Copywriter Services – The Lowdown On TOV

When it comes to copywriting, tone of voice is everything. It’s the way your business speaks to the people it really wants to influence (that’s your customers), demonstrating that you understand them and can supply their needs.
So why is finding the right ‘voice’ for your written marketing materials so important?
We talk in particular cadences and rhythms and the human ear is attuned to rapidly identify whether the speaker is ‘one of us’ or ‘one of them’. As listeners we react to a range of stimuli, such as the person’s age, personality and emotional state and whether the speaker has any particular characteristics, such as a regional accent. Within just a few seconds of hearing a person speak we will have made a value judgement on whether they are the sort of individual with whom we’d like to spend our valuable time.
It’s the same with the written word. When we read a piece of text it’s not just the content of the message we absorb, it’s the way it is presented. This includes the choice of words used, their juxtaposition in the sentence, the rhythm created by the sequence of words and the emotion they convey. Because we can’t actually hear the words being spoken we unconsciously create a specific, internal ‘voice’ for the text as it helps our brains process and digest the message more easily.
Consider the above statement in terms of human history: our ancestors have been communicating through speech for more than a million years, while the written word emerged less than six thousand years ago. As a result of this evolutionary development speech patterns have been hard-wired into human consciousness. In simple terms that means if your copywriter can create the right tone of voice for your customers, they will respond by buying your products.
While there’s no doubt that you are the real expert on your company and product lines, you should consider that you may not be the best person to communicate with your client base. In fact the closer you are to the subject matter, the greater your need for professional copywriter services. You need someone to bridge that gap between what you know, and what your customers need to hear. A good copywriter will listen to you, understand your product, research your potential client base and use a kind of alchemy to put all those elements together on the page.
Get the tone right, and sales will follow. Get it wrong and even the most desirable and keenly priced products will fail to fly off the shelf. It may be tempting, but a million years of evolution suggests you take a raincheck when it comes to writing that copy yourself.