Do you outsource content creation to external service providers? Then you are probably familiar with the term briefing. But even if you keep content creation within your team, you can still achieve great results with the briefing . This is because this guideline defines all the points that are important to you in order to strengthen your company's external image. An essential component of this should be your corporate language.
You will now learn how to define it for your briefings and why it is so important.
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Why a briefing simplifies and speeds up content creation?
The briefing is a kind of short instruction for projects. In it, you define all the important key points, for example, regarding collaboration, which employee has to complete which tasks and when, when meetings will take place, and so on. In content marketing, the briefing refers to the key data of the content. These instructions ensure that everyone involved knows what to pay attention to during creation. All questions are clarified in advance so that employees or external service providers can start creating content immediately without having to ask questions.
The briefing also allows you to standardize all content pieces. You can use it to create guidelines that everyone can follow. In terms of brand building or corporate identity, this is important so that your company appears consistent across platforms and brand awareness can develop . In addition to the logo and design, there is another important aspect to the identity of any brand: corporate language.
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What is corporate language?
Corporate language is an English term. In German, this concept would be referred to as corporate language or linguistic corporate identity. A brand is often associated with visual key data. Examples include the cyan used by contentbird and the magenta red used by Telekom. Once a brand has established itself, these colors create a bond with users. No matter where someone sees this color, they will immediately think of the company that uses it in its external image.
What many people underestimate is that the same thing is possible with words and phrases. In corporate language, terms and sentence structures are therefore clearly defined and used repeatedly across platforms in texts, videos, and audio recordings. Corporate language also includes narrative style, tone, target group address, and imaginative terms.
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Define corporate language in the briefing
To ensure that all your content can be directly attributed to your company, even if the logo is not visible, the focus should be on standardization. Since you define other key data in the briefing, you can also specify the language there. This ensures that every employee or service provider is reminded to include certain phrases in the texts, videos, or audio tracks.
To make the process easier for you, I will guide you step by step through all the important points.
Addressing the target group
The first question that needs to be answered in the corporate language for your briefing is often the one that companies prefer to avoid: Should we use "Sie" or "du" when addressing customers? However, determining this is essential for corporate language.
General tonality
Once you have decided on "Sie" or "du," it is time to delve a little deeper into the way you address your audience. This includes the general tone. Do you want to come across as serious and professional, or would you rather build a closer relationship with your target group?
There are other tonalities:
- Loose
- Directly
- Provocative
- Friendly
- Dominant
- Reserved
- Childlike
- Superficial
- Fact-based
- Humorous
Two things are important when it comes to tone: your company values and your target audience. Ideally, the tone should strike a happy medium between the two. It embodies your values in a way that your target audience finds appealing and relatable.
Once you have established the basic tone, I recommend defining no-gos. External service providers and new employees in particular benefit from guidelines on how the tone should not be. This makes content creation and distribution much easier.
Writing style in content marketing
Closely related to tone is writing style. Do you want to write in a more complicated way that requires the reader to think? Or do you want your content to be easy to read? This also includes whether you use a lot of technical terms or simple language. You should also determine this in line with your target audience. For example, medical laypeople with a keen interest in medicine do not understand all the technical terms that are familiar to doctors or alternative practitioners.
Sentence length is also part of your writing style. Do you want to "race through the text" by using very short sentences, or do you prefer to use commas instead of periods? Another important decision is whether your content deals with topics in a concise manner or in a more detailed and in-depth way.
Triggers in corporate language
Triggers are factors that set things in motion. The goal of content marketing is, on the one hand, visibility. This includes, for example, optimization for Google in the form of keywords or WDF*IDF analysis. However, content marketing should also contribute to the financial goals of the company – in other words, it must also promote the promote sales of the company's products or services. You can achieve this – even independently of the briefing – with triggers. These can be individual words or phrases.
If you define the appropriate triggers in advance, your employees or external service providers can integrate them into the content. By combining the triggers with specific frames, they can become an integral part of your corporate language.
Frames originate from NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and create a certain framework around statements. Take, for example, the popular trigger of scarcity. The content could mention that there are only 10 places available for a consultation. The effectiveness is increased by additions that you can easily insert into your corporate language. Among other things, it is appropriate to say that you want to keep your customer base as small as possible because you want quality over quantity . This reasoning can appear repeatedly in your content pieces so that, little by little, everyone in your target group knows that quality collaboration is important to you.
I would like to mention another example here, as this trigger is also ideal for all content formats and forms an essential part of corporate language: in-group and out-group. Most successful brands, especially in the B2C sector, make use of this effect. They focus on community building and give it a special name. This strengthens the target group's sense of belonging and turns them into loyal customers.
Koawach calls them her chocolate friends. This trigger is also possible in B2B. Most companies use it rather subtly and describe it as "graduates of the mentoring program are now achieving a 20% increase in conversion."
Individual words as part of corporate language
Corporate language includes individual words that describe and bring to life the vision, content story, and goals of the company. Such words include, for example, "proud" or "fit" as in McFit, "performance" and "fresh" in Nike, or "yellow," "100% green electricity," and "sustainable" in Yello.
Of course , these words should appear in every piece of content you publish. This applies to your website, blog articles, social media, and other media such as videos or podcasts.
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Integrating corporate language into the process
Once you have defined all these points for yourself, you will probably have more than one A4 page. Add to this other briefing details, and the total can exceed four pages.
The good news is that you don't have to send everything with every new piece of content. You only need to send general information, such as company language , to each employee or service provider once , and then you can switch to short briefings that only contain individual pieces of relevant information.
If you use contentbird, it's very easy: you define this basic information in the strategy for each project. Every employee can access it at any time and refer back to it whenever necessary. Even if your strategy changes, it's easy to add words, triggers, or phrases to the list or remove them from it.
If you're curious now, you can try contentbird here for 14 days free of charge:
