Choosing Format for a Corporate Blog
Dressing up your corporate blog is a fun activity for the whole family. Here’s how you do it
So, you’ve decided that a corporate blog is a nice thing to have and there are people willing to run it. That’s great, but there are still a couple things to set up. These things are the tone of your conversation with the readers and the visual style of your covers and illustrations.
I’ve noticed that these aspects are sometimes overlooked or neglected at the initial stage of building a blog. This is a good enough reason to put up a little reminder and, hopefully, direct people towards better course of action. Let’s do this.
Style and Tone of Conversation
This is about the way you talk to the audience. Regular humans change their tone depending on their surroundings. We may be informal and crack a joke or two when talking to our friends, but get all formal and no-nonsense when trying to impress potential employers at an interview. With blogs it works just the same way.
When picking a tone for your outbound communications, the first question is who you are talking to. Your typical (or even ideal) client is of a certain age, has certain interests and certain ways to communicate with peers. An investment banker in his sixties talks differently from a recently graduated JS programmer. Given that you’ve already figured out your target audience, you can investigate further by reading what they read and visiting places where they talk, such as forums or chats.
Another question is, unsurprisingly, how do you talk to these people. However, here you should consider not your audience, but yourself. It may look reasonable to talk formally to certain groups of people like the investment banker mentioned above. It might even work if your company offers some serious legal or financial services. But what if you are selling craft pastries? Just imagine a post about cinnamon buns written in a tongue you typically see in fraud investigation reports.
Just as we all do as humans, you should tweak your language based on both who you are and who you are talking to.
When you’ve answered the two questions above, it’s time to generalize and describe your tone. There are at least two complementary ways to do it.
The first one is to characterize your tone as a set of scales:
- from formal to casual
- from serious to humorous
- from respectful to provocative.
You should get something like “casual, slightly humorous, respectful”.
Another way is to describe your brand as a person and their traits. You may try to do it within your team or ask your audience. In the end you should get a description like “a tech-savvy friend who tells you about the newest gadgets” or “an ubeat granny who treats you with delicious cake.”
Finally, when everything else is sorted out, you get to the style of writing. It’s about the nitty-gritty details of the language you use and is basically an application of your editorial policy.
Your style defines aspects, such as:
- whether it is appropriate to use jargon
- how to present dates, time, large numbers, abbreviations, etc.
- how to present quotes
- how to use bold or italic to put in highlights
- how to present geographical names and names of institutions
- your preference towards using positive language over negative language.
Basically, it is the set of editorial guidelines your writers will follow to keep everything consistent across your blog posts, ads, email conversations and wherever else.
For a great example of tone guidelines check out the Content Style Guide made by Mailchimp.
Visuals and Design Considerations
With a blog your primary medium of communication is, of course, text. Yet, when it comes to the readers’ impressions, the visual appearance of your blog is just as important. To be fair, Medium blogs are not exactly design-heavy, but there are still certain things to keep in mind. Basically, we are talking about the cover pictures and illustrations for your posts.
The first thing to consider is consistency.
A company behind a corporate blog has its own visual identity. It may include corporate colors, themes, mascots, and so on. A rule of thumb here is to reflect the company’s identity in the visual content for the corporate blog. It will help people associate what they read with the company, which contributes greatly to brand recognition.
Apart from being consistent with the company’s visual identity, the visuals you use for the corporate blog should be consistent from post to post. Use a pre-set color palette, put in some recurring themes and see if the pictures look nice when placed together on the main page.
As you may have noticed, for our own blog we’re using the same color palette as our corporate website. There are also certain shapes we’ve inherited from there, such as these cubes you see on the covers.
Another thing to consider is relevance.
The freedom of creative expression is important, but the themes and style of your pictures should be relevant to the topics you write about. Similarly to the tone of voice, your visuals can be anything from clean and professional to deliberately silly and weird. A formal no-nonsense writing is unlikely to pair well with silly sketches.
There are technical considerations as well.
The pictures you make will be displayed in different sizes, different places and on different screens. The trick is to make them look well in all cases.
A cover picture will be displayed in a post, as a preview in the layout of your blog, and, chances are, on the Medium main page. Keep that in mind if you want to put in lots of small details or fine textures — these will probably look messy or become hardly noticeable on a small preview. It is also better to put the important bits closer to the center of your pictures, since they may be cropped when displayed as a preview.
What to Make of It
A corporate blog in and of itself is a way for companies to present themselves, share their expertise, and engage the audience. And you probably want it to work that way.
Corporate blogs work best when the tone of conversation and visuals you pick are consistent with other forms of your company’s outbound communication, such as banner ads, newsletters, social media posts, and everything else.
Considering all of the above, you shouldn’t forget about the particular medium you are using to share your ideas, which is aptly named Medium in our case.
You have your own style, and your blog should have one as well. The point is to choose it and stick to it.
