MARKETING
5 Ways to Define and Use in Content
Updated April 6, 2022
If your logo didn’t appear with your content, could your audience identify it as coming from your brand? Would someone viewing your content on multiple channels know it all came from the same brand?
If you’re not careful, you can end up with a random assortment of voices and tones in the content produced across your marketing ecosystem. The content won’t provide a consistent picture of your brand or even the same use of language.
This inconsistent brand experience is more common as an organization grows and often exacerbated as external entities such as freelancers and agencies get thrown into the brand’s content creation mix.
You may ask why a brand voice matters. Isn’t it more important to make your content sound human? A brand voice, though, isn’t a non-human voice. It’s a consistent voice that enables your brand to be an easily identified and authoritative source in your area of expertise. Similarly, a consistent brand voice and vocabulary are essential to implementing localized content and intelligent content strategies effectively.
A #brand voice isn’t about creating a non-human voice, says @SFErika via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet
A brand voice chart can help address the challenges. I’ve outlined the five steps to establish, create, and maintain brand voice to drive consistency in your content creation efforts.
1. Gather a representative sample of your content
Cast a wide net – gather every type of content, from videos to web pages and e-books to social media. Now, cast a critical eye on the content. Which examples could have come from any of your competitors? Set those aside. Whittle your examples to a small group of pieces unique to your brand – examples of the brand voice you want to embody. Print and put these examples on a whiteboard, grouping together pieces with a similar feel.
2. Describe your brand voice in three words
In the same room as the whiteboard (or with the board visible to all in a virtual environment), work with your key content creators and owners of the brand identity. Again, cast a wide net and invite content creators throughout your organization, including teams from PR, sales enablement, customer success, etc. Consider the whiteboard content as the best examples of the brand voice you want to embody. Discuss common themes across all of those pieces. Group the examples into three thematic buckets.
If your brand was a person, how would you describe its personality to someone? At this point, describe your competitors as people, too. Is one of your competitors the class bully? Is another the head cheerleader? How do your brand’s personality traits make you different?
If your #brand was a person, how would you describe its personality, asks @SFErika via @CMIContent. #ContentStrategy Click To Tweet
Let’s create an example using these three broad traits:
- Passionate
- Quirky
- Authentic
Define each one in detail. How do these characteristics show up in how you communicate with your audience? How do they come across in the kind of content you create? How do they appear in your focused topics? Let’s continue this example:
- Passionate – expressive, enthusiastic, heartfelt, action-oriented
- Quirky – irreverent, unexpected, contrarian
- Authentic – genuine, trustworthy, engaging, direct
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3. Create the brand voice chart
With your brand’s voice defined, illustrate how it turns up concretely in your content. This brand voice chart is an essential reference tool to ensure your content (text and visuals) consistently uses the same voice.
Include three rows for each of the primary characteristics accompanied by three columns – brief description, do’s, and don’ts. If necessary, add a row for secondary characteristics that need a little extra explanation. In this example, “irreverent” is a related word and should be fleshed out so the team is clear on how it is defined (i.e., to challenge the status quo or to be snarky).
4. Ensure writers understand how to put the brand voice into action
You’ve defined your voice and tone and shown it in an easy-to-understand chart. How do you get everyone to use it? Meet with the team – anyone who creates content or communications – and walk them through the chart.
Go through some examples of content that hits the mark. Show in real time how to revise some existing content that isn’t reflective of the defined voice. If possible, provide team members with a laminated or card-stock copy of the brand voice chart to keep at their desks for reference. Make sure an electronic version also is available.
Laminate your brand voice chart for #content creators to keep on their desk, says @SFErika via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet
5. Revisit and revise the brand voice chart as the company evolves
A brand voice chart is not a set-it-and-forget-it tool. As your brand messaging evolves or new competitors come into your market, refresh it with new examples.
A #brand voice chart is not meant to be a set-it-and-forget-it tool. Update it quarterly, says @SFErika via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet
Quarterly, convene your key content creators and communicators to find out if any voice attributes haven’t worked well or are more aspirational than possible. For instance, many brands initially include the word “irreverence” but find their writers are uncomfortable flexing that muscle or key approvers consistently delete that part of the voice in the content. If that’s the case, it may be time for a voice refresh or some new do’s and don’ts.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
MARKETING
YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples [2024 Update]
Introduction
With billions of users each month, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and top website for video content. This makes it a great place for advertising. To succeed, advertisers need to follow the correct YouTube ad specifications. These rules help your ad reach more viewers, increasing the chance of gaining new customers and boosting brand awareness.
Types of YouTube Ads
Video Ads
- Description: These play before, during, or after a YouTube video on computers or mobile devices.
- Types:
- In-stream ads: Can be skippable or non-skippable.
- Bumper ads: Non-skippable, short ads that play before, during, or after a video.
Display Ads
- Description: These appear in different spots on YouTube and usually use text or static images.
- Note: YouTube does not support display image ads directly on its app, but these can be targeted to YouTube.com through Google Display Network (GDN).
Companion Banners
- Description: Appears to the right of the YouTube player on desktop.
- Requirement: Must be purchased alongside In-stream ads, Bumper ads, or In-feed ads.
In-feed Ads
- Description: Resemble videos with images, headlines, and text. They link to a public or unlisted YouTube video.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that play outside of YouTube, on websites and apps within the Google video partner network.
Masthead Ads
- Description: Premium, high-visibility banner ads displayed at the top of the YouTube homepage for both desktop and mobile users.
YouTube Ad Specs by Type
Skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Placement: Before, during, or after a YouTube video.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Action: 15-20 seconds
Non-skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Description: Must be watched completely before the main video.
- Length: 15 seconds (or 20 seconds in certain markets).
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
Bumper Ads
- Length: Maximum 6 seconds.
- File Format: MP4, Quicktime, AVI, ASF, Windows Media, or MPEG.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 640 x 360px
- Vertical: 480 x 360px
In-feed Ads
- Description: Show alongside YouTube content, like search results or the Home feed.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Headline/Description:
- Headline: Up to 2 lines, 40 characters per line
- Description: Up to 2 lines, 35 characters per line
Display Ads
- Description: Static images or animated media that appear on YouTube next to video suggestions, in search results, or on the homepage.
- Image Size: 300×60 pixels.
- File Type: GIF, JPG, PNG.
- File Size: Max 150KB.
- Max Animation Length: 30 seconds.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that appear on websites and apps within the Google video partner network, not on YouTube itself.
- Logo Specs:
- Square: 1:1 (200 x 200px).
- File Type: JPG, GIF, PNG.
- Max Size: 200KB.
Masthead Ads
- Description: High-visibility ads at the top of the YouTube homepage.
- Resolution: 1920 x 1080 or higher.
- File Type: JPG or PNG (without transparency).
Conclusion
YouTube offers a variety of ad formats to reach audiences effectively in 2024. Whether you want to build brand awareness, drive conversions, or target specific demographics, YouTube provides a dynamic platform for your advertising needs. Always follow Google’s advertising policies and the technical ad specs to ensure your ads perform their best. Ready to start using YouTube ads? Contact us today to get started!
MARKETING
Why We Are Always ‘Clicking to Buy’, According to Psychologists
Amazon pillows.
MARKETING
A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots
Salesforce launched a collection of new, generative AI-related products at Connections in Chicago this week. They included new Einstein Copilots for marketers and merchants and Einstein Personalization.
To better understand, not only the potential impact of the new products, but the evolving Salesforce architecture, we sat down with Bobby Jania, CMO, Marketing Cloud.
Dig deeper: Salesforce piles on the Einstein Copilots
Salesforce’s evolving architecture
It’s hard to deny that Salesforce likes coming up with new names for platforms and products (what happened to Customer 360?) and this can sometimes make the observer wonder if something is brand new, or old but with a brand new name. In particular, what exactly is Einstein 1 and how is it related to Salesforce Data Cloud?
“Data Cloud is built on the Einstein 1 platform,” Jania explained. “The Einstein 1 platform is our entire Salesforce platform and that includes products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — that it includes the original idea of Salesforce not just being in the cloud, but being multi-tenancy.”
Data Cloud — not an acquisition, of course — was built natively on that platform. It was the first product built on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s new cloud infrastructure architecture. “Since Data Cloud was on what we now call the Einstein 1 platform from Day One, it has always natively connected to, and been able to read anything in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud [and so on]. On top of that, we can now bring in, not only structured but unstructured data.”
That’s a significant progression from the position, several years ago, when Salesforce had stitched together a platform around various acquisitions (ExactTarget, for example) that didn’t necessarily talk to each other.
“At times, what we would do is have a kind of behind-the-scenes flow where data from one product could be moved into another product,” said Jania, “but in many of those cases the data would then be in both, whereas now the data is in Data Cloud. Tableau will run natively off Data Cloud; Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud — they’re all going to the same operational customer profile.” They’re not copying the data from Data Cloud, Jania confirmed.
Another thing to know is tit’s possible for Salesforce customers to import their own datasets into Data Cloud. “We wanted to create a federated data model,” said Jania. “If you’re using Snowflake, for example, we more or less virtually sit on your data lake. The value we add is that we will look at all your data and help you form these operational customer profiles.”
Let’s learn more about Einstein Copilot
“Copilot means that I have an assistant with me in the tool where I need to be working that contextually knows what I am trying to do and helps me at every step of the process,” Jania said.
For marketers, this might begin with a campaign brief developed with Copilot’s assistance, the identification of an audience based on the brief, and then the development of email or other content. “What’s really cool is the idea of Einstein Studio where our customers will create actions [for Copilot] that we hadn’t even thought about.”
Here’s a key insight (back to nomenclature). We reported on Copilot for markets, Copilot for merchants, Copilot for shoppers. It turns out, however, that there is just one Copilot, Einstein Copilot, and these are use cases. “There’s just one Copilot, we just add these for a little clarity; we’re going to talk about marketing use cases, about shoppers’ use cases. These are actions for the marketing use cases we built out of the box; you can build your own.”
It’s surely going to take a little time for marketers to learn to work easily with Copilot. “There’s always time for adoption,” Jania agreed. “What is directly connected with this is, this is my ninth Connections and this one has the most hands-on training that I’ve seen since 2014 — and a lot of that is getting people using Data Cloud, using these tools rather than just being given a demo.”
What’s new about Einstein Personalization
Salesforce Einstein has been around since 2016 and many of the use cases seem to have involved personalization in various forms. What’s new?
“Einstein Personalization is a real-time decision engine and it’s going to choose next-best-action, next-best-offer. What is new is that it’s a service now that runs natively on top of Data Cloud.” A lot of real-time decision engines need their own set of data that might actually be a subset of data. “Einstein Personalization is going to look holistically at a customer and recommend a next-best-action that could be natively surfaced in Service Cloud, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud.”
Finally, trust
One feature of the presentations at Connections was the reassurance that, although public LLMs like ChatGPT could be selected for application to customer data, none of that data would be retained by the LLMs. Is this just a matter of written agreements? No, not just that, said Jania.
“In the Einstein Trust Layer, all of the data, when it connects to an LLM, runs through our gateway. If there was a prompt that had personally identifiable information — a credit card number, an email address — at a mimum, all that is stripped out. The LLMs do not store the output; we store the output for auditing back in Salesforce. Any output that comes back through our gateway is logged in our system; it runs through a toxicity model; and only at the end do we put PII data back into the answer. There are real pieces beyond a handshake that this data is safe.”
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