Brand Voice: Steps to Establishing and Marketing Your Brand Voice

Brand Voice: Steps to Establishing and Marketing Your Brand Voice

February 28, 2018

As a brand, old or new it’s easy to get caught up in the fast-paced and ever evolving digital era --social media, email, blogs, content, content, content! It can be difficult to figure out where to start when you’re looking to gain control of your brand identity. We will say it’s simply your brand voice. Your brand voice drives your internal teams and inspires trust among your customers through consistency. All content should be born out of your brand voice and not the other way around.

Your brand voice otherwise known as your ‘tone’ of voice is essentially copy created about your brand that speaks to your company values, goals, and aspirations. Think of your company as a person, what do they like or dislike, what’s their approximate age, where do they come from? Deciding these details will begin to set a tone for how you talk to your customers on your website, through email, social media and any other aspect of B2C and B2B communication. Establishing your voice could take time to mature but it should always stem from your core tone. A good brand voice will create consistency across any and all assets a company creates.

How to create your brand voice:

-Collect 20 or so adjectives that describe your company’s values/manifesto.

-Decide on a mood. Are you Luxury? Quirky? Cheeky? You can combine two.

-From your adjectives and mood create 5 taglines.

-Share with your team. It can help to get your employees involved as they may have valuable information about your customer and company you may have overlooked.

-Choose one or two taglines and 3-5 adjectives and weave into any and all marketing copy as necessary this includes but is not limited to, email, social media, labels, display, product descriptions etc.

Tips:

-Take a look at your 3-5 closest competitors, how do you differentiate your voice? Perhaps one of your competitor’s adjectives is ‘sleek’, so you choose to use ‘streamlined’. Get creative!

-Practice using these words out loud in conversation with your employees; does it feel natural? Does it sound too friendly or too serious based on your values?

-A/B testing with email subject lines will help you measure the effectiveness of your tone and help you refine over time.

-Create a document that is shared internally with all teams to make sure your brand voice is staying consistent and active across departments.