Do you outsource content creation to external service providers? Then you're probably familiar with the word briefing. But even if you leave the content creation in-house, you will achieve better results with the Briefing better results. That's because this guide defines all the points that are important to you in order to strengthen your company's external image. An essential part of this should be your corporate language.

Learn how to define it for your briefings and why it's so important.

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Why a briefing simplifies and accelerates content creation

The briefing is a kind of short instruction for projects. In it, you define all the important key points, for example, on collaboration, define which employee has to do which tasks when, when meetings take place, and more. In content marketing, the briefing refers to the key data of the content. Through these instructions, everyone involved knows what they need to pay attention to in the creation process. All questions are thus clarified in advance, so that the employees or external service providers can immediately begin with the content creation, without having to ask often.

With the briefing you manage to unify all content pieces at the same time. You create a guideline that everyone follows. In the sense of Brand Buildings or corporate identity, this is important so that your company appears uniform across all platforms and brand awareness can develop . In addition to the logo and design, there is another important aspect to the identity of any brand: the corporate language.

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What is corporate language?

Corporate language is an Anglicized term. In German, this concept would be called corporate language or linguistic corporate identity. A brand is often assigned to visual key data. For example, the cyan of contentbird or the magenta of Telekom. If a brand establishes itself, these colors create a bonding effect among users. No matter where someone sees this color, they will immediately have to think of the company that uses this color in their external appearance.

What many underestimate is that the same is possible with words and phrases. In corporate language, terms and sentence components are therefore firmly defined and used again and again across platforms in the texts, videos and audios. Corporate language also includes narrative style, tonality, target group address or fantasy terms.

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Define corporate language in the briefing

So that all your content is directly attributable to your company, even though the logo may not be recognizable, the focus should be on standardization. As you define other key data in the briefing, you can also define the language there. This ensures that each employee or service provider is reminded again to include these or those 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 brief is often the one that companies prefer to bypass widely: Do we choose "you" or "you're" to address? However, defining this is essential for corporate language.

General tonality

After you've decided on "you" or "you're," it's time to dive a little deeper into the speech. This includes the general tone of voice. Do you want to come across as serious and professional, or would you rather build a closer bond with the target audience?

There are other tonalities as well:

• Loose
• Direct
• Provocative
• Friendly
• Dominant
• Restrained
• Childlike
• Superficial
• Fact-based
• Humorous

When it comes to tonality, 2 points are important: your company values and your target audience. Ideally, the tonality is the golden mean. It embodies your values in a way that your target group feels picked up and addressed.

Once you've established the basic tone, I recommend defining no-gos. Especially external service providers or new employees benefit from the specification of how the tonality should not be under any circumstances. It makes content creation and distribution much easier.

Writing style in content marketing

Closely related to the tone is the writing style. Do you want to write in a complicated way that makes the reader think? Or do you want your content to be easy to read? This also includes whether you use a lot of technical words or simple language. You should also determine this in accordance with your target group. For example, medical laypeople with a keen interest in medicine don't understand all the technical terms that are familiar to doctors or alternative practitioners.

Writing style also includes sentence length. Do you want to "chase" your readers through the text by using very short sentences, or do you prefer to use commas instead of periods? This decision is also important: Does your content cover the topics briefly and crisply or rather extensively and in depth?

Trigger in the corporate language

Triggers are triggering factors. The goal of content marketing is visibility on a page. This includes, for example, optimization for Google in the form of Keywords or the WDF*IDF analysis. But content marketing should also pay into companies' financial goals - so it must also, to some extent, meet the Promote sale of the offers. You can do this - also independently of the briefing - with triggers. These can be individual words or even phrases.

If you define the appropriate triggers in advance, your employees or external service providers can integrate them into the content. If you combine the triggers with specific frames, they can become an integral part of your corporate language.

Frames come from NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and create a certain frame around statements. Take, for example, the popular trigger of scarcity. In the content it could happen that there are only 10 seats available for a consultation. The effectiveness is increased by additions that you can easily insert into your corporate language. Among other things, it is suitable that you want to keep the circle of your customers as small as possible, because you want class instead of mass . This reasoning can appear again and again in your content pieces, so that gradually everyone within your target group knows that qualitative cooperation is important to you.

I would like to mention another example here, as this trigger is also ideally suited for all content formats and is also an essential part of the corporate language: In- and Outgroup. Most successful brands, especially in B2C, take advantage of this effect. They rely on community building and give it a special name. This strengthens the target group's sense of belonging and makes them loyal customers.

Koawach calls their chocolate friends. This trigger is also possible in B2B. Most companies use it more subtly, describing it as "mentoring graduates now achieve a 20% conversion increase."

Individual words as part of the corporate language

Corporate language contains individual words that describe the company's vision, content story and goals and make them tangible. Such words are, for example, "proud" or "fit" as at McFit, "performance" and "fresh" at Nike, or "yellow," "100% green power" and "sustainable" at Yello.

Of course, these words should appear in every content piece you publish, if possible. This is true on the website, in blog articles, in social media, but also in other media such as videos or podcasts.

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Integrate corporate language into the process

If you have defined all these points for yourself, you will probably end up with more than 1 A4 page. Add to that other briefing details, so that the whole can come to more than 4 pages.

The good news is that you don't have to send everything with every new content piece. You can send general information, such as the company language, to each employee or service provider only once and then switch to short briefings that contain only individual relevant information.

If you use contentbird, you have it very easy: In the strategy of each project you define such basic information. Every employee can access it at any time and recall it whenever needed. Even if your strategy changes, it is easy to add or delete words, triggers or phrases from the list.

If you are curious now, you can test contentbird here for 14 days for free:

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