Client: The Garden Retreats
Project: Develop brand tone of voice and copy for Instagram and website.
Spec work.
The Brand: The Garden Retreats is a fictional brand, uniting Muslim women aged 21+ from all over the world to focus on their health and wellbeing. Held in natural landscapes, the brand promotes faith, relaxation, wellbeing and sisterhood through expert lead workshops, guided walks, and inspirational talks. Retreats are held in the UK, Spain and Morocco. Women from all cultures are welcome to join and experience what the Islamic faith has to offer.
The Brief: Create brand tone of voice and tagline. Write social media, website, and email copy promoting retreats to target audience, encouraging sign-ups to newsletter and free informational webinars.
Project Roles: Writer from concept to execution, developing brand tone of voice, generating ideas, and copy editor.
Deliverables:
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Research and develop the brand persona, tone of voice and tagline.
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Headline (on-image copy) and Body (caption below the image) options for the brand's social media campaign.
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Headline and sub-headline copy for website homepage.
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Write subject line, pre-header and body options for brand's email marketing materials.
Brand Tone of Voice
The Brief: Create the Brand Tone of Voice (TOV) and Brand Tagline for The Garden Retreats.
Approach: I firstly created a brand persona, which created a guideline for how The Garden Retreats would look and sound if it were a real person.
Moving on to developing the brand tone of voice, I envisioned the copy being very focussed on how it would feel to be on a retreat with the brand.
Outcome
Tone of Voice: We are calming, not over-excited.
Do: Use copy that taps into how it feels to get away with The Garden Retreats.
Don’t: Use copy that’s overly excited and over-hyped.
Brand Vocabulary/Glossary: Peace, quiet, tranquil, time-out, sisterhood.
Brand Tagline
The Brief: Create a memorable brand tagline that expresses the brand’s identity and reason for being.
Approach: Sticking with the brand guidelines, I used copy that taps into how the brand wants their target audience to feel. The word “Delightful” expresses feelings of happiness, pleasure and excitement in one word. Overall, the tagline expresses what the brand is offering and its benefits.
Social Media Content
The Brief: Headline (on-image copy) and body (caption below the image) options inviting target audience to sign up to the newsletter, offering a 20% discount on their first retreat.
Approach: In order to bring across feelings of peace, I took a minimal approach to the copy and overall design of the visuals. The on-image copy expresses how women will feel and what they’ll gain from attending a retreat. The caption further explains the benefits, but also entices the target audience to sign up to the newsletter for a 20% discount.
Homepage Hero
The Brief: Write headline, sub-headline and CTA copy for website homepage.
Approach: I continued with the theme of using words that evoke feelings of being on a retreat. For example, “Where birds sing and hammocks swing” immediately make the reader feel as if they’re somewhere amongst nature, relaxing in a hammock, with nothing but the sounds of birds chirping to their hearts content.
Since the retreats also welcome non-Muslims I provided options with and without the term Muslim/Muslimah for the sub-headline.
Email Marketing
The Brief: Write subject line, pre-header, and body copy for the brand’s email marketing campaign, encouraging women to sign up to informational webinars where they can learn more about the retreats and meet each other.
Approach: Attention-grabbing subject lines and headlines are key to email marketing. The copy needs to stand out amongst all the other emails cluttering up your inbox. Then follows the body copy — it needs to sway your target audience enough follow the CTA.
I opted for words such as “tranquil” and “time-out” to bring across a sense of peace from the ordinary hustle and bustle from the target audience’s lives. “The gates are opening once again” nudges the reader to step into the garden.
The body copy explains what benefits the retreats offer, the call to action asks the reader to sign up to the webinar.