Previously, we defined what your brand voice is and how it can benefit you. From simply being consistent and clear to showing your personal spunk, your brand’s voice can be what sinks or saves your business. But the next question that comes to mind is, “How Do I Develop My Brand’s Voice?” Here is the step-by-step process of developing your brand’s voice and taking advantage of what it has to offer:
Step One: The first step in developing your brand voice is understanding who your company is and what values you want to reflect through your brand. Your personal vision of what you want your brand to become has a lot to do with your brand voice. For example, knowing that you want your brand to be helpful to a particular community in a fun and youthful way, you should have a more laid back way of speaking to your audience. Using the correct mediums that your community uses will allow you to reach them effectively. At the same time, your values will need to show through your messaging so that they know exactly what you are trying to do within the community.
Step Two: The second step in developing your brand voice is experimentation. By trying different techniques and analyzing feedback overtime, you are able to effectively gauge how well each particular voice fits and how customers truly feel. In return, you will have learned what voice creates the most engagement and allows your customers to understand you the most. Here are a few ways to do this:
- Tag-line Try Ons- Often times a tag line will set the stage for the voice or tone of a company. Many companies are unsure about how their tag line is setting the stage for their company voice, and some have no tag line at all. To set the initial customer touch point in the right direction, survey your customers, who know you the best, with some Tag-line concepts and gain feedback from them on how it resonates and represents your company. Be sure you are selecting tag line concepts that will support the long-term goals of your company brand.
- Medium Testing- Depending on your industry, your marketing mediums will vary and so will your brand voice. By experimenting with different voices in your social media, blogs, or videos, you are able to know what voice your customers like through likes, shares, and overall engagement levels.
- Content Auditing- By checking out your website, social media, and blog content, you are able to see if there is a consistent tone in your messaging. Is your brand voice suggesting that you are a fun, creative, formal, informal, or mellow company? Read through your content, analyze engagement and create content that has a consistent message and build from there. As your customers continue to visit your website, social media page, and blogs they will feel like they are getting to know you better and better as a result of a consistent brand voice.
Step 3: The final step to finding your brand voice is honesty. Your customers want to be in a relationship with a company that is transparent and up front about who they are and what their mission is. For example, a CEO is writing his annual report. We all know these reports offer some sort of fluffiness for public relation reasons, but how truthful do they come across to the consumer? Start with writing a first draft that is completely honest as to why certain changes are being made, what the goals are for these changes, and the benefits that you hope to see come out of these changes for the consumers. Then edit from there to incorporate the PR side of the content. This approach will help to limit the amount of PR fluff as it will incorporate a foundation of truth, honesty and candor. Your customers will appreciate an honest brand voice that tells them everything they need to know about with whom they are conducting business.
Finding your brand voice is an ongoing effort that will require tweaks no matter how long you have been in business. You have a responsibility to your customers to be honest and maintain a strong representation of who you are and in return, you will build trust with your customers through providing a consistent voice and dialog. Be on the look-out for our next blog: Maintaining Your Brand’s Voice.
