Your brand’s voice is the unique personality that comes through when people engage with your brand. It can be playful and teasing, insightful and sagacious, or serious and authoritative. When it comes to how you want your brand to present itself to the world, it’s your choice. Together with your brand’s values, brand voice is a foundational aspect of a brand’s identity.
Understanding Brand Voice
A brand voice is a consistent thread that runs across all communication channels. While it can evolve over time, a brand voice should remain consistent and feel tailored in execution across your different marketing touch points. Always keeping in mind the basic essence and personality of your brand.
The starting point of building a successful brand voice is to ask yourself – how do you want to sound? Basically, you’re asking how you want your brand to be perceived. Through choreographing your brand’s voice, you’re choosing the automatic associations people will make when they think of your brand. And in doing this, how deeply your brand will resonate with your audience. Establishing a positive emotional connection will keep your brand at the forefront of people’s minds. This results in creating a brand-loyal community that will feel compelled to promote your brand’s virtues.
3 Cs of Branding:
Strong brands convey Clearly, Consistently, and with Constancy in regards to what and who they are. These three C’s are a good test, enabling you to see if your brand’s personality is well articulated or needs to be defined or refined.
One of the most successful brand voices is Coca-Cola. Its voice is friendly, optimistic, and inclusive. Across all channels, it comes across as happy and promoting togetherness. It is further strengthened by automatically triggering mental images of family and friends as well as linking to specific sounds. Like a can of coke being opened and even sighs of contentment. Coca-Cola’s successful brand voice is a great example of the ripple effect a good brand voice can have. As well as the competitive advantages it can generate.
All to say, you don’t need to have a mega-budget, well-established brand, or even worldwide influence to have a brand voice that successfully resonates. So how do you get your brand to come across with the personality you want it to have? One that is also customized to reflect your unique promises of brand value? What it comes down to is understanding the basics, getting them right, and working alongside the right people.
The Significance of Brand Values
Brand values are guiding principles that should be the basis of company decisions. They guide management strategy, HR policies, and a company’s external actions. As a result, they help to foster authenticity and connection between employees as well as with a company’s customer base. Brand values are considered a “foundational element” in brand identity and building because of their impact on company performance and bottom line.
3 Principles of Brand Values:
- Transparency.
- Trust.
- Visibility.
When these three principles of brand value are in place, customers feel closely connected to a brand and trust it more. They also believe that the brand understands and fulfills their specific needs. As a result, they are prepared to depend on that brand, which further entrenches brand loyalty. Research shows a brand value customer connection can result in a 57% increase in willingness to spend more on that brand! Furthermore, it’s also been shown that this feeling of brand connectedness can result in 76% of people choosing your brand over competitors.
Internally, a company that is openly values-driven is more likely to make consistently united decisions. They also tend to attract the type of employees who are a good fit and are loyal to the company. This results in higher retention rates and better work performance.
Brand Tone: Communicating Your Brand Voice and Values
Your brand’s voice and values are impacted by the tone your brand assumes. Tone can mean the difference between being on point and missing your audience. It also assists in reinforcing authenticity and authority, while encouraging brand resonance.
Your brand’s tone is your brand voice’s emotional response. Tone has four elements – formality, respectfulness, humor, and enthusiasm. How you pitch the tone of your brand voice depends on the situation at hand. For example, you might use a humorous tone when identifying a challenge your target audience has. Then switch to a more formal tone conveying authority when presenting your product as the best solution to this challenge.
Why Have a Brand Persona?
A brand persona is a proverbial face that you give to your target audience. What do they look like? Where do they live? How do they research what they need and where do they shop to find it? How do they speak and what do they say? What sparks their passion?
Creating a contextually refined description of who you are talking to helps your brand voice maintain the three Cs. Doing this strengthens the link between customer perception and brand authenticity. Practically, having a brand persona makes it easier to produce content with the right tone, language, and focus across each channel. It also nixes many of the challenges in maintaining brand voice and consistency. So, give your brand persona a name. This will make your ideal brand persona seem more real and it’ll be easier to “include” them in your marketing team.
Creating Your Brand Voice
At its roots, a brand voice is essential to remaining consistent and being recognized. Therefore, curating it and refreshing it is a decisive process. Often, it’s most efficient as well as effective to work with a professional digital and social agency to do this.
5 Tips on How to Develop Your Brand Voice
- Identify your audience and create a brand persona.
- Assess your existing tone and voice.
- Match what you say to where you say it.
- Create a Brand Voice Style Guide.
- Monitor, evaluate, and tweak.
Realizing a Brand Voice
Once you’ve created the brand persona for your ideal customer, you need to make sure you’re talking their language. Don’t assume you know how best to say what you need to. Rather, research and find out colloquialisms and language specific to your target audience.
In doing an audit of your current tone and voice you’re looking for inconsistencies. Is the language you use across all channels consistent with your voice? And does it match your brand persona’s? To drill down into this, find chatter. Look at how and what your customers are saying in response to your own and your competitor’s top-performing content. Once you have this information, match your tone to the content and its channel. For example, customer responses should be professional whereas Facebook posts can be humorous.
To help maintain consistency, you need a brand voice style guide. This should document in-depth details of your brand’s persona, including personality traits, expected habits, and common language used. It’s best to include do and don’t examples when, for example, outlining tone across channels and scenarios.
It’s important to remember that creating a successful brand voice is a continuous and dynamic process. This means regular monitoring, reviewing, and adapting when needed.
Common Mistakes When Branding
Two of the most common pitfalls, when it comes to brand voice, values, and tone, are inconsistency and audience misunderstanding. However, if you’re able to keep the three Cs and the principles of brand value at the forefront, you’re more likely to maintain your brand voice, values, and tone.
How to Maintain Your Brand Voice and Values
Social media is a fast-paced evolving vital area of business that requires constant attention to remain on top of. To do this you need information, but data is only valuable if it can be correctly collected and interpreted. There are many tools and metrics to assess the effectiveness of a brand’s voice, tone, and conveyance of values. However, using them can be time-consuming and successfully interpreting information gleaned and then converting it into quantifiable actions is tricky.
SocialQ has built its reputation on having a nimble and impactful approach to social media and digital marketing. So, while we keep you on the pulse, we’re constantly thinking and planning how to keep your brand’s voice and identity resonating loudly. Our experienced team bases your digital marketing strategies on current brand metrics and market trends. Chat with us today to see how we can keep your brand voice and unique promises ringing true across all channels.