The Internet is by far one of the most effective tools you can use to help your small business grow. After all, you can't expect to maximize your reach if no one can find your business on the first page of the search engine results pages (SERPs). Therefore you need to have high-quality content on your site to boost your authority and visibility.

However, there are numerous aspects of quality content that you may be unaware of. Let's look at what you should know:

There were two young farmers, Amos and Rufus. Both were just starting out, and neither could afford to buy their own land. They had heard a large landowner, Frank Booker, was letting farmers like them rent land for free. They spoke with other farmers and realized that it was indeed the case and that they to could use the land for free.

Amos and Rufus were given identical spots side by side. They were the perfect spots to boot! They were close to the main road with plenty of parking, and they could sell their crops directly from the field. Time went by, and our faithful farmers started to become more successful.

You have heard it time and again – content marketing will help grow your small business. 

It may sound redundant, but until companies focus on making relevant website content, it bears repeating. Content marketing is at the heart of many successful sales and marketing campaigns of small and large businesses alike. 

Effective communication is the basis of every successful organization. Making genuine connections with prospects and clients requires the right brand voice. Of course, the opposite is also true, a badly formed or inconsistent brand voice can just as quickly breed doubt, even distrust.

Understanding how to develop a brand voice will pave the way for effective internal and external communications. Let's delve a little further into why this is the case and how your brand may create—and keep—a voice that is appropriate for your company.

Why is brand voice important?

Brand voice serves as a link between your company and its clients. It is how you demonstrate to your audience what you do or provide and who you are as an organization—your personality and values.

When you create a brand voice, your consistency will identify your brand and distinguish you from your competition, increasing reach and awareness. It fosters loyalty—the better your prospects believe they know you, the more likely they will have a good perception of your brand. After a series of good interactions, your brand will be perceived as reliable and trustworthy. It also enhances the entire customer experience by allowing for a seamless transition from one engagement and communication channel to the next.

Here are some statistics demonstrating the importance of a consistent brand voice:

• Brand authenticity makes a huge difference to your ability to be successful, and our research indicates that 83% of customers will refuse to do business with brands they don't trust. (Source: Gartner) 
• 86 percent of consumers say authenticity is important when deciding what brands they like and support (Source: PapersOwl)
• Brands that come across transparently and speak to customer needs in a true way show a 19% lift in loyalty, 33% increase in trust, and a 39% shift in preference. (Source: Gartner) 

How to create a brand voice

Brand voice includes everything from precise word choices and distinctive terminology to tone, visual aspects, and emotional effect.

You will want to leave out the noise of competitors and buyers you don't want to reach. Everyone will judge your brand voice and communication style differently, but what is essential is that you are sure that your brand voice represents what your company stands for and that you are successfully engaging with clients.

Here are a few tips on what you need to do to create an effective brand voice:

Clarify your organization's mission and vision

What are you hoping to accomplish, and what actions will you take to get there? Your purpose informs the personality you want your voice to convey.

Establish your values and culture

Think about what you hold dear? What characteristics do you want your brand to be associated with? Your beliefs and culture will help you determine who your target audience is and how to communicate with them.

Think about your competitive edge

Ask yourself what distinguishes your brand from the competition, what differentiates you from your competitors? Anything that puts you ahead of your competitors should be reflected in your brand voice. Let prospects and clients know you're confident you're the best option.

Determine your target audience

Is this the audience you're currently targeting? What will your audience anticipate from you in terms of tone? Is your brand appealing to them? What are your core values? 

Consider your current audience and what they like about your brand. Extend on this to fine-tune your brand voice and reach your whole target demographic.

Examine current content to see if you can spot a pre-existing voice

Look at the current state of your brand's presentation, and what would you wish to do differently in the future?

By examining how your clients receive your present voice, you can then examine where effective communications have occurred and determine whether they are consistent with what your business stands for.

Consider your brand to be a person

Is your brand a sweet primary school teacher, a feisty fashionista, or a rugged explorer? Consider the communication style that individuals would use—and hence the communication style your brand would use—and how they would come across.

Look within—at yourself, your staff, everyone—and draw inspiration from it.

Determine your tone objectives

While your voice should be constant across all channels, your brand tone may vary depending on the channel and scenario.

For example, although a humorous, lighthearted tone may be appropriate for social media, a more severe and sympathetic approach may better suit a customer service encounter.

How to create your brand voice style guide

Maintaining consistency and quality across all your communications may be difficult, especially if you create a lot of material such as blogs, videos, and social media posts. When creating your style guide, be sure to include the following elements:

• A description of your brand's tone of speech
  • The tone you're keeping
  • The persona of your brand
  • How it corresponds to your brand's ideals
  • It is aimed towards a certain audience.
• A dictionary of specialized word-choice preferences and/or distinctive branding words
• Descriptions of the many brand tones you wish to target across multiple channels and media (e.g., websites, videos, support emails, etc.)
• Spelling, grammar, and syntax rules, as well as any established style standards you choose to follow (e.g., AP, MLA, Chicago, etc.)
• Other dos and don'ts for internal and external communication include expectations for one against the other. Internal communications, for example, might be more informal, but external communications must be more formal.
• Real-world examples from your organization to demonstrate and explain your rules

Your brand style guide will be critical in developing a distinct brand voice and maintaining consistency across channels today and in the future.

If you want more information on developing your style guide, I suggest you look at How to Develop Your Business’ Content Style Guide by Grammarly.

Maintaining your brand voice

Simply identifying your brand voice is inadequate for long-term success; you must also guarantee that your brand voice is utilized appropriately and consistently. Begin by developing a brand guide, which should contain a written style guide outlining your company's voice and the tone you intend to utilize across various media.

Following that, you'll want to ensure that everyone on your team understands your brand voice and how to use it. Schedule training sessions to go through your style guide and provide staff the opportunity to ask questions that will help them grasp it better. Here are just a few examples of the various types of training you may provide:

1. Training calls: Host a monthly (or weekly) meeting for your staff. Include anyone who is an expert on the issue and put out a call for questions.
2. Newsletters: An internal newsletter dedicated to brand voice might feature recent client comments and success stories to keep everyone updated on your business’s style standards. This may also be a fantastic method to show the importance of your brand voice to your workers to gain more buy-in.
3. In-person workshops: If feasible, holding a hands-on session can help to engage staff and keep them involved in learning about your brand's voice. Be informal, include visuals, and begin an open discussion.

Conduct frequent communication audits in addition to regular training to identify areas for improvement that can be addressed in future sessions. As needed, revise the style guide anytime your brand voice needs to develop, which it will do organically over time.

Your business and staff will be able to expertly use your new brand voice not only to reach more people but also to deepen connections with your existing client base if you have a good style guide and the proper tools.

Do you want to know something shocking? Search Engine Land reports that 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.

It is critical to optimize your website for search if you want people to experience and connect with your small business online.

With the advancement of technology and the refinement of algorithms, the search engine optimized techniques in 2015 may no longer be applicable now. Given certain search engine optimization (SEO) best practices remain unaltered, others continue to evolve and new ones are introduced into the mix. After all, internet years may be best thought of as in dog years. A year in human time is like seven years in internet time. Needless to say, the internet is fast, but time moves faster on it!

If you want to be found in Google searches and build your small business’s reputation and presence online, you must stay up with evolving SEO trends. Otherwise, you'll be left in the dust in the search engine results pages (SERPs), with your material getting old on Google's page 2. This is also known as where you hide the dead bodies.

According to a report by Matt Southern of Search Engine Journal, “Results on the second page of Google have a CTR of less than 1% for each position.”

Are you determined not to fall behind in the SEO game? If so, keep reading to learn about the top SEO trends of 2021 that will help your content stand out and rank higher in 2022.

Did you notice anything recently about your email open rates? On September 20, 2021, Apple rolled out their new iOS 15 privacy features that includes Mail Privacy Protection. This is great when it comes to customer privacy but will impact your marketing efforts, especially email marketing.

Many elements may affect your email open rate (subject line, preview text, body content, personalization, and more), but in this case, it’s all Apple. doesn’t

As the weather starts to turn cooler and we enter into the fourth quarter of the year, many businesses start discussing budgets. Choosing the right marketing budget is difficult for any small business. Small businesses, in particular, must maintain a good balance of revenue to costs while spending resources to advertise, market, and grow the business. Then the ultimate question comes up of how much should I be spending on advertising and marketing and where.

Testimonials show prospective clients that your service really works as it should. But how effective are testimonials? We are providing you this list of testimonial statistics to give even more evidence of the difference that testimonials and reviews can make for you in the coming years and how they can be used most effectively.

Content marketing is a low-cost, long-term, and client-focused strategy for driving website traffic and leads. It is critical to successful small business inbound marketing in an era where communication is a cacophony rather than a conversation.

In the 1970s, it was said that the typical person viewed 500 to 1,600 advertisements every day. In 2021, there aren’t any official numbers available. However, the average person is expected to see between 6,000 and 10,000 advertisements each day. So it's no wonder that adblocking software is used by 11% of the world's internet-connected population. Quick confession: your’s truly runs one and has for years!

People are hyperaware of advertisements and sales pitches with more means to interact than ever before, and they don't like it. So, before you can earn their money, you must first win their heart. This is why content marketing is essential.

When done correctly, content marketing delivers a variety of benefits that combine to create a sales-friendly atmosphere.

Why invest in digital marketing for your business? How do you grow your North Carolina small business with digital marketing? 

With the rise of the internet as a marketing tool, digital marketing is now the leading trend in the industry. 

The digital marketing concept prides itself on the following advantages:

• It incurs little to no investment. Traditional marketing, on the other hand, costs thousands of dollars right from the start.
• More and more people are shopping online. They prefer home delivery services to time-consuming brick-and-mortar shopping.
• Your competitors are doing the same things you do. Thus, it comes down to who reaches customers first - online.
• Digital marketing uses many tools not used in traditional marketing, making it easier for businesses to make decisions. With these tools, you can craft strategies based on your audience and product feedback. 

At the core of it all is the fact that everyone is online. With online marketing, you have the power to reach billions of people to spur growth for your small business fast. 

Gmail started using a “promotions” tab in 2013 to help users sort important emails from promotional emails and social media emails. Since then, there has been a huge reduction in users' spam complaints and a lower read rate of commercial, promotional emails. This is due to many users ignoring the two tabs and staying in their inbox.

The way Gmail delivers to these tabs is constantly changing based on variable data, sender information, email content, and recipient engagement. Not all Gmail users pay attention to these special tabs, and some have disabled them altogether. Many users stay in the primary inbox tab, but many users still check the promotions tab for important emails.

I make no qualms about it. I have never felt like I was a strong writer. Working with the written word was never my strong suit in school and don’t get me started on my lack of spelling skills. Had it not been for spell check and Google being invented, I would be sunk! Therefore, I am constantly searching for any application that can help me overcome my writing deficiencies. Without further adieu, here are nine writing assistant apps or websites to help you write better.