Brand Voice Is the New Logo - Keynote Speech

Ladies and gentlemen, once again, your hostess with the mostest, Anne Henley! So much for that amazing audience participation. Honestly, you are all honorary Beelzebubbs. That was the Tufts University Beelzebubbs. They're a nationally renowned acapella group. Three facts I want to share about them as they exit the building. These guys were here at Quarter seven. Come on. Crazy. Fully dressed, suited, tie, whole nine yards, incredible. Three about the Beelzebub. The Beelzebub have been together since 1962. 60 years. Does their skin look incredible? I was like, 60 years? What do you use? Can we talk products? Let's do like a Sephora visit later. You can just like pick and choose. Second fun fact about the Beelzebub is that they were the voice of the Warblers on Glee. Remember the Warblers on Glee? 2011, 2012 kind of vibe. Yeah? Yes? Okay, good. Yeah, the iconic cover of Katy Perry's. Yeah, right? Teenage Dream, incredible. Anyway, and the third fun fact about the Beelzebubbs is that they have, I don't know, I said 27 albums because that's what's on your website, guys. Maybe you need web services from someone here in this audience because they corrected me today and said it's more like 37 albums or something like that. I mean, 60 years. That's like two albums a year. Anyway, their most recent EP is Prospect Street. You can catch them on Spotify or Apple Music or wherever you access your music of your choice. So once again, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for opening it up with such big energy. Get growling. Welcome. On behalf of everybody here at Marketing Profs, I am... literally so excited that you're here and you can tell that I am excited because I used 150 points type on this slide with three exclamation points. That's how excited I am and that's how aggressively excited I am in fact. It's very aggressive so you're gonna get lots of aggression from me. Oh my god you're here! Thank you. We're all so grateful that you're spending the next two days with us. And I am so thrilled that we are back in person together. Online is fine, but it's fine. So, oh, sorry. Online friends, online is amazing. Wow. What an experience you're having at home. That's what I meant to say. Sorry. There's like a thousand people online, right? So it's incredible. So technically it's our biggest event ever. So yeah, we love online. Thank you all of you for being here in your jams. Like you're not wearing Spanx right now, are you? No, you're not. So I want to set the stage for the next two days this morning with a very brief talk on a subject near and dear to my heart, which is brand voice. I believe brand voice does not get enough attention, especially in B2B marketing. Yet I believe that a recognizable, identifiable voice can make or break your marketing. So I've been thinking a lot about... writing and I've been thinking a lot about brand voice and how we show up as B2B marketers because it was just a year ago this week that I signed a contract to write the second edition of my last book, Everybody Writes. This is the OG version. I published it eight years ago in 2014. Why did I decide to update this? I don't know. Because I just am a glutton for... A lot of work. That's actually not true. I actually thought it would be like a piece of cake. I thought it would be easy. Peasy, Anne, I said to myself. I was like, this is going to be so easy to do. Now, why did I think this? It's because, you know, it's a Wall Street Journal bestseller. It has 952 five-star reviews on Amazon. God, that sounds like a flex. Sorry about that. It's not a flex. I'm just trying to set the stage for why I thought it would be easy and peasy. This is the thing I thought how hard could this be to update a book already a Wall Street Journal bestseller already got all these like amazing reviews I'm like I got this no big deal. I got it So I decided that I was just gonna maybe do I don't know light dusting Maybe like set the Roomba vacuum Let it like travel all over the pages. I'd be like you just clean that up. Will you do something like that? I may spray some for breeze like So fresh so clean easy, right? So I went on to Amazon to read the reviews. And I did this as part of my research because I thought, you know what, let's see what people have said about it more recently. Like maybe there's some good clues in there for maybe what needs updating, what's a little bit rusty. Now, I never read reviews. Of course I read reviews. I read every single review. And I print out the ones that are unfavorable, just so you know. This is the one that popped out at me, though. Look at this. Three stars. Disappointing. A bit boring. So I dug into it. I'm a big fan of Anne Hanley's newsletter, which is written in an energetic style with many linguistic surprises. I was like, oh, hello, yes. Why the three stars, mister? Then he says, so the style of this book struck me as a little too buttoned down, dutiful, and devoid of Anne's personality. I says, okay, he said, but I found it hard to get through. Oof. But you know what really chapped me? Look at this. Whoops. One person? How could you do that? But also, let's talk about his name. Experienced Seminar Leader. Like, I don't know what kind of parent names their child Experienced. But like, you know, you do you, Mr. and Mrs. Seminar Leader. Congrats on your son, by the way. Grew up to be a jerk. You know, you know when you see something or you hear something or you get a piece of feedback that you know is like true? And even if you get a little defensive at first, even if you're like, ugh, you know in your heart that it's true. Like, you ever experienced that? And you're like, hmm, you know what? Mr. Experience seminar leader, I knew in my heart, was right. And I thought, all right, we're doing this. We're going to rip this entire thing apart. We're going to take it down to the studs. We're going to build it from the ground up. We're going to put a bouncy house in the backyard because... You know what? Now I have an opportunity to do that. So I did a complete overhaul, and that's the book that you have sitting with you today. But it also made me think about why my voice had changed. Like, what had happened in the past eight years? Like, why had my voice changed so much? Why did Mr. Experienced Seminar Leader see such a vast difference between how I was eight years ago and how I am today? Like, what was that gap? What happened in there? And what's more than that, why does it matter to all of us as B2B marketers? Why does it matter to all of us in marketing? Now before we get going, I just want to say one thing about brand voice. I hate that phrase. I just really hate it. It sounds so literary. It sounds so high-minded. It sounds so pretentious, and it's annoying, like in a way. But then I thought, all right, there's got to be a better phrase for this. What else is out there? Verbal identity? Look at this one. Communicative persona. Ew, who did that one? Like I feel like somewhere a writer is crying. Doug Kessler? Probably just had an aneurysm at that. Are you here, Doug? Yeah, he won't even acknowledge. He's just waving as I'm here. Because he does not have the energy because he's in the midst of an aneurysm. That's what's going on. He is weeping right now. So brand voice it is. We're going to talk about brand voice. What is brand voice really? It's how you sound when someone... reads your writing, right? That's what voice is. It's how you sound when someone reads your writing. It's how you sound in their head. And brand voice is exactly the same thing. It's just that it also carries your personality in your brand, and it conveys who you are as a company and what you are like to deal with to your prospects and to your customers. Now, I think that brand voice matters more than ever, and we need to pay more attention to it. Why do I think that? It's for a few reasons. One, because our content is changing. The content that we produce this year different than the content we produced last year and it's very different than the content we'll produce next year and why is that it's because we've changed because the world changes and we need to react to that as marketers as the first line of defense in any kind of communication on behalf of the companies that we work for you know now we weigh in on political issues sometimes or social issues or for example we need to we need to adjust our mes our messaging because I don't know, maybe there's like a global pandemic that just will not end. Like maybe there's that. So we always have to be cognizant of what else is going on in the world. There's another reason why I think brand voice matters a whole lot. And I want to share with you some gorgeous brand new data that we at Marketing Profs do in connection with the Content Marketing Institute. In the most recent survey, this is our 13th year of partnering on this survey, it's not even out until next week. But I'm going to give you a sneak peek. Why? Because it proves my point. But also because I love you. So there's that. So we asked B2B marketers, 1,500-ish or so of them, what's actually working in B2B content today? What's working in your marketing programs? And 71% of them said, you know what is working? Content is so much more important now. Content matters more in a post-COVID world than it did before that for the obvious reasons we all know because so much of the way that our customers are accessing us is online, of course, right? So they said, heck yes, content matters a whole lot more. But not just any content. It's the kind of content that truly connects. It's content that is produced with a sense of craft and care. I love those two words paired with marketing, by the way. The third word I love paired with marketing is creativity. And you're going to hear from Pierce at NAC. He's going to talk about how we can all be more creative marketers. All right, and there's one more reason why I believe it is so important for us to think about brand voice, and it's because artificial intelligence is increasingly part of what we do in B2B marketing. You know, increasingly, AI tools and solutions and platforms can write our blog posts for us. They can produce a rough draft in, like, they just did, like, 42 of them just since I started that last sentence. Like, it's that fast. You just can, like, here, you want one here. I got this, and I got this, and I got this. Like, it'll do it super fast. It can help us optimize headlines and all of that. But the thing is, we can't let AI do our jobs for us. We have to be aware of what our voices are as people, and then we have to know our brand voice so that we can layer on the bits of personality and empathy that make our content our own. So in other words, we can't just be coasting around on the AI tools, like just coasting around, just like riding around, riding around like the Roomba puppy. We're better than that. We're not cuter than that, but we're better than that. But the thing is, voice is so hard in B2B. It's tough. The brand voices that are celebrated, the ones that we read about when you hear about brand voice as being like an incredible leader for a company, it's most often those B2C brands. It's those B2C brands, the funny, snarky, kind of in-your-face B2C brand, like Wendy's, for example. Like they troll McDonald's all the time or like Steakums on Twitter like they troll themselves in a completely ironic way and And like what's more than that? They don't even use uppercase letters or punctuation Because that's how edgy the voice of frozen beef sheets are Like that's that's this is brand voice like they're killing it Or Duolingo, language learning app, their TikTok is so unhinged that I don't even understand it. I follow them and I love it and I don't know why. Like why do I do this? Their engagement is insane on their TikTok. So I'll show you an example of this. Let me just share with you a recent post that they put on TikTok in which the Duolingo owl His name is Duo. Right, I just blanked. Thank you. I was gonna say his name is the Duolingo owl because I was trying to cover it. But no, his name is Duo. So Duo, he uses a Taylor Swift lyric. Yeah, she's in the audience. Taylor, thank you for being here. Anyway, she uses a Taylor Swift lyric to convey the depth of sorrow. that the owl feels. All right, here we go. Like what? What are you who didn't laugh? It's because Jake Gyllenhaal and Taylor like had some bad things. You wrote a lot of songs about him. You know, so he's like Google Translate is like the Jake in the relationship who like did Taylor dirty. You know what I mean? Okay, filling in the gaps for all of you. But also I love this. Alton XOXO. Another, how do these parents name these kids, these names? Anyway, OlsonXOXO is like, drag Jake as you should. Like, heck yeah. If you want more Taylor content, by the way, Ahava is leading a session directly after this keynote bank today. It's gonna be fantastic. So, just wanna say that. So we can't drag our competitors. Like, can you imagine if IBM showed up on TikTok and like, Hewlett Packard was like. Like, honestly, that would delight me. But I don't think that's gonna happen, because that's not who we are in B2B, because voice is so hard, it's so hard in B2B. Or, or is it?

Clip of opening to the MarketingProfs B2B Forum, featuring Ann Handley as host and kickoff keynote.