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10/12/26 #ContentChat: How to Conduct a Competitive Brand Voice Audit · #ContentChat

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Hello everyone and welcome to Content Chat.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Eric Heald.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Last week, during my AMA workshop on building a brand voice that scales, one of the participants asked a question that really stuck with me.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that was how do you create a distinctive voice for companies in the same niche that serve similar customers and pretty much offer essentially the same services?
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, this is a challenge that I see frequently with B2B marketing.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: So many organizations use the same descriptors: innovative, trusted, customer-centric, industry leading, without defining how those characteristics actually come into play when it comes to the decisions they make about creating content and how they communicate.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I feel it's really important when you are taking on the definition of a brand voice that you go ahead and you actually do an audit.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: So we and not just an audit of your own content, but a competitive brand voice audit.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: So that way you can understand how you fit in to the greater landscape of all of your competitors and understand how they're coming across so that way you can make sure that you do have that kind of meaningful differentiation.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: However, with that said, your distinctive brand voice still needs to be authentic to the organization.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: It can't be something that's just aspirational, and we'll touch on this a little bit as we go through my brand audit, my brand voice audit process today.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: But the differentiation, it can come from things like sharing the founder's perspectives, things that are unique about the company's history or location or the people that they serve, the customer relationships, expertise that's really just unique to the organization, or even the approach that the comp the organization takes to solving problems.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: So when you have all of that context in play, the competitive audit then helps identify both those shared industry conventions, because we all have them.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: There are all those things that, regardless of your voice, that there are going to be certain ways that you might talk about some of the products or services, but you also want to use the audit to define, identify those opportunities where you can communicate differently.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, before you can jump in and start comparing how the brands sound, we need to establish who we're comparing.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, first of all, you need to go ahead and not just look at who are the people in the marketplace who are top of mind when it comes to being your competition.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you're talking about content, when you're talking about communications, your customers are going to places for educational content or for professional development in addition to going to your competitors' websites and looking at the content they create.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: So you're probably going to be looking at a list that's more than just the top three people that come up in those sales conversations.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Also, if you have distinctly different industries that you're serving or a few very different product lines, you might need to break out your competitor sets by those areas and do them separately.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: I had a client who we recently did a competitive brand audit, brand voice audit, and we did take two completely different segments because we realized that there was one segment that they were very much niched down into and that had very different kinds of competitors, than another broader category that they also sold into and wanted to make more headway in.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: So rather than try to make a soup out of a bunch of things that don't go well together, we made sure that we broke apart the two different groups of competitors so that way we could look at them within their own groupings to gain better insight into the brand voice in order to understand how we should be looking at our brand's voice.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're doing this, you want to be looking to understand both how the direct competitors communicate and what best in class organizations who are creating content for your audience what they're doing particularly well.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: So again, you're going to start with those direct competitors serving similar audiences and solving similar problems, but you're going to consider including some of those adjacent competitors if they compete for the same customers or attention.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I think it can be fun also to think about what things they're doing that are kind of aspirational.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're looking at some of those top people who are creating content, they might be doing something that for your brand is very much aspirational, but you're going to want to make sure that you're still documenting what that is.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want to be weeding out competitors or not documenting things as part of your audit just because it seems a little bit out of reach.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I know when you're doing this kind of thing, the temptation is always to just look at those folks that are sitting in your row at the conference, right?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: The people who are down your aisle in the conference trade show floor, but you do want to go a little bit broader than that.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because again, when you're feeling like everybody kind of is talking about the same things and we're talking to the same people, so how on earth can we differentiate?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: I have an example here, which is Ramp, Brex, and Mercury.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: These are three B2B fintech companies and they have overlapping audiences and offerings, but they communicate quite differently.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: So Ramp, for example, uses the tagline Time is Money, save both.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a great example of its direct, energetic approach.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: I have another client that totally was the same sort of short, punchy, using the punctuation, kind of just out there and very bold.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: So to me, this language is really concise, it's action-oriented and focused on eliminating friction and busy work.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, on the other hand, BREX, and I did do some contract work for them for a very, very long time ago, so that's my friendly disclaimer here.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Using messaging, like make finance the hero, not the money police.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: And if that makes you grin, that's certainly by design.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: They're using confidence and playfulness here, but also they're emphasizing that they empower finance teams while helping businesses grow.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: But I really like that because it's an example that playful can still also be very professional.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the third uh competitor, Mercury, they use language like everything you do with money all in one place.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: So its communication feels more measured and understated, more classic, more classic financial services to me, emphasizing simplicity, clarity, and the know-you experience of building a business.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that empathetic relatability.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now, all three of these companies talk about efficiency, control, and simplifying financial management.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Those are pretty, you know, typical category messages that you're gonna see.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: But what they do is they use their voice and the differentiations between their voices to express those ideas differently.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: So while Ramp is punchy and action-oriented, Rex is confident and empowering, and Mercury is thoughtful and restrained.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: And these are preliminary observations.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: This is like very, very casual me looking at these brands.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't actually looking for their official brand voice characteristics or asking AI to do a deep dive.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: If I were doing a full audit rather than just trying to get a little bit of flavor for their personality for this conversation, I'd be reviewing comparable content across multiple channels and I'd be documenting the word choices, the sentence structures, the tone, and the personality traits that support each assessment.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: So that's pseudo.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: The takeaway here is you're gonna get a good flavor by doing a cursory uh review of a few web pages, but you're not gonna want to stop there.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: You're not gonna want to stop with just putting out three characteristics and calling it a day.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's really important to look at how those characteristics show up in their actual content and you know which content is actually performing well with the audiences so you can see which messaging is really landing, which voice and tone actually is making a difference, because that is going to help you figure out what you're doing that is just sounding like more of the same versus what you're doing that is a potential opportunity for differentiation.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, so like I said, we you shouldn't assign assigned brand voice uh traits based on a tagline or a single home page headline.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna want to gather probably your home page and primary positioning statements for each of the competitors.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna look at a few product or service pages, see what kind of content are they including on those pages, and how are they speaking to the benefits and the jobs to be done by their customers.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: You also want to separately look at blog posts or executive thought leadership, depending upon your industry and whether or not thought leadership is specifically something you're going to be investing in, or if you're currently just doing blog content or vice versa.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: You also want to look at customer stories.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: These have a tendency to vary quite significantly from company to company if they're done well and if they're done within the context of having a robust content strategy.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: You'll notice a huge difference between the way that they are approached, depending upon that context.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, you'll want to look at social media content when relevant.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: For B2B, that's gonna be looking at LinkedIn and Reddit and YouTube, and then for consumers, it's gonna be looking at all the channels that you prioritize.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and noting, of course, if there's some channels that they're working, that they're using that you're not, understanding who they're reaching there, and then if that is a gap, identifying that for yourself.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this probably sounds like, oh my gosh, so much work, right?
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it is, it's not something that's gonna take you five minutes to do.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Even if you use AI to help you, it's gonna take you some time.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: You're because you want to make sure that you're having meaningful comparisons, that you're comparing similar content types to each other and understanding what channels this content actually came up through.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you're comparing apples to pears, you're not going to end up with anything that you can use to help you with your own brand voice definition and documentation.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Alright.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, step three is evaluating and comparing those brand voices.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: This starts with having the brand the brand voice audit criteria that we just went through, and then looking at putting together an overview of the positioning for each company, understanding what the company seems to want to be known for, the key messages, what themes does it consistently reinforce, differentiators, what does it claim makes it different?
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: What is it saying is its differentiation point?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're pretty much going to be seeing some of that stuff directly, but you also might have some of it that's more of a subtext.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then when you're looking at the voice and personality, what recognizable characteristics come through in all of its content?
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: What's the thing that stays consistent no matter where it is?
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, tone, which is looking at how formal, conversational, authoritative, or playful it is, how is this flexing across the different channels or the different types of content that they're creating?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: You're also going to be looking at language and readability, what vocabulary, sentence structures, and level of complexity that they use, and how they balance their business outcomes and technical detail.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Are they really down in the weeds focusing on the technical, speaking only to that technical customer, or are they addressing the entire buying committee?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Are they being a lot more a lot more broad and outcomes focused?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then finally, of course, consistency.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: How consistent are they with their brand voice?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll find that frequently you're gonna find that they're not that consistent.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: And if that is the case, then you're gonna have to figure out where can you learn the most from them about their brand voice, where it's most likely to be affecting your customers in the marketplace and how they're going to be comparing you to that brand.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: So then, step four, we're gonna look at opportunities, we're gonna identify opportunities rather for differentiation.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna look for three things.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: What are the shared conventions, the words, messages, claims, and personality characteristics that appear repeatedly?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Next, you want to see what some meaningful differences are.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: Where do your competitors express similar ideas in noticeably different ways?
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: That shows you that that's an area where people are already pulling apart.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so that that's more of a going to be more of an audience expectation versus the areas where everything everyone's talking about things the same.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: If those are more around big industry challenges, probably you're gonna be keeping um keeping things very similar, but you never know.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: In some cases, there might be some opportunities for differentiation in those areas where everyone's kind of keeping things the same.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you're a challenger brand, you might be challenging some of those assumptions and challenging some of the status quo and ways that people are talking about things.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, then you're going to be looking for those potential opportunities.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: What communication approaches are underrepresented and what could authentically fit your organization?
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: So it's important not to just go, oh gosh, to be differentiated, we need to do X, Y, or Z.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: You need to think of it always through the lens of your organization and its existing brand, its existing culture, and its existing reason for being.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Why did somebody found the company and want to do something differently than the way everyone else was?
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because ideally, there is that kernel of uh truth there, the the why that drives the organization, the founding the founder's focus, and that is going to really help you understand why somebody would want to choose your organization, which then influences how you're going to actually document and express the voice.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, from a very practical standpoint, to be getting at this source of truth, this why, you're going to want to be understanding, um, you're going to want to be interviewing the founders or your leadership team, but you also want to be talking to customers and you want to understand, you want to actually ask them why they chose your organization over another organization, or why they chose your brand's products over a competitor's products.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sometimes you're going to get an answer that you had a better pricing or you had a better contract terms or something really boring and irrelevant from a content standpoint, but frequently you're going to hear them talking about your brand in a specific way.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's going to be something that can be really, really helpful.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now, something to note here, you know, we're talking about the art and science of a competitor audit.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing is, is, you know, the competitor audit is your hypothesis.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's not automatically a recommendation.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: This is you putting, pulling together all of these examples and giving a lot of thought to how this competitor is turning up in the marketplace and where there are some opportunities for you to show that you are a different organization and that you bring different values and different emphasis to the way that you're communicating with your customers.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to take that, those findings, and you're going to validate them against your actual current brand identity and your and your customer experience.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because you also you want to make sure that you don't end up in the situation where you say, We're very high touch, uh, we're very high touch, we're very white glove, and our language needs to be in that same kind of vein, only to find that you've got a bunch of areas where that's not the case.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: So it's always thinking through the lens of it's not just how you want to turn up, it's how you actually turn up.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: So sometimes you might be doing this exercise and realize that the reality of where you can be with your brand voice isn't necessarily where you would like to be.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that's okay because your brand voice, your brand voice chart is not set in stone.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: You're not carving it into a tablet.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: You are literally creating it as a documentation of where you are today to help people be consistent over time.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: So when things do change, you're gonna be changing up your brand voice guidelines accordingly.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, if you have competitors all of a sudden start copying you, well, then that's probably gonna be an opportunity for you to figure out what are they doing better than you, and where can you, again, where can you pivot, where can you split off, where can you get ahead of them.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, so once you've done all of this, once you've figured out some of those characteristics that might help distinguish your brand, the next step is defining those characteristics so that anyone who creates content for your organization, whether they're internal or external, or even AI, can use those characteristics to help make better decisions and to sound like your brand every time, no matter who is doing the content creation.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, for each of the selected characteristics, you're gonna be documenting a clear definition of what it means for your organization.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's gonna include specific do's and don'ts that really show, not tell, show people how to bring that trait to life.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna include real examples of language that reflects the characteristics, so real examples from your organization, or if we're in a situation where we're trying to change or evolve the voice, then you might be showing non-competitive examples of that voice and action to give people again that real flavor of what that trait means when it's authentically shared, and then finally guidance on how it adapts across audiences and content types because you might be changing some of that up a little bit, but then again, that's gonna be primarily tone, and that's actually a whole nother can of worms that we're not gonna get into today.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: But I do want to talk about um the importance of having that definition by sharing an example from my own work life.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: The character trait, the brand voice character trait of irreverence, has been a thorn in my side for multiple years.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: I've worked like two places where it was actually documented that that was a primary brand voice trait.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the deal: they were not at all meaning the same thing.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: One had a very, very witty, sometimes a little sarcastic uh person in charge of content who un 100% really leaned into irreverent.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes for me as a writer, took it a little too far to where I was not comfortable sometimes having my name on things that had passed through.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: That editing pass.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas in a different example, the irreverent was more like you know, winking at the status quo, having an unconventional take on something, or using um using an example that no one else had used before.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: Two organizations that both claimed irreverence as a touch point for their voice, but completely different interpretations of what it means.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why you have to make sure that when you have any trait, that you're really clear on what it means to your organization.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why you also end up with people choosing vague traits like innovative or knowledgeable or approachable, and frequently it doesn't mean anything.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because to every single person who sees those words, they are interpreting them through what the lens of their own experience and how they would define those traits themselves.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now, with the client that I most recently did this kind of competitive benchmarking with, we after we did all of that, we actually saw that there were some places where their differentiated expertise was just not coming through consistently in the public content experience.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: It was something that was coming through once customers got to know them, but in the customer-facing channels, that expertise was not front and center.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: For example, content was being published frequently with just the brand's byline instead of the human being with the experience and expertise on the line having their name there.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, even thought leadership content, frankly, wasn't always being accompanied by a bio of the person who wrote it that explained to somebody who didn't already know them why they should be seen as an expert in this area.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: Very, very specific fixes and for a very specific thing that bubbled up 100% from looking at what the competitors were doing and understanding that we had a gap from the brand voice into what we were actually putting from the brand voice into what we're actually putting out there.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: And in situations where we were more knowledgeable, even in some of these areas than the competition, but we weren't doing a very good job of putting it out there in the same way that they were putting it out there and making it clear who their experts were and how they came about the opinions that they were sharing.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: So it was really, really valuable to have such a concrete, um, such a concrete takeaway from doing this process.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: But there's always something like that whenever you do it.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um but what yours will be, it's gonna vary.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: So to wrap up, I want to just recap what your five-step process is for conducting your brand voice audit.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: First, you need to define your competitive landscape, which is gonna include both those direct competitors and some of those best in-class content creation content creators who are also speaking to your audience and on these topics.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: Next, you're gonna gather comparable content samples for the channels that matter the most for your organization.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: Third, you're going to evaluate the voice and messaging using consistent criteria like the criteria that I outlined.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: Fourth, you're gonna want to identify patterns that you see across what people are doing in the different channels and with their messaging.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then you're going to also identify opportunities for differentiation, which may be both areas where everyone sounds the same, but also those areas where you're seeing significant differentiation.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: That says that that's gonna be table stakes for you to differentiate in that particular area.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: And last but not least, you're gonna want to translate your findings into practical brand voice guidance, into how you shape your brand voice chart with all of those do's and don'ts, the examples, and the really specific, unique to your organization definition of what those traits mean for you and for how people create content and what people should be creating.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: A competitive brand voice audit gives you such a great understanding of how your organization fits into the competitive landscape and where you've got copper where you have those opportunities to really stand out with your content and with the way that you talk to your audience.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: Your goal with this is going to be to identify the qualities that make your organization distinct and make sure that those qualities are consistently coming through in your content.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, remember that those brand voice guidelines should always evolve.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to revisit your audit anytime your competitors change, your business grows, or your content needs evolve.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope this gives you a practical starting point for conducting your own competitive brand voice audit.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want to have more info on conducting brand voice audits, we've got some checklists and some articles over on EricaHill.com.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want more guidance on building that consistency, building the documentation that all of your content can be standing on that starts with the brand voice, you can go over to contentfoundationsbook.com and you'll find lots of details about my book, Content Foundation, Scale Your Content with AI Without Losing Your Voice, along with a bunch of free word resources that will help you strengthen your content operations.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, I hope you'll join me next week.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: Or my guest is going to be Amy Rodriguez, and we're going to be talking about the unsexy side of content or sexy side of content, depending upon where you fall on the spectrum here.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to be talking about taxonomy, data, and reporting.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: Specifically, we'll be talking about why standardizing your content data matters, how taxonomy makes meaningful performance reporting possible, and why an ebook isn't actually a content type or a format.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to be going from the, you know, 10,000-foot view right down into the weeds.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: But I think this is going to be a really great conversation that's going to help you make better content decisions.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope you'll join us next Monday at noon Pacific for another content chat.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're listening to the podcast, you'll want to hit subscribe so you don't miss the conversation.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: So thanks so much for joining me, and I'll see you here next week.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: Bye.