPC are running some great campaigns that are off brand, copy steps in to make some changes.
28:58 - 32:36 - How Photobox Reaches Different Audiences Simultaneously - Photobox focuses on 4 key audiences, so its important to understand the language they all use, the messages that appeal to them most, but also where they hang out. You might find that you have an older generation on email, a younger one via certain social media, and another different audience likes using your app. So you can still follow your key pillars for all audiences, and look to make smaller changes throughout the copy to appeal to the audience that you’re infront of at that moment.
37:30 - 49:20 - What is Microcopy and How Does it Work? - Microcopy is these small nuggets of copy you dot around your website and app to create impact where previously things might have been a bit dry. They claim that their app is super easy to use, so the copy has to be super easy to read as well. You can’t go and put paragraph after paragraph of text in, because customers want it to be super quick and easy. There are some places where the copy is supposed to be quite formal, legal, things related to GDPR, tracking, notifications. Theres so much opportunity to explain this in fun, engaging ways that make the customer realise that it can be beneficial to them.
49:31 - Who Would Rachel Like to Take For Lunch in the D2C Marketing World?
Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of Bumble, how she managed to shifted the dating scene, or the marketing team at Gorilla, the delivery app, about how they’re trying to be the best in the market.
52:27 - Rachel’s Must-Have Ecommerce Tools:
- Grammarly
- Facebook ads library
- Milled.com
If you’d like to hear more from Rachel, you can connect with her on LinkedIn or head over to https://www.photobox.co.uk/.