How original is your content? Are the posts you share on different channels aligned and easily recognizable? Most importantly, if your brand name or logo didn’t appear with your content, would your customers recognize that it is coming from you?
That’s called brand consistency and your brand voice is one of its most significant elements.
Namely, great fluctuations in your tone and voice may lead to the inconsistencies in your branding strategy and affect your overall brand image.
That’s something you shouldn’t allow.
You need to revamp your content creation and social media marketing strategies and develop the approach that will help you humanize your voice and position yourself as an easily recognizable and reliable source of information.
Know Who Your Target Audience Is
When building your brand identity, you need to have a solid story to back it. And, this story needs to inspire and engage your target audience. This is exactly why your ideal starting point would be to determine who your potential customers are. Analyze their demographics- stuff like their gender, age, income, education, profession, ethnicity, and marital status. Pay attention to other relevant metrics, such as their location, hobbies, interests, lifestyle, values, and attitudes that may form and influence their purchasing decisions.
Once you’ve collected all the information needed, contextualize it by creating detailed customer personas. In short, your customer personas are the representations of your buyers, website visitors, and social media followers, created out of the data you’ve collected. These sketches will help you personalize your marketing efforts and tailor your brand voice to your customers’ sensibility.
Listen to Your Customers
Your every article, answer, or status update form your brand voice. This is why you need to make sure it resonates with your target audience. In other words, now that you know who your customers are, you need to see what they talk about you online.
Start with social networks. There are numerous social media monitoring tools that will notify you whenever your brand or product name is mentioned. Not only will you be able to see what people think about you, but also participate in their discussions and provide real-time customer services. Communicating with your customers in a timely and consistent manner is one of the most powerful ways to build trust among them.
Pay attention to your brand reviews online, as well as conduct interviews and surveys. The only problem with this form of collecting feedback is that people don’t take it seriously enough. To make sure they give reliable answers, you should consider incentivizing them. For example, set up paid surveys online. Knowing that they will get something in return, they won’t hesitate to voice their opinions honestly.
Define Your Brand
To determine the effectiveness of the branding campaign you’ve been building so far, you need to assess it carefully. Cast a critical eye on every single piece of content you’ve published. Do all the pieces of content you’ve shared on your blog or social networks have the same, consistent brand voice?
Try to describe your brand in a few adjectives. When thinking of the characteristics of your brand, ask yourself: “If my brand was a real person, how would I describe it to someone?” This is how you will make it more human-like and believable.
Make a list of the adjectives that describe your brand effectively and create a chart that will help you contextualize these adjectives. Provide brief descriptions of your brand voice, write do’s and don’ts to guide your writers and communicators towards a consistent use of your brand voice.
Let’s say you see your brand as passionate, authoritative, and quirky.
Show your passion using heartfelt and action-oriented words that will engage your target audience. Prove your authority showing strong phrases and emphasizing how different you are from your rivals. And, to show how fun you are, be playful. Focus on your authenticity and don’t be afraid to express yourself. Don’t hesitate to use the contrarian point of view and choose the unexpected strategies that will surprise your customers.
Make Sure Your Writers Know How to Implement Your Brand Voice
Now that you’ve defined and described your brand voice, meet with your team once again to walk them through the chart. Your primary goal is to explain the purpose of building a consistent brand voice and make sure they know how to put it to use. Ask them questions and provide them with actionable tips and examples that will show them the real-time use of your brand voice.
Test Your Voice Regularly and Revise It as Your Business Evolves
Your brand voice is not something you set and then you forget about it. As your business grows and new, similar companies appear on the horizon, you need to measure the effectiveness of your brand voice and update it regularly. Meet with your content creators and social media strategists to see which voice attributes work or don’t work well for your brand. Set new rules and new do’s and don’ts that will help you maintain your relevance and uniqueness in this overly saturated market.
Conclusions
Your brand voice is the backbone of your branding strategy. The consistency you implement into your content, social media campaigns, and customer services will help you build a unique story behind your brand. Most importantly, it allows you to position yourself as an authoritative source of information and, in this way, inspire your target audience to choose you over any other business.
A digital marketer from Sydney. Works as a blogger, Senior Editor for Bizzmark blog and a lecturer at Melbourne University. Tweets industry related articles.
