Think about some of the brands you interact with the most. Does their voice influence how you feel about them?
Brand voice is how a brand expresses its personality through verbal and written communications. Voice reflects the brand’s tone, diction, and style to build connections and credibility with its audience.
Consider your favorite teacher growing up for a brand voice exercise. Something about how they carried themselves had to keep your attention, right?
Did they speak in a certain way, tell jokes, or use storytelling techniques to make their lessons come alive?
Whatever their methods, they were able to make an impression and create a memorable connection with their audience: you.
Developing a strong brand voice that resonates with your target audience will help them remember your business and offerings. More importantly, it will open the door to meaningful connections and conversations that rise above the noise.
But how do you get your target audience to listen in the first place?
Why a consistent brand voice is important
One of the most important things we stress about brand voice is that it should be consistent across all your channels and communications.
While your tone can change depending on the situation and channel, your voice shouldn’t.
What is the difference between voice and tone?
Voice is your brand’s personality. It is the distilled representation of your company and how you convey your values.
Tone is the general attitude or emotional inflection added to your voice depending on the situation and purpose of the messaging.
Your tone can change depending on what is appropriate for each context.
Think about how you speak with your boss and how you chat with your friends. Or how you talk to your child versus how you talk to your siblings.
The need for formality can scale up and down and the word choice can vary based on the situation and who you’re talking to, but your voice will remain the same.
Consider the favorite teacher example from the introduction.
Their personal “brand voice” could be caring and approachable, but their personal “brand tone” will likely be very different during a lesson than a parent-teacher conference.
In the latter scenario, their tone will probably be more reserved and professional to reflect the situation, but they’ll still be caring and approachable throughout.
As you develop your brand voice, take note of the words and style you want to use and document do’s and don’ts to help your team remain consistent.
Consider how you would adjust your tone to reflect various situations while maintaining your brand voice.
What are the benefits of a consistent brand voice?
A consistent presence on all platforms can increase revenue by 23%. It can help grow recognition and develop a genuine rapport with those who want to interact with your brand.
Customers who know who you are, your values, and what they should expect from your content will be more likely to trust you. According to Salsify, 46% of people they surveyed said they would spend more on products and services from brands they trust.
To ensure consistency and build trust with your target audience through a compelling brand voice, you first need to understand who you and they are. Here are some ways to help you get started.
Ways to develop your brand voice
Discover your brand personality
Branding is when a business takes on a human persona with human characteristics and attempts to make connections, build trust, and nurture relationships with new or existing customers.
Your brand personality is the distinguishable human traits that make you unique to your industry and customers.
At Miles, we work with the 12 brand archetypes to provide our clients with proven guidelines for shaping their personalities and audience perception. These will help define your brand personality and make it familiar to your customers.
For example, if you have a healthcare business and want to convey a gentle, caring personality across your channels, look at the caregiver archetype.
The various archetypes are evident throughout stories and storytelling and will help your audience quickly identify and understand your brand personality.
They can be the model for you and your team to begin considering the traits and characteristics that make you unique and help you craft your voice.
Develop buyer personas
If you haven’t created buyer personas before, they are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on research and customer data. You may have a few or many depending on your target audience.
Your buyer personas provide a top-level view of their background, socioeconomic status, daily tasks and responsibilities, challenges, fears, and more.
Understanding these factors and characteristics will allow you to tailor your voice to resonate with them, creating more profound, meaningful connections.
One part of a buyer persona that is particularly useful for brand voice is the media they interact with and use.
If you see that all your personas read The Wall Street Journal for their news, this will give you an idea of the tone, diction, style, and level of formality they’re used to, which may help inform your voice and tone.
By understanding your audience, you can better know how to write and convey your personality for various scenarios and types of writing.
Review your mission statement and About page
Your mission statement should help you define your values and identify the most critical aspects of your brand.
Let’s take the healthcare company example. If you list compassion and integrity among your values, you must shape your voice to embody these values. At a glance, you might deploy the following techniques to accomplish this:
- Using empathetic language in all of your communications
- Writing in shorter, simple sentences and avoiding passive voice
- Personalizing communications whenever possible
- Telling real-life stories and providing examples and testimonials
- Being open and transparent about pricing and availability
By going through this step, you can apply your voice and the appropriate tone to reach your audience.
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Before If you are in need of dedicated professional medical care, [Practice Name] supports patients through a number of ways, including a caring staff, advanced facilities, and a friendly patient-first approach. New patients can contact us today to confirm availability and scheduling. You will need to have your insurance information available prior to making an appointment. |
After At [Practice Name], every patient is treated with the utmost compassion and care. Our approach is rooted in empathy, and we want you to feel supported and safe every step of the way. We welcome new patients and accept a wide range of insurance and payment options for your convenience. When you’re ready, reach out to us, and let’s start a wellness journey together. |
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If you are just exploring your mission and values, take time with your team to identify your history, review your business strategy, and engage with relevant stakeholders.
Perform an audit of all your content
At first glance, you might need to recognize why your best-performing content was more successful.
A content audit enables you to dive deeper into and analyze your content. You want to look for patterns to see what resonates with your target audience.
- Do certain types of content perform better than others?
- Did you use a specific tone of voice in your better-performing content?
- Are there topics or characteristics of your brand identity that your audience is more interested in than others?
As you perform your content audit and see what elements of your brand voice are evident in your best-performing content, you can leverage your findings to improve your brand voice across all content and channels.
Conclusion
Developing your brand voice is an ongoing process that requires frequent feedback and reassessment to ensure it remains relevant and aligned with your brand identity and audience.
The steps we described in this blog post should help you get started. From there, you can create brand voice documentation and a style guide to inform everyone who writes and creates content for you so it remains consistent and uniformly unique to your perspective.
At any step, our branding team can help you develop and finetune your voice to achieve your goals and build meaningful interactions with your audience. Together, we can eliminate the noise and get your voice heard by the right people.
