According to blogging statistics, food and personal finance blogger life make the most money followed by lifestyle and travel bloggers. Food and personal finance bloggers make $9100 per month while lifestyle blogger life earn $5174 per month followed by travel bloggers who make $5000 per month.
This makes lifestyle a lucrative industry for bloggers, which is why we are seeing more and more bloggers choosing lifestyle as their niche for blogging. This also means that competition in the lifestyle blogging space is increasing. This makes it more difficult for new bloggers to steal the limelight their content deserves. So, how can a lifestyle blogger stand out from the crowd? By creating a unique brand voice and refining their voice as a lifestyle blogger.
If you want to know how to do that, you are at the right place. In this article, you will learn about ways to refine your brand voice as a lifestyle blogger.
How To Establish Your Own Brand Voice?
Here are seven steps you can use to create a brand voice for your lifestyle blog and then refine it to differentiate your lifestyle blogs from others.
Mission and Vision
The first thing you need to do is to create a mission and have a vision. Once you have a mission and vision, now it is time to write it down in the form of a mission and vision statement. Make sure your mission and vision statement truely depicts your brand values. This will help you align the values with your lifestyle blog.
If you don’t know how to write a mission and vision statement, you can take inspiration from other brand’s mission and vision statements. Look at some of the examples and you can easily translate your mission and vision statements into words. It will give you a clear direction and helps you stay focused and motivated.
Perform An In Depth Audit
If you have already started creating content and posting content on your lifestyle blog then you should perform a brief update of your existing content. Look for common themes and messaging in that content. Ask yourself does your content really align with your content values?
If yes, then you are doing things the right way. If the answer is negative, then you should rethink your content marketing strategy. Analyze your best and worst performing content and try to identify why some content pieces performed better or worse than others. This will help you narrow down on key elements that will determine the success and failure of your blog content.
The next time you create a new content piece, keep those important things in mind. Additionally, monitor which content type or format resonates with your target audience and double down on it. If it is video content, create more of it. If it is text based blog content, double down on it. This will help you to slowly improve your results over time.
Conduct an Audience Survey
Let’s suppose you already have an engaged audience that returns to your blog to read new articles whenever you post new content on your blog. You can conduct a survey to collect useful data about their preferences. Here are some of the questions you can ask them.
- Where do you live?
- How much do you earn?
- Which channel do you spend your most time on consuming content?
- Which type of content do you like to read the most?
- What are your hobbies and interests?
All these questions will help you better understand your audience. This in turn will help you create hyper targeted digital marketing campaigns. Data shows that personalized messaging and hyper targeted marketing campaigns tend to outperform cold emails and outreach attempts.
Audience Research
Just because you have conducted an audience survey does not mean that you are done with audience research. Audience research is a continuous process that helps you track shifts in user behavior and preferences. Instead of solely relying on audience survey data, you should go above and beyond when it comes to audience research.
Choose some of your most satisfied customers and look at the social media profiles. You can also use a social media management tool for this. What do they share and how do they communicate? This will give you an idea about their likes and dislikes. What brands do they follow on social media and what content do they already read? What do they prefer to watch and listen to? What doi they love to eat? All this can tell you a lot about your buyer persona. More importantly, it will help you to create a brand voice that is familiar to your target audience.
Create an Outline of Your Brand Voice
There are certain brand voice characteristics you should keep in mind when creating a brand voice for your lifestyle blog. Some of them are
- Authoritative
- Playful
- Authentic
- Passionate
You need to decide which characteristics would your brand voice have as a lifestyle blogger. Once you have selected a characteristic, you need to define it and look for steps you can take to develop these characteristics into your lifestyle blog. On the contrary, you should also be aware of what steps you should not take that could destroy that characteristic in your brand voice. Here is a brand voice chart that sums this up brilliantly.
Clarity
You might be wondering what does clarity have to do with your brand voice? Yes, your brand voice should have clarity but that is not what i am referring to here. You need to have clearly documented brand guidelines so you can make sure that your lifestyle blog is meeting all the standards.
Here are a few reasons why you should clearly document your brand voice guidelines.
- Assist you in identifying gaps and weaknesses
- Ensures uniformity in messaging and content
- Serves as a reference manual
- Streamlines the whole process
- Keeps you on the right track.
Consistency
Last but certainly not the least is consistency. According to statistics, consistent brand voice can increase your revenue and visibility by 23% On the flipside, lack of consistency can create confusion and amplify both your brand message and revenue.
Apart from that, it can also help you to
- Build stronger connections with your readers
- Improve brand recognition
- Makes your blog stand out
- Delivers a great first impression
What steps do you take to refine your brand voice as a lifestyle blogger? Share it with us in the comments section below.
