Defining Your Brand’s Voice

Studies throughout the years have shown that consumers buy products from brands that they connect to on an emotional level. In order to create valuable, long-term customer relationships, great brands have to entice customers with emotional connections, and not just mere information about their product or service.

This can be accomplished through branding – a company’s product name, slogan, logo. Consumers decide which brands to buy based on how they make them feel, and for this reason it’s important that brands constantly seek to create close emotional ties with their customers. The concept is simple: put a face to your brand, and let your brand’s real personality come through. This concept applies to content marketing as well. To be truly successful as a content marketer and set your company apart, you need to be able to build relationships and trust with your customers. That means that your written content has to be engaging, relevant, and useful – and yet still deliver a consistent voice and message for your products.

Defining Your Brand’s Voice

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Any time you publish a blog, post on social media, or even put a page on your website, you are creating your brand’s voice. The words you choose, the style of writing, and the consistency of your language…all of these add up to create the voice that reflects your brand and your brand name.

Simply put, your brand’s tone of voice is not what you say to your customers, but how you say it. It’s the heart and soul of your communications, and it’s more than just words and phrases. Your brand voice is the tone in which you speak to and connect with your audience; it’s how you express your messaging. Brand voice touches on nearly all aspects of your communications, from slogans and advertising to blog posts and website content.On the next page we offer a case study from MailChimp on how to effectively use brand voice, as well as several tips on how you can keep your organization’s brand voice engaging, relevant, and meaningful for your users.

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What is Brand Voice?

A great branding service and reference tool for how to effectively use brand voice in content writing is MailChimp. MailChimp provides an interactive chart that takes you through the different types of content that they publish. As you go through the content types, you get a sense of how a user might feel in each scenario, and how you should speak to that user.

MailChimp excels at running their tone and voice through everything in nearly every scenario, from default text to knowledge base answers to terms and conditions. For example, when a user asks if they can create

their emails in Word and paste them into MailChimp, MailChimp responds by giving them a straightforward, yet informative response. In this case, MailChimp’s response was: ‘In general, it’s not a good idea to use Microsoft Word to create email campaigns. Below we’ll show you what kind of messy code ends up in campaigns when someone copies and pastes content from Word.’ This kind of response doesn’t just answer the user’s question with a simple yes or no. It goes a step further in personalizing the response for the user, which gives the user the feeling that their needs are being addressed and acknowledged.

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Case Study: Mailchimp

As a marketer, your brand voice can be informative, formal, or fun - but whatever it is, it has to be authentic. Honesty and transparency are critical in brand storytelling, and they must be rooted in the reality of your brand, products, and industry.

Your audience will be able to tell if your voice is not genuine; empty messaging will only hurt your brand name. Your customers should recognize your brand’s voice right away, and it should be used honestly

and consistently across all of your marketing and advertising communications - including social media, websites, and traditional marketing and advertising channels.When you invest the time to find the tone that best represents who your company is, you are being authentic and true to yourself. If you then communicate to your customers consistently in that tone of voice, you’ll positively influence how your company is perceived, and audiences will understand your brand and keep coming back.

Keep It Authentic

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Social media has fundamentally changed the way businesses and their customers interact. Corporations can no longer be the faceless, distant operations that they once were. Companiesneed to be engaging entities that must adapt and respond to their consumers in real time.

When developing your brand’s voice, your social media messaging is critical. If you picture your brand as a persona, you can try to imagine what your brand sounds like to your consumers. Creating specific attributes that fit the general vibe of your brand helps you personalize your brand, and you can benefit from the conversations that follow. For example, let’s say you create a humorous voice and tone that your customers engage with and enjoy. Those satisfied customers then talk positively about your brand, which essentially generates new content. That content then reaches other prospective customers, delivering your brand’s message for you. This scenario underlines the powerful capabilities that social media has in creating your brand’s voice and messaging.

Use the Power of Social Media

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Deliver a Consistent MessagePerhaps the most important thing organizations can do to define their brand’s voice is to deliver a consistent, steady message to users. Giving your audience a consistent experience builds loyalty and trust. By being consistent, users will better understand your brand and have a good experience whenever they are exposed to it.

When a brand’s voice is consistently expressed, audiences will come to see your organization as one they can rely on and connect with. And once you’ve established a consistent brand voice, people who follow you on social networks, visit your website, and interact with your customer service department will have the same great experience every time. To help achieve consistency with your brand voice, you can (for example), build a style guide describing your brand and its voice, and distribute it to your team internally. You could also hold an internal event to introduce your brand voice to your team, answer any questions people have, and create a plan to implement it across your platforms and channels.

While following any of the tips will help take your organization’s brand to the next level, an important thing to always keep in mind is that you shouldn’t try to finish the perfect brand voice from the start.

The world today moves at a fast pace, and what was new today is quickly outdated. Your brand voice should be fluid, and should be open to change with the dynamic landscape of how we interact with one another, and with the technologies that continue to shape our future. While the nature of your voice should remain consistent, you’ll still have to keep pace with your audience, work across a variety of communication avenues (both internal and external to your company), and communicate in fresh and exciting new ways. In the end, a lasting and successful brand voice is one that stays relevant because it has the ability to adapt to changing needs and tastes.

Continue to Evolve

8 | Defining Your Brand’s Voice All images are subject to copyright.

THINK DIFFERENT