In an ideal world, your customers do not have to look for your logo or slogan to recognize that the content belongs to you or simply recognize your brand voice. Every blog post, social media posts, and infographic that you share must have a specific tone which will make it obvious to your audience that the content comes from you.
However, it is difficult to achieve this perfect arrangement in the current age of digitization, especially for small businesses.
It is very difficult to stand out online especially when 200 million websites are active daily and Google Ads and social media marketing are viewing millions of ads per day.
So what to do?
That brings us to the most important question, how to build a website to rise above the noise.
Since more and more business houses are getting an online presence, it’s becoming very difficult to be heard these days. Thus a brand voice is essential.
Contents
So, what is a brand voice and why does it matter?
Your brand voice is your means for communicating with the target market that you operate in. It is a combination of personality, imagery, language, words and of course the message you choose to communicate through your content.
Now, with the importance of brand voice highlighted, let’s move on to the 6 ways through which you can identify the brand voice of your company:
Begin By Highlighting Your Values
Firstly, begin by asking what are the fundamental beliefs of your company? What are the values which help you guide internally and externally? Are these your company values or your personal core values?
Though company values are not starred in the mission statement, they are still practiced. Thus, identifying your company values and understanding what is most important to you will help you guide your brand voice.
Airbnb is a good example.
One of their core values in inclusion and this guides their imagery style as well. All their ads, web pages, and their marketing content showcase people from diverse age groups, ethnicities and strata of society.
Thus, understanding core values are very important since the course through which your business will flow depends on that.
Constantly Review The Content You Have Created
Make it a point to look through Your old blog posts, newsletters, and tweets. Is there something common about them? Are there some typical words or phrases that you have used earlier?
If you have failed to identify your brand voice, you will notice that the content you have produced previously looks like it could have been sent from different companies. It’s essential to get rid of the posts and materials which do not connect to your brand voice.
The content that you create must highlight that it comes from your brand. In order to do that gather all the content that you have, analyze its tone, personality, and words and use these to guide the future course of your content.
Think About Your Audience
It’s important to consider who you are speaking to. Remember that the tone of your content will vary based on the age group and profession of your target audience. If it a gym-based brand the tone will be different from a brand dedicated to teens.
Identifying your buyer’s persona will help you with some crucial things like language to be used, what the target group considers important and how they go on to express themselves.
But of course, you need to be authentic about whatever you are saying.
Work Along With Your Team
Working in coordination with your teammates can also help in defining the tone of your content and thereby the voice of your brand.
In order to discover that voice, have a brainstorming session with your teammates to discover three words which highlights what your brand stands for. Each person can be given the opportunity to come up with three words. After they are done share the results and see if you can identify a common thread.
Once you and your team have identified the best words to describe your brand, break the words further down which will help you describe the brand.
Let’s see this through an example:
For instance, let’s assume that you have come up with “ Sincere”, Bold“ and” “ Innovative” to describe your brand.
Now take it a step further to describe what each of these words means. For example, bold may stand for fearless, adventurous and such.
The primary idea is to be as specific as possible with your brand identity.
What is The Story of Your Brand?
Your brand voice is very much influenced by the story that is behind the business. No matter which business you are in, customers love to hear a story and look forward to know-how was the brand started.
So it’s important to give that much-desired story to the audience. Take some time out to frame out your story. Are you a stay-at-home brand? Did you quit your job to start this business? What was your motivation initially?
Once you have got all these answered, make use of certain visual content to highlight your story. While words and texts are crucial, you cannot overlook the value of visual content.
Images are the best means you can use to connect with your customers so make sure you include visual content in your brand story.
Remain Clear To Your Brand Voice and Tone
Do not be under the impression that building your brand voice and the process of branding is an overnight thing. It will take some time to work out but it is worth the effort.
Even when you hire people to create content for you, make sure you let them understand the brand voice and what the brand stands for so that they can create the content and visuals accordingly. Creative visuals for your brand in the form of infographic or social media posts speaks louder than your textual content.
If your content is in tune with your brand value then your ideal market will trust you and you will perform better.
So get in the process of creating a voice, and content that will reflect that voice.
About the Author:
Prince Kapoor is a seasoned Marketing Analyst and Blogger. With his skills, he has been helping fellow marketers and brands worldwide.
