You know how important it is to create an aesthetically uniform brand for your company.
A solid branding strategy backed by powerful visual cues builds and maintains trust,
reputation, credibility, and loyalty. Creating a uniform brand voice across all your marketing channels reinforces all the benefits of good branding. If your voice is inconsistent, you’ll undermine all your branding efforts.
Why Is Brand Voice Important
Your company is so much more than a logo. Whatever your industry, the way you speak to your customers affects their relationship with you. Your visual branding makes you more memorable, while a strong brand voice reinforces your company ideals. When your customers read your blog or tweet you, they expect a certain kind of interaction.
Think of your brand voice as a personification of your business. Yours will be as distinctive as your own personal speaking voice. It will convey your brand’s personality and intent. It breeds familiarity and trust, just like getting to know an actual person. That familiarity and trust translates to customer loyalty. Your search engine optimized (SEO) content and social media copy must sound like a single voice to your customers. Consistency is key. You could be one snarky tweet away from losing droves of customers (unless they expect snarky from your brand).
How To Create Your Brand Voice
Before you start creating content, you have some work to do. You need to build a brand persona that goes beyond the visual. Start with considering who your business is. What sparked the idea that brought your business to life? What do you do for people? What makes you so special? Your brand voice must reflect these things. Likewise, the subject matter you discuss should fit well with your tone of voice.
The other part of your brand voice is determined by your customers. You can answer these questions yourself, but it would be even more helpful if you can ask your customers. What do they expect to hear from your company? If you already have an established customer base, they do have expectations of who your company is and what they get from you. Find out what is important to them and what type of content they find valuable.
Ensure Consistent Brand Voice Across Channels
Once you’ve created a brand voice that reflects your company’s values and gives your customers what they want, you must ensure that voice is consistent across all channels. You may create a brand persona to serve as a profile for your social media representatives. Be sure to give your persona a background and a purpose that can guide the use of your brand voice. Use the persona to cultivate high quality examples of your brand voice in each content channel.
Most importantly, make sure that everyone or every department creating content knows the persona and understands its purpose. Give them access to the examples. You may even facilitate meetings which include all content creators, so they can get on the same page. They may also create a written procedure for ensuring consistent brand voice, such as the optimal way to respond to problems via social media. Using online project management from Insightly lets all involved parties collaborate, discuss, and share files with each other instantly.
The voice for your brand is one aspect of your business personality. It complements your visual branding and your SEO efforts by rounding out your company persona. Work to maintain a consistent brand voice across channels and it will build confidence and loyalty among your customers.
