Meet content marketing creative Todd Stewart, marketing manager at HourlyNerd and adjunct public speaking professor at Bryant University, his alma mater. Stewart previously served in content and communications roles at Advanstar Communications and BoldrDash. A dog lover and marathon runner, Stewart explains how he brings his passion for efficient communication to content marketing.

The brand voice, which we marketers understand to be the purposeful, consistent expression of your brand through the written language you use, has extra functionality in the world of software as a service (SaaS). At the most basic level, when we decide what a brand should sound like, we're also figuring out what we value as a company, who we want to be to our customers, and what specific promise we're making them.

In the SaaS world, marketers must take a nuanced, detailed approach to brand voice. That’s partly because we’re doing B2B marketing and targeting narrow, highly specific audiences, typically with the aid of personas. You may even have two sets of personas — the former for the users of your product and the latter for other audiences. The bottom line is that the blanket approach doesn’t work for SaaS. Selling software to a busy, skeptical person is not the same as selling beer to someone who's thirsty.

If you are waiting for someone to step up and volunteer to write next week’s blog post, stop. Your job isn’t to wait for volunteers, it’s to empower and enable your colleagues to become the great content contributors you know they can be.

Of course, we know this is sometimes more easily said than done. There is certainly no shortage of excuses available to your teammates when they don’t want to be involved. Christine Warner recently provided some great tips on how to coax internal experts into participating in content marketing. Now, we are back with tips and insights to help you deal with a few more common obstacles and objections.

Fashion icon Coco Chanel nailed it when it comes to avoiding the perils of over-accessorizing: “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” While she may have been referring to exuding understated elegance, I’ve learned to take this wisdom to heart when evaluating my style of writing.

I could wax poetic when it comes to a subject I’m particularly passionate about, but I have to keep the best interests of my audience in mind. After all, it only takes a few seconds for a reader to determine they’re not interested and move on to another article. Almost always, there’s something that can be removed without detracting from your main point; if anything, that excess is what will end up diluting your reasoning.

Although monitoring your site’s analytics, such as bounce rate and time spent on site, can be key indicators of audience engagement, have you considered that your writing style could be a make-or-break factor when it comes to your audience sharing, and ultimately continuing to revisit, your content?