Isn’t it a little odd that we try to communicate with our audiences in so many different voices?
Many companies – and the writers who work with them – seem to struggle when it comes to finding a single, consistent voice for their websites.
For example, a company’s homepage might be written in a fairly cautious, descriptive tone.
Their About page may feel even more formal and corporate.
Meanwhile their sales pages are much louder and pushier, written in a voice that would be better suited to old-school, broadcast media like TV and radio.
Click through to their social media pages and suddenly they’re all chatty and friendly.
How does that make sense?
And how can we trust a business that keeps changing its voice? Which is the real voice? The genuine voice? The trustworthy voice?
Wouldn’t it be better if we could find one voice to use across all those pages, and across all digital media?
I think we can.
And I think that voice can be described as conversational.
Why conversational? Because the web, almost by definition, is a social and conversational medium.
This is what fits.
With conversational writing and copywriting we can apply the same voice across all digital media.
We can be informative, engaging and persuasive with the one voice.
Being conversational gives us this flexibility.
In the real world I’ll adjust my conversational tone, depending on whether I’m talking with colleagues, my buddies over a beer or two, or my wife at home.
It’s still me, it’s still my voice, but it adjusts to different circumstances.
It can be the same online.
Don’t use different voices across different digital platforms, or even pages or screens within one platform.
Use one recognizable and conversational voice, and then adjust it according to whether your primary purpose is to be informative, engaging, persuasive… and so on.
This is the power of conversational copywriting.
NOTE: If you’d like to add the craft of conversational copywriting to your online writer’s toolbox, find out about the Conversational Copywriting course here…
