In a world where SEO and content marketing are constantly changing, with new strategies emerging all the time, it’s sometimes good to take a step back and revisit the basics. One of these basics is developing your brand tone of voice.
Done well, your brand’s tone of voice will help you stand out from your competitors, keep your marketing consistent, and speak directly to your target customers.
Done badly, your message might be misinterpreted or misunderstood. Or worse still completely overlooked.
In this article, we’ll explore how to identify and develop your brand tone of voice and perhaps more importantly, how to ensure that it remains consistent throughout your online and offline marketing.
What is brand tone of voice?
Your brand tone of voice, or just brand voice, is the way in which you communicate with your customers. It refers to all communications, including (but not limited to!) your online and offline advertising, social media, and customer services.
Your brand tone of voice refers to what you say and how you say it, giving your company an identity beyond just its products and services. It goes hand in hand with your logo, brand colours, and any taglines or slogans you use.
Don’t worry if you’ve skipped this step in your marketing. We know what it’s like when you’re setting up a business or developing a marketing strategy – sometimes you just want to get up and running and see what sticks. The good news is that it’s not too late to go back and refine or even define your tone of voice.
Why is brand tone of voice important?
Just like a person, your brand’s personality makes it unique. Your brand voice should reflect your company values and what you stand for.
Brand tone of voice ensures that your brand is instantly recognisable. It allows you to stand out from your competitors and encourages brand loyalty amongst your customers. In fact, in a study on consumer behaviour, 33% of people said distinct personality makes a brand stand out more than others (source: Grammarly).
Can AI help brand identity?
With Artificial Intelligence (AI) creating more and more of the content we consume, having a strong brand identity of your own can really help to cut through the noise. AI has limitations and one of them is that its generated content won’t convey your brand’s personality.
5 tips on developing your brand voice
So how can you effectively develop your brand voice? Here are our five top tips:
1. Develop your buying personas
Although your brand voice should reflect your company’s values, don’t forget your customers. A great marketing strategy starts with your audience first and works backwards from there.
Start by thinking about who you’re talking to and why you’re talking to them, and this will help you develop your buying personas. Consider both your existing customers and potential buyers that you don’t already target – but would like to.
Once you have these in mind, consider their characteristics such as their age, gender, hobbies, family, and interests. It can help to make these as detailed as possible. Give your buying personas names and keep them in mind throughout your brand tone of voice development.
For example, a CrossFit gym may have a buying persona called Lauren. Lauren is a 27-year-old female who enjoys competitive fitness, activity based holidays and having brunch with friends. She is single and lives on her own in a city centre apartment. Lauren graduated 8 years ago, has a mid range car on finance and spends money on clothing, holidays, and beauty products.
2. Decide on your brand’s personality
The next step along the road of brand tone of voice development is to decide on your brand’s personality. Your brand’s personality is the characteristics that you show to your customers. It makes you relatable and recognisable and can help keep your customers loyal.
Think about how your buying personas would relate to different personalities, which would resonate with them, and what you want your brand to stand for and become known for.
In a study by the Harvard Business Review, 64% of consumers said that brand values were their primary influence in their relationship with a brand.
For example, a children’s charity may have a more serious brand personality which is knowledgeable and empathetic, whereas a soft drinks company may have a slightly quirky or cool personality.
3. Assess your current voice and identify inconsistencies
Don’t worry, you don’t always need to reinvent the wheel! You may have organically already started communicating in your brand tone of voice or there may be areas where you need to refine this.
Have a look at all of your communication channels and collect these as examples of your current brand voice. Review these and identify any inconsistencies. You can also check to see which content is performing well and take learnings from this.
Rather than starting from scratch, use your current communications to solidify your tone of voice.
Assessing your tone of voice shouldn’t be a one-off task, especially if you have lots of different people working on your company’s communications. You should set a diary reminder to audit this every couple of months to ensure you stay on the right track.
4. Tailor your brand voice for different channels
Now, it’s on to the implementation. Your brand tone of voice will vary slightly depending on the marketing or communication channel, and you can adjust this accordingly.
For example, if you have a jokey, fun brand tone of voice, this may need to be slightly more serious in customer service emails or when dealing with complaints. If your business is both B2B and B2C, you may need to use different language for each customer segment.
Identify what is and isn’t acceptable in each scenario and make distinctions between channels. Which brings us on to the final step in your brand tone of voice project…
5. Create documentation for your teams
This is perhaps the most important step for getting your brand tone of voice to stick, especially if you work in a larger organisation with different teams and members of staff.
Create a brand guidebook or style guide which can serve as a reference document for anyone who needs to write customer communications in your brand tone of voice. This will help to keep your social media posts, blog posts, website copy, and emails consistent.
Include common words or phrases that your brand uses, your brand’s characteristics, and examples of copy. You should also include examples of things that your brand wouldn’t say. This should help your teams craft copy that fits your desired tone of voice.
Your brand guidebook can be shared with external agencies or freelancers to help them get to know your company and ensure that anything they create stays within these guidelines.
One Response