Your ecommerce store may well start small, with ten items and one writer. But as you grow, adding more products and writers becomes an increasingly painful process.
You forget to correct descriptions, mix it with different voices, and before you know it, your customers see varying levels of quality from description to description of your many products.
What Is a Brand Voice?
Brand voice is your brand’s communication personality. It encompasses the words you use, the tone you use, your approach to explaining your products, and the attitude your customers are exposed to on your website.
For an expanding ecommerce business, it is essential to keep your tone consistent throughout hundreds of publications such as articles, guides, and blog posts without overburdening your writers.
When you have a consistent brand voice, it helps customers recognize your business, understand what you offer, and feel more confident about buying from you.
Define Your Brand Voice Before You Create Product Pages
You cannot maintain your brand’s voice if you have not established what it should be. This is the step you should begin with, especially if there are already multiple people creating product content for your store.
Consider what you want your customers to say about your brand after reading one of your product pages. Would you like to sound welcoming and friendly? Or do you want to sound straightforward and practical?
Write down the characteristics and prepare strict guidelines. Make your brand conversational and use simple language to describe features. This way, you will give the writers a concrete example of what you want instead of asking them to guess your intention.
On the other hand, if you allow your writers to use AI to help them create the copy for the products, you can use an AI detector as a tool to check the quality of the text. Your guidelines will help your team ensure that the language they use is engaging.
Create One Clear Content Standard for Your Entire Catalog
If your company has hundreds of product pages, it is not enough to rely on a single pair of eyes to review them all. A good solution would be to establish a standard format for all of your product page copy.
This can include things like the structure of the text; for example, you may want to list the benefits first, followed by key features. You may also include standardized terms and units of measurement. As an example, you can ensure that all T-shirts measuring forty-four inches will be marked as XL.
This standardization does not mean that all descriptions should be the same. Instead, you can provide your writers with a solid foundation and give them space to create individuality for your products.
By combining standardized content creation and smart growth strategies for your ecommerce business, you will be able to build a catalog that will look organized and trustworthy. So, you can win the trust and loyalty of your customers.
Write for Your Customer Instead of Writing for the Product
One of the most common mistakes you can make on the product pages of your ecommerce site is to overemphasize the attributes of your products.
People are not interested in the specific blend of materials your jackets are made of; they want to know if it will feel comfortable and save them from hugging their waists at the same time.
Your brand voice is likely to attract more customers if you can manage to consistently associate each attribute of your products with a benefit for your customers.
For instance, if your product is a storage box, you may not only want to mention its twenty-liter capacity, but also say how this volume would help someone store their daily necessities without cluttering the house.
With this approach, you can give your writers a consistent way to communicate. You are not asking them to make every product sound exciting. You are asking them to answer the same important question: “Why should this product matter to the customer?”
Give Every Writer the Same Brand Voice Guide
If five people write your product description, you could see five very different styles.
One of your writers may use short, punchy sentences, while another one uses technical terms your customers would not understand. None of these things are wrong per se, but your ecommerce business could look pretty inconsistent.
A brand voice guide will help you to solve this issue.
However, your writers need proper guidance on how to follow these instructions. You can give a few examples of phrases that sound right for your brand and a few that do not.
Just having a strict guideline will not be enough for your business. You should lead by example and show them exactly what you are looking for. If you work with freelancers or an external ecommerce development or marketing team, then make the guide very easy to understand.
It is ultimately your job to bring everyone who is working towards making your products be seen, under one single roof.
Keep Product Terminology Consistent Across Your Store
Imagine your customer is browsing through three product pages on your ecommerce site. On one page, a jacket is labeled “water-resistant,” while the same feature is labeled “waterproof” on another page and “weatherproof” on the third
Now, you can be sure that your customers will be confused by the different terms they see under each product. If your products are similar and solve the same problem for your customers, then your catalog will look unprofessional
Your customers may even leave your site because they are now confused about what they wanted to buy.
You should draw up a list of approved terms for your product catalog. This list should include all the key features, your product types, and any other regularly used terms in your industry.
This list is crucial as you build a larger catalog.
Your terminology list can also help your writers improve your SEO because when you use consistent language, it makes it easier to create internal links and supporting content.
Review Your Older Product Pages Instead of Only Checking New Ones
Keeping your brand voice consistent is not a one-time project.
Your ecommerce store will be growing constantly. You will add new writers to your team and at the same time, you will introduce new products and discontinue older ones. As you gain more experience, your preferred phrases may also change.
This means that some of your oldest product pages may gradually become out-of-date and will not match your brand voice.
You should regularly review your older content. First, identify your most important products based on traffic or how well they are selling and review those first.
You should look for discrepancies in tone and any terms that do not go with your business any longer. Also check for outdated information and descriptions that you no longer provide in your products.
You can then work through the rest of your catalog in stages. This is a more realistic approach because you are a growing business and you want your customers to find the latest products you are offering.
Use Automation to Be Consistent When Your Business Grows
When you have hundreds or thousands of product pages, it is not possible for your team to manually check every sentence.
This is where you can use automation.
You can scan tens of thousands of pieces of product copy using AI tools to detect possible differences, especially in the phrases, language and structure that your writing team has used.
Rather than asking your team to read over every sentence for possible errors, you can have automation do a first check so that you can double check later. You have to balance how you use automation and your team’s efforts.
Why this balance is important is because your brand may have rules that are not easy for an automated system to understand. Your writers might have used a particular phrase that your AI tool will flag because it sounds odd. But it might be an important part of your brand personality.
When your content pool grows, you can use automation as a tool to check, but you or your team should make the final decision.
Final Thoughts
To maintain a cohesive brand voice across hundreds of ecommerce product page copy, you do not have to make everything sound the same. It is more about how you enable customers to identify your brand, understand your offerings and allow them to connect to the same personality whenever they make a purchase.
To ensure brand voice cohesion, you need to create a set of guidelines for your writers, establish standardized terms and page structure, and train your team. You should regularly analyze pre-existing pages and use tools to automate while you enforce a consistent message.
But most importantly, remember to focus on your customers by making your brand voice copy easier to read and understand.
While your consistent brand voice is an important element for your online store, it is also something that will evolve alongside your business and your customers’ expectations.
