Do You Use Your Brand Voice?
Brand voice? What it is and why does it matter?
When branding your business, people usually only take into account how a brand looks visually. Using delightful fonts, shapes, comics or colours you like to design your logos and content doesn't always represent your business well. Brand VOICE is most often overlooked. Consider how your visual brand makes your client FEEL.
With current digital trends and social media marketing efforts, brand voice is definitely more important than ever to ensure your business stands out from the crowd of digital chitter chat.
If your logo didn’t appear with your content, could your audience identify the content as coming from your brand?
Would someone view your content on different channels knowing it all came from the same brand?
What brand voice is and how you can develop one of your own.
A brand voice isn’t about developing a non-human voice. It’s about being consistent with the voice and manner in which you present to your potential clients – putting your organisation in an easily identifiable position, an authoritative source for your area of expertise. A consistent brand voice and vocabulary is essential to implementing relevant content and intelligent, effective content strategies.
A company who sells surf gear speaks with words, phrases and attitude of a surfer.
The company selling mattresses may tone down the voice, calmly selling a good nights sleep.
While you can get away without having a distinctive brand voice, you can take your marketing much further when you establish one.
Define Values: Most entrepreneurs, small and large started out with a vision in mind for their business when they launched. Those values may be important to you and your company but are they important to your customers, clients or staff? The mattress and it's technology may be important to you, but we think a good nights sleep is what the customer really wants and needs. How can you reflect that in your voice?
Try-On Tags: Places your voice emerges is in your company’s tagline or mission statement. You can get a good indication of voice by what taglines resonate. Doing a simple market research survey or poll may give you a few words, phrases or taglines that best represent your brand.
We have put together a simple document to help figure it out yourself, DOWNLOAD HERE > > >
Find Your Words: Once you have defined your "10 Words" using the PDF, continue to remove those of least importance until you have just 4-5 remaining. These are your brand words, the ones that help people to think of your brand when used in various content, to create your phrases and represent your mission.
Other Methods.
A/B Test Kit:
Most of us are familiar with the idea of A/B testing in advertising designs, looking for conversion rates or headlines to see what works. But it’s also possible to A/B test for voice.
If you have access to an extensive database you may consider sending email marketing to test subjects in your prospect or customer pool and see which drives a higher level of engagement.
Or perhaps poll your staff, partners or member base.
Write A Letter or Report: Focus on the highlights of the month or year from a completely truthful place that explores what you want to say and how you want to say it. Try writing it to your customers, your colleagues, your prospects, without an intent to publish. This helps to write honestly, so it feels safe, and you will be able to be completely transparent. The letter may need to be massaged or reshaped but could contain the seeds of your most authentic, powerful voice.
Summary: Finding your brand voice can take time and ongoing effort. But it’s necessary for building a strong brand, and connecting with your audience, Your brand voice should be utilised if you wish to achieve a successful content marketing campaign.
What techniques have worked for you in determining your company’s voice? We'd love to know in the comments below.
