With the online marketplace ensuring customers are spoiled for choice, a strong brand voice is essential to make your business stand out from the crowd. Some brands’ voices speak so clearly through their copy that you don’t even need to see the name or logo to identify them.
But if your brand doesn’t currently have a clear voice, how can you create one?
Our step by step guide will help your brand to find the voice that will really speak to your customers.
What is brand voice?
Your brand identity is the way it looks, feels and sounds to the world. The most obvious elements are your brand’s name and logo design, but giving your brand a clear voice across all your copywriting is just as important.
With social media marketing becoming such a vital element in any business’s marketing strategy, developing a clear and defined brand voice has become important than ever before. Customers prefer brands that have a strong and distinctive personality. Developing a clearly defined voice that reflects the personality of your business helps your brand come to life and sets it apart from the rest. It also ensures consistency across all the copy and content you use to speak to your audience.
Make your business memorable, encourage your audience to relate to your brand, and build brand loyalty with a compelling brand voice.
Creating your brand’s voice
Now you understand what it is and why it matters, let’s dive straight into how you can bring out your brand’s unique voice!
- Evaluate where your brand sits in the marketplace
Before you can establish what your brand sounds like, you need to understand your position in the marketplace. A vital part of that process is to establish who your competitors are and what they are doing. This will help you identify ways you can do things differently and set your brand’s voice apart.
Keep in mind that sometimes the business owner is too close to see how their brand is perceived from the outside. If you need help conducting a brand audit, give our intelligent creatives a call!
- Understand who you are speaking to
If your brand voice doesn’t resonate with your audience, your copywriting efforts will fall flat. Be sure to consider who is buying your products or services when developing your brand voice.
Ask yourself some key questions, such as:
- What is my ideal customer like?
- How do they interact with my brand?
- What do they value?
You can also research what other sites your audience accesses to help identify the style of copy and content they prefer. Knowing if they choose academic-style articles over casual, light-hearted writing will help determine what voice will appeal to them.
- Define your brand’s unique selling proposition (USP)
What sets your corporate brand apart from the rest? What problems does your product or service solve that no one else can? What is your brand’s mission statement? What are your brand’s values? You need to have a clear idea of who you are and what your brand offers so your brand voice can clearly tell your story.
Once you know what only your business can provide for your customers, you can start to create a unique brand voice that clearly expresses this.
- Identify what’s already working
A great way to understand what really speaks to your audience is to examine the content that has already created great engagement.
Take a look at some of your best-performing pieces of content and identify key features of the voice from those pieces. Something about the tone of this content caught the attention of your audience. If you can recreate this in your brand voice, it’s likely to have a similar positive impact.
- Clarify the don’ts
When deciding what your brand should sound like it can be just as useful to clarify what to avoid saying!
For example, if you know that you don’t want your brand voice to be formal or overly technical, it’s easy to flip it into what your brand voice should be – in this case, informal and using accessible, plain language.
If you are struggling to define what your brand would say, start by considering what it definitely wouldn’t say.
- Call in the professionals
Defining your brand voice is crucial to ensuring your message hits home, so you want to get it right. Calling in a team from a creative agency will help define and support your overall corporate branding and take your marketing to the next level. If you are ready to create a voice that speaks to your customers but don’t know where to start, contact our friendly team of intelligent creatives today to see how we can help you!