Brand voice, or tone of voice, represents your brand's personality, perspective, and the values you stand for. It's important because it helps you reach like-minded people, the ones you want as your customers. Do you know your brand's voice?
From web copy to social media posts to brochures, your tone of voice should be consistent, applied across all channels, and form a key part of your brand's identity.
Why do it? A consistent and original tone of voice sets you apart from your competitors, it expresses your brand identity in a powerful way and can help earn loyalty and trust from customers, and it can help with persuading and guiding your audience through to to the enquiry or purchase stage.
Here are four steps to develop your brand's tone of voice so you can use a consistent voice and start resonating and building loyalty with your audience.
1. Know your brand values and your audience
Before you can create a tone of voice for your brand, you need to have an understanding of your brand values and culture, and your audience. Your brand, or core, values reflect what is important to you and your business, so they bring the human element to your business.
People buy into people, and their values, so expressing these is important. It's human nature to be attracted to people (or brands) who share similar values to you. Brand values also shape you and your staff's attitudes and actions - in turn creating a work culture that reflects those values.
The nature of your business and its goals will directly influence your brand values. Some example of what these might be are: being innovative, taking risks, acting with courage, environmental consciousness, being transparent in everything we do, or challenging the status quo.
2. Consider type of voice and personality traits
Again, the nature of your business will influence the overall type of voice you choose to have for your business. A formal tone might be better for a solicitor, for example, but perhaps it should also be motivating and optimistic. If your business is built around something fun or creative, you may be able to take a more informal tone, with humour in it. You may want to write in the first or second person for a more conversational style. Be careful to sound professional and trustworthy, whichever type of voice you choose.
Coming back to the idea of your brand as a person, write down some of the traits you want your brand to have. These should fit with your brand values. For example, if one of your values is to strive to be innovative in everything you do, then your brand's personality traits may be adventurous, independent and brave.
3. What is our brand not?
Sometimes it is easier to reverse the process and note down what you do not want to be known for. What are the opposites of your values? Take a moment to consider the brands you dislike and why. How do they speak? Why doesn't it resonate with you?
4. Which competitor tone of voice do you love?
Whose content resonates with you? Don't be afraid to spend a bit of time looking at how your competitors speak and take a bit of time to analyse their tone of voice. Is it light-hearted or humorous? Do they favour certain words or phrases? Perhaps check out their offline materials, or sign up for their newsletter. How successfully are they engaging their audiences online with their written content?
Take note
You may want to consider creating a brief style guide for you and staff, so everyone knows how to write about and present the brand in written form. And you may want to alter the tone of voice slightly to suit different channels and formats, for example one tone for social media (less formal) and another for blog posts.
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash