Effortless Tricks for Adopting Your Client’s Voice

As a writer, having a distinctive voice is important. Your voice is your brand, your calling card, and what sets you apart from all of the other writers out there. The tricky part for many freelance writers is that voice is a brand for everyone, and when you’re writing for clients, it’s not necessarily your voice they want to hear. Instead, they want you to produce content in their voice, so that it matches their brand and is recognizable to their audience.

No, you haven’t spent all of that time honing your voice as a writer for nothing. Your voice still matters, and it is what attracts clients to you. However, an important skill for freelance writers to develop is slipping in and out of different voices to mirror the needs of each specific client. It might sound difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. There are some very straightforward steps you can take that will make it easy to adopt your client’s voice, whether your client wants a casual blog to appeal to millennial readers or a formal article on will preparation. Get your client’s voice right every time with these tips.

Don’t Take It Personally

Writers are naturally protective about their voices, and it’s sometimes hard to imagine why a client would read samples from you in your voice and hire you without wanting you to use your voice for them. Keep in mind that clients are likely seeing your skill in writing pieces and want to work with you because you seem like a strong writer capable of crafting excellent work—and they have the confidence that you will apply that skill to presenting content in their own brand messaging.

Sometimes, clients will specifically want your voice, when it matches well with their brand. When they don’t, it’s not a critique or rejection of your voice as bad. Keep in mind that producing content for clients is a job, like baking a cake according to instructions from a customer or painting a room in the color a customer wants.

Interview Your Clients

Clients are often able to tell you if they want to formal or casual content, but that information is not enough. To truly get to the heart of the voice that you need to emulate, try conducting interviews.

You can interview the owner of the company for many small businesses, but if you’re working with a larger corporation, you may need to interview someone from their marketing department. Ask about their goals, mission, target market, and values. Listen to the answers they are giving you, but pay an equal amount of attention to how they are giving you the answers. Do they use formal language, or are they laid-back? Do they joke around, or are they very businesslike in their responses? The content of their answers gives you important information you’ll need as you write, but how they present that information gives you vital information about their brand’s voice.

If it is too hard to make schedules align for a real-time interview, use a questionnaire-style interview by email. Their written responses will also give you a hint to their brand’s voice.

Create a Customer Character

Writing in the voice of your client is like playing a character, so why not actually slip into character as you write? A perfect way to nail the voice your client wants is to assume the character of their target audience—the market they described to you during the interview. Then write your content in the voice of that character, in the way you think they would speak and how they would speak to others.

Many writers find this process extremely helpful when they are freelancing for a client with a voice that is very different from their own. It frees them up to think about new ways to present information and helps to prevent them from unwittingly slipping in and out of their own voice. Writing as a character will also help to inject the necessary amount of distance into the content. This is particularly helpful if you have a client who wants extremely formal content, and your style is more casual and conversational.

When you write in the voice of a character who is part of the client’s target market, you also begin to see what that market may want from content. If you are going to be generating content topics for the client, this is an excellent way to identify information that may be useful to cover and pain points of customers that should be addressed.

Mine the Existing Material

Naturally, reading the client’s existing content is a good way to learn their voice. You should browse through the client’s website to see how they are selling themselves, but don’t forget to dig deep into their social media channels and blog to see how they present themselves in these kinds of forums. Don’t engage in just skimming, but rather read and read this material until you can predict how they are going to say something and can hear the flow of the language in your head. This will make it feel more natural once you start writing yourself.

One caveat about using existing content as a benchmark, however: It is possible that the client is hiring you because they dislike that content and want to give it all a facelift. If you are concerned about this, ask the client if there are pieces of content that the company really likes or others that they don’t. Seeing these pieces will help you get a clearer idea of the vision they have in mind.

The longer you freelance, the easier it becomes to adopt your client’s voice. At Writers Work, we’re here to help at every step of the process, from connecting with your first client to building a portfolio. Our writing coaches are here to guide you to a better understanding of using voice and all parts of your writing talent to build a successful career as a freelance writer. Explore our site to see our tools for writers and to learn how to join our community today.