Brand Voice: What's It & How to Define Your Unique Ones

The branding profession often focuses on how a brand appears visually, including fonts, colors, and styles. The brand voice, however, should not be overlooked. In an era when social media marketing is more important than ever, brand voice is becoming more important than ever to stand out from the crowd of digital noise.

Regardless of whether you're familiar with the term, you've likely encountered it. Although you can get away without a distinctive brand voice, when you have one, your marketing will be much more effective.

What Is Brand Voice

Taking on a voice is the way your brand communicates. Regardless of who creates the content, consistency across channels is crucial for any communication campaign.

Your marketing assets aim to invoke personality and image by using the words and language you use. You need it if you want your message to stand out from the rest and make a lasting impression on potential customers.

Brand voice helps brands stand out from the noise, and helps consumers relate to and remember your brand. Brand loyalty grows as a result. In addition, brand voice encourages new prospects to learn about your product or service before they even come across it.

Importance of Having a Strong Brand Voice

A strong company has a clear sense of purpose and a strong personality. Throughout their brand voice, their message is delivered consistently everywhere they are present.

Consistency and repetition are essential to building brand recognition with consumers. You make it harder for audiences to know what you're all about if your personality or messaging change frequently. In this case, your efforts will be fruitless, and you will be beaten by a better-branded competitor.

There is more to content than just photos and videos. Text and graphics are also important. Consumers care about your presentation. According to the same index, consumer unfollowing is due to poor presentation. Nearly half of consumers reported unrelated content. You can get unfollowed if you post content that does not match your brand's perception.

Furthermore, brand voice is important so that you can easily recognize your brand. The ability to recognize a brand by its content alone does not require you to know who posted it.

How Accessibility Impacts Your Brand Voice

Online accessibility has become a prominent topic in the last few years. We are slowly realizing just how many brands are not catering to disabled users, particularly online, even though they rely on the web to perform a number of day-to-day tasks.

Brands that choose to prioritize digital accessibility are doing their part to provide customers with a more inclusive experience, to show customers they care. Creating an accessible website that complies with the requirements outlined in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) makes you a socially responsible brand, one that promotes inclusivity and equality.  

Consumers want to do business with brands that are authentic and have values, which is why web accessibility should be taken into account during the brand voice development process.

Difference between Brand Voice and Tone

As we discussed, your brand voice reflects your brand's personality; it's always the same.

It should be:

• Unique: To create a brand voice, you don't have to be the next Apple or the next Facebook; you need to be the first to deliver your message.
• Easily Identifiable: Would your audience be able to identify your brand from a piece of content you wrote? Definitely yes.
• Complement Your Brand Identity: Each element of your brand identity should work in concert so that, together, they form a comprehensive picture of "who" your brand is.
• Uniform: Your brand voice should be present on every piece of content you post, whether you're answering a customer's email or posting an interesting article on your Facebook page.

While your brand voice remains consistent, your tone can vary depending on where it is used. A brand voice encompasses the overall ideas you convey, while a tone describes how you convey those ideas.

When you respond to a comment on social media, your tone is likely to be lighter than if you were responding to a customer who complained via email or if you were announcing your hours rather than replying to a comment.

Establishing Your Unique Brand’s Voice

1. Explain Your Brand

Firstly, the brand voice should be derived from the brand identity. You form an impression about a brand based on the voice of its content, just as you form an impression about a person based on how they speak.

A brand can be compared to a movie character in that sense. A character's lines should reflect their personality to be truthful and credible. A number of factors play into this, such as their vocabulary, jargon, how they speak, how they comment on different situations, etc. These factors help the audience determine how to view a character.

Your brand retains its identity when its voice is consistent. You can tell your customers who you are by just looking at your captions or ad copy, once you develop it.

2. Review Your Existing Content & Messaging

It's time to do a brief audit of the content or copies you've already created. Here are a few things to review:

• Blog posts
• Posts on social media
• Website
• Videos
• Signage in-store
• Spots on TV
• Print collateral
• Ads on the radio

Observe any common themes or consistency in tone and messaging. Would the voice you currently use fit your mission and values? What can you do to improve it?

Keep an eye on your best-performing content (whether it is a blog post, a video, a website page, or a social media post). You may learn the most from these.

3. Survey Your Audience

It is hard to get a clear picture of your brand. Seeing it from a broader perspective is difficult for you because you are too close to it. Getting customer feedback is useful in such situations.

It is for the customers that a brand's identity is created. A brand's personality can be developed using your resources. In the end, however, if the target audience perceives the brand differently, then it will make no difference. You should base your brand identity on your brand values to bring your customers closer to you.

When it comes to establishing a brand voice, a short customer survey will not harm. Rather than using the voice, you're trying to achieve, write the survey and the email (in which you ask customers to take it) in your normal voice. Your responses will be more accurate.

4. Conduct a Competitive Analysis

Who are your competitors' audiences? How do they communicate? After reading their blog content and/or social media posts, if you feel as though you have a good sense of who the brand is after a few minutes, chances are that their brand voice is defined.

Next, determine if their brand voice(s) align with your industry. How can you similarly relate to your audience, or is it inappropriate for your brand mission? To find out whether their voice resonates with their audience, you can check out their social media pages.

In an ideal world, you would not want to create a brand voice that is identical to that of your competitors, as this will not distinguish you from them nor give you a competitive advantage. In any case, it's important to keep an eye on what's out there - including the failures and successes of your competitors - to think about new ways to reach out to your audience.

5. Create a Chart

After knowing where you are now and where you want to be, now it is time to focus on the specifics. Start by creating a brand voice chart. You can use it to list and explain the characteristics of your voice.

There are typically four columns in a brand voice chart. In the first column, the voice characteristic is mentioned, in the second and third columns, it is described, and in the fourth column, certain "do's" and "don'ts" are presented.

Adding additional columns with examples, etc., will allow you to customize this structure to fit your preferences. Using this brand voice chart, your team can reference every piece of content they write going forward. As your brand voice solidifies, you'll write in that way as second nature.

6. Be Specific

It might be difficult for your content team to understand what's expected of them without examples. To create a brand voice, it's best to gather samples in that voice.

Alternatively, you can search your blog content for exemplary writing and turn to other brands with similar voices. Add some notes clarifying what you like about each sample.

7. Create a Style Guide for Content

What is your content style guide? Brand consistency extends beyond the tone of voice. There is so much to consider when it comes to topics you cover, the format of your articles, the media you use, and so much more. For consistency, you need to refer to a guide.

8. Involve Everyone

No matter how well you define your content and brand voice, if they remain on paper, they have no effect.

As a result, it's crucial to share the guidelines you've developed with the entire team. You can do this by holding a team meeting. Bring all the content creators together for a meeting and discussion by preparing a slideshow or video presentation.

In your presentation, give lots of examples. Everyone on the team should learn how to apply those guidelines to their writing. Be open to suggestions and questions.

9. Provide Feedback & Guidance

Once all team members have a clear understanding of the new brand voice, it's time to start practicing it. It's crucial to receive feedback and guidance at this stage. Make sure all team members get the help they need so there are no gaps or misunderstandings.

A smooth transition will also be ensured by providing lots of feedback in this stage.

Review the written content with each writer and point out the parts where they have successfully incorporated the intended brand voice. In addition, explain how improvements can be made.

If you're going to successfully adopt a brand voice, it's important that everyone in the company (not just the content team) understands the brand's personality and how to communicate it.

Examples of Unique Brand Voice

While it is one thing to say your brand should have a unique personality, it is quite another to accomplish this in a way that feels organic and genuine. Listed below are three companies with distinctive brand voices that you might find inspiring in your efforts to define or refine your brand voice.

· Apple

The minimalist visuals in Apple's advertisements make them easy to identify, but their written content is just as unique. They choose carefully chosen, short words to accompany their visuals. They use language on their website that is straightforward, direct, and open.

· Oatly

In addition to its fun illustrations, Oatly’s brand work is full of quirky copy. Every aspect of their brand voice is evident, from their packaging to their social media captions.

· Mailchimp

The Mailchimp voice guide was made public more than half a decade ago. As a voice guide example, it had excellent punctuation and spelling notes. In the guide, anyone can emulate Mailchimp's approach to communicating their brand style and tone, whether they're at the company or not.

Conclusion

It takes time and practice to develop a successful brand voice. You can make this process as smooth as possible by following the steps provided in this article.

Choosing a brand voice means you've chosen the most effective way to tell your story! Having crafted the right voice for your business, you can then create content that will resonate with your audience and keep them coming back for more.