How to create your brand voice?: A complete guide for your business

Source: Pixabay.

To be successful in your digital business there is a hand full of things you should have as a  business owner, which are a good product or service idea, a team that backs your company with their heart and soul, money to invest, and a lot of passion for what you do.

Once you build your entire business and start running, you'll face an uncomfortable reality for all of us: There are hundreds of companies competing in your niche, and you have to stand out among all of them.

Creating better services or using the latest technology could be something beneficial to compete, but in the end, people don't buy based on the products they do because of the way you make them feel. That's when you have to build a personality to your brand, a style and way of acting that will make any customer notice at first view that is your brand the one who is talking, and speaking about "talking" this is where "brand voice" comes to this article.

When you think of famous brands like Gucci or H&M there is a picture that comes to your mind Gucci is an elegant and luxurious person and H&M is a more comfortable and relaxed one. 

These brands show their personality in the way they communicate and do marketing, and today in Codedesign, we'll teach you how to create your own with a complete guide.

So, let's get the best of your business and create your unique brand voice!

Keep reading.

 

What is a brand voice?

A brand voice is a personality your company takes in all its communication channels.

As we said before, people expect that your brand is a relatable being, like they are speaking to a real person and not an intangible thing. 

When you speak with your friends you know how they are based on their expressions, tone of voice, or even the inflection they use, and similar to these human interactions, people should expect a way of acting and communicate from your brand. 

When you create a solid brand voice, your business is consistent across all its communication channels, no matter if different team members create your content. As a result, no matter whether it is social media, email communications, or even blog posts, people will still feel they are "talking" to the same brand.

A brand voice should be unique because you build it from your human experience and the values you want to show in your business, and like all humans, we all have a different perspective on how we perceive things.

Your brand voice can have many characteristics, it can be:

• Inspiring
• Powerful
• Emotional
• Casual

To build yours will give you a list of steps to create it, but first, let's answer...

Source: YouTube.

Why is brand voice important?

 

It represents the people behind your brand

As we mentioned before, your brand voice is the representation of the people behind the brand, and that is even bigger than the brand itself. Your tone of voice should embody the brand's personality, and it goes hand in hand with your values: the things that drive your team, their loves and hates, and most importantly what they want to share with the world.

It sets you apart from the rest

Our brand voice should be distinctive, recognizable, and unique, that's what will set us apart from others. 

It is like your own voice, you as a person have a unique way of expressing yourself, and as soon someone hears your voice or even chats with you they notice your style. And although language - both written and spoken - is highly influenced by our culture and dialect, we all have our way of thinking, expressions, inflections, and personality.

The idea is to add some of that uniqueness into your brand and on top of that put some of that passion, the things that make your heart a bit faster and inspire you, then you'll transmit this great energy to your team and customers.

In a survey made by  Sprout Social Index™, customers said that memorable content, distinct personality, and compelling storytelling are the three factors that help brands stand out. As you may guess, all of these have a close relationship with the brand voice because it's the key differentiator for your brand.

It builds trust

In ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, we find that there is a strong link between familiarity and trust. When we are familiar with a companies' brand voice, we are more likely to feel at ease around it. 

When you create a specific tone of voice, customers will always know what to expect from your brand in customer experience or any content creation.

You can use it to influence or persuade

“People don’t always remember what you say or even what you do, but they always remember how you made them feel.”                                  American author Maya Angelou

Beyond words, what matters is how we make customers feel. Just with the way of talking we can form different impressions from our customers, for example:

• Excuse me, would you mind lending me that pen
• Do you have a pen?
• Give me that pen

Depending on how we speak we can persuade or influence our audience and this strategy is used by politicians and marketers the same way. 

While politicians want to project trust and honesty with simple sentences and universal truths, we marketers want to solve people's problems and make them believe we are the best option for them. 

To do this we choose a brand voice style that aligns with our audience's lifestyle and culture, and the feeling we want to produce in them.

If we are a vocational agency for millennials, probably we'll have a relaxed and friendly tone of voice, and we would even use "memes" as a content strategy for them.

But to do it more precisely, let's figure out how you can build your brand voice. Read how meme marketing is used to grasp audience's attention.

Source: YouTube.

How to build your unique brand's voice?

Define your mission and values

Previously we said that the personality of your brand goes hand in hand with your values as a human being, and it is that these, together with your way of thinking, are the molds to start building the tone of voice of your brand.

Taking references will always be a good idea because that's where we all started, however, you must add your twist to that idea to make it yours.

A good way to start discovering your values as a brand is to answer the question:

• What do you want to tell the world?

Once you define the purpose of your communication you can start writing and creating content with a purpose and clear guidance for your entire team.

To further identify your values try to answer these other questions:

• Why was your company set up in the first place?: Beyond earning an income, there must be a spark that starts it all. Find it and develop it to your brand's voice.
• What is the basic human value your company offers?: Find what is that universal value you want to share, the thing you want your customers to feel. It can be freedom, power, safety, or anything else.

Read this guide on how to improve website traffic and get relevant customers.

Find out how do you work differently?

Despite being in the same niche two different companies can have a completely different tones of voice or values.

For example, in beauty brands, we have L'oreal and Lush. The former tends to focus its copy and message more on scientific advances, while Lush is more on an eco-friendly campaign.

When you evaluate your values or even your work method, you'll find out what you do differently from others and how that can differentiate you to create your unique copy style and content production. How can you use QR codes for your digital marketing campaign?

Ask your team what do they think about the brand?

As leaders, we are absorbed sometimes by all our duties or ambitions of wanting to succeed in business.

Within all that tidal wave of thoughts and tasks, we may be losing sight of things that team members could see from miles away about our company, aspects we can't perceive because of our ego.

True leaders aren't these people who give orders regardless of the opinion of their workers, they are people who guide their companies to success together with the help of their team.

That is why it is good that you talk to those people close to your work team and ask, how they see the company, to define those final touches that will build the definitive personality of your brand

On the other hand, your buyer personas and ideal customers are other great models on which to base your brand voice, just try to build a tone that would please them in their way of thinking and based on the needs they want to solve.

Describe your voice in 3-5 words

Once you talked with your team members, it is time to gather all of them in a room to choose 3 to 5 words that represent your brand. Cast a wide net and invite content creators, sales teams, and even happy customers. 

To make this more precise ask these people questions like, if your brand was a person ...:

• How would you describe its personality to someone?
• How do your brand’s personality traits make you different?

After this, you could come up with characteristics like:

• Funny
• Spontaneous
• Honest

With these 3 words, you'll define each of them in detail to get a clearer view of your way of thinking and how you'll show it in how you create content. So, taking the three previous words we could define:

• Funny - passionate, young, doesn't take himself too seriously
• Spontaneous - outgoing, energetic, have an open mind
• Honest - protector, mature, care about their friends

Create your style

Now that you established the characteristics of your brand voice, it is the moment to create a style that keeps it consistent in all digital marketing channels. To do this, there are two areas you have to consider:

• Sentence Length: The sentence length can highly influence your tone of voice, for example, if you want to sound pithy and fun, shorter sentences can help you with this. In another case, if you want to sound authoritative and formal, long sentences are a better choice, since long sentences with different structures can be melodic. Short sentences are more straight to the point.

• Vocabulary: Define the type of vocabulary you want to use in your content. This can include details like the possibility of swearing or even using slang. For example, slang is a good choice for companies with young audiences, since it can help you connect better with them. On the other spectrum, the use of this characteristic could sound dissonant for older audiences, and it wouldn't be your best choice. Depending on your buyer persona you can figure out if they want a more professional vocabulary or an informal one.

These voice principles can help your team stay consistent in your brand voice:

• Show new team members what they have to do regarding content creation. For this, it's an excellent idea to create a brand voice chart or document.
•  Identify your weaknesses as a brand and find solutions for them.
• Provide requirements to ensure an effective project management

Make a do's and don'ts list.

Now that you defined what is your brand, it is also helpful to define what your brand "isn't".

When establish what you don't want your brand voice to be is a crucial step to staying loyal to your style.

So, in your brand voice strategy, you can start defining statements like:

• Our brand voice is not pretentious.
• Our brand voice is not elitist.
• Our brand voice is not too formal.
• Our brand voice is not misguiding.

When you finish these statements, it is time to create the real message of your brand:

• Our brand voice is friendly and professional, we want to be helpful to our customers.

Develop your storytelling

Since ancient times telling stories has been the most effective way to entertain all of humanity. 

In ancient times it was stories of dragons and knights, and today we entertain ourselves with all the movies that Marvel releases.

Storytelling is the practice of presenting information about your company in the form of a "story" that connects emotionally with your audience. In a few words, it is the way to turn all the effort and challenges that it took to create your business into a digestible and memorable narrative. And if you add to this tale your company's personality, beliefs, and values it will make it a more reliable one for all your users.

With your story in hand, you can put it in a video format and launch it as a memorable and meaningful marketing piece. Nevertheless, there are other places where you can share it: Written customer reviews, slide back of a new product, a presentation, and even in your "About Us" section of your website.

 

Source: YouTube.

Examples of great brand voice

Apple

When we look at Apple's advertisements we can identify their minimalist visuals, but, this aesthetic is accompanied by short written content that is pretty unique. On their webpage, their tone of voice is simple, direct, and open. 

Then, when we go to the small business page, we read a language that is familiar to small business owners, going straight to their benefits casually and invitingly.

Apple wants people to use their products as simple as possible, so, their indications and instructions on how to use their items are direct and easily digestible, with language choices that help address customer pain points without being a technology specialist.

MailChimp

Mailchimp may be the greatest example in this list, as the brand itself wrote the Mailchimp's Content Style Guide to illustrate better how their brand voice works.

Using comedy or humor in your brand voice can be a great idea because it makes your brand more approachable, and you sound more like a close friend helping you at work than a boring software that will only help you send emails to your list.

In the Style Guide Mailchimp says:

"We want to educate people without patronizing or confusing them. Using offbeat humor and a conversational voice, we play with language to bring joy to their work … We don't take ourselves too seriously."

To get a better explanation, let's take a look at Mailchimp's tone definition:

Source: Mailchimp.

Spotify

With Spotify, we can see another clear example of brands using humor in their tone of voice to please their audiences. And let's face it, in real life most of us prefer to be with a person who makes us laugh over one who is too sophisticated. This tone of voice usually permeates better because music is a space in which we can take refuge, and that is why humor fits well within this type of brand. In this way we see great works of the brand such as the following tweet:

Harley Davidson

Now, going to a completely different tone of voice than humor, let's go with the most famous motorcycles in history.

Although we commented above that the guy who makes us laugh is a good company, in cases like Harley Davidson a completely different personality is better: a tough, rebellious, and aggressive guy.

The tone of voice of this brand seeks to challenge readers to take the courage to drive one of their great machines, to see if they are worthy of such a feat. 

When they use this type of voice it resonates perfectly with their audience, middle-aged men that are independent, courageous, and fearless.

Coca-Cola

Finally, we want to mention a brand that has made its concept a solid and lasting one, since in case you did not know, Coca-Cola is already 139 years old with the same tone of voice.

Every time we see an advertising spot for the soda brand we see families, friends and even polar bears sharing a happy life, and that is the concept that wanted to promote the brand: Coca-Cola equals happy moments.

So we can see how in its pieces the brand connects these moments of joy with an appropriate tone of voice:

Final thoughts

We can conclude that the greatest attribute of a company for its consumers is its personality and brand voice because it is with this that we build the bases of our communications and the way we act with them.

To properly build it, it is first necessary to make an internal evaluation of how we feel and how our company makes us feel and then soak up that external vision that our team has to finish defining.

Once we have defined who we are as a brand and what is the true message that we want to convey to our audience, it becomes easier to create a guide on how we will communicate with them to achieve this goal.

Having a great team of professionals who have a genuine interest in your company is paramount, that's why at Codedesign we are pleased to advise you and help you build a better brand to achieve success on digital platforms.

Feel free to contact us to see the unprecedented growth of your business.

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