How To Create A Powerful Voice To Help Your Brand Stand Out
Effective branding is essential to brands that will stand the test of time. When you think about iconic brands, like Apple and Nike for example, their immediately recognizable and distinctive brand personalities come to mind. It’s hard not to think of Apple’s straightforward, sharp and confident language in their ads, and Nike’s bold, energizing and inspiring visuals. Creating a strong, cohesive brand identity across all marketing strategy is crucial to a company’s success.
While the visual component of brand identity may be prioritized over written copy, the voice a company uses to speak to their audience is vital as well, from creating effective communication and building loyalty and trust with their target audience to promoting stronger customer retention.
What Is a Brand Voice?
A brand voice is the written expression of a brand’s core messages consistently channeled through all content and marketing strategy. Used as a vehicle of communication to your audience and clients, it reflects key elements of your brand’s attitude, personality, and values. It is also vital because it helps position your company in your industry or field, helping establish a memorable brand identity that will help you stand out from your competitors, as well as create a lasting impression on your audience and clients.
Why Is It Important to Have an Effective Brand Voice?
A strong and developed brand voice is crucial for many reasons. Within the first few seconds of taking in your content, your audience will have already made an impression about you, making judgements about how they perceive your brand, products, and offerings. With an established, distinctive, and unified voice, you will not only strengthen your brand recognition, becoming more easily identifiable and memorable, you will be able to capture and hold your audience’s attention and stand out in a sea of digital noise. A cohesive voice used across all marketing material that is used to appeal to your customer’s pain points will help build trust with your target audience, turning prospective customers into clients, and existing customers into loyal and returning customers. And this will in turn, will help amplify your sales and profits, boosting performance of your company overall.
How Do You Create an Effective Brand Voice?
Building Personas
To know how to strategically communicate to your audience, you need to first have a deep understanding of who your target audience is. There are various strategies you can implement to start developing your customer personas. One way is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes to leverage more insight into your customer’s user journey. Try to get inside their heads to consider what your customers may be thinking. How would your customers perceive the messages you are using to promote your products and offerings? Is your content effectively communicating the solutions you offer to meet your audience’s needs and challenges?
Another great way is to use your company’s internal resources to glean crucial insights. Talk to your sales or support teams or any departments that interact directly with your customers to learn more about your customers’ pain points, and the solutions your company offers to solve those issues.
Finally, the best thing you can do to learn who your customers are is to talk to them yourself! Reach out to your customers and ask them what their challenges are, what they liked about your products or offerings and what they didn’t like. Firsthand contact with your customers will be invaluable in learning how to effectively communicate with them.
Define Your Brand
Clearly defining your brand is essential to creating a powerful and distinctive voice to stand out from the competition. If you could describe the personality of your brand in only a few words, what words would you use? Are you fun-loving, relatable, and quirky? Or are you technical, bold, and innovative? From these words, you can list out common themes, and other secondary words, that embody and exemplify these fundamental concepts. You may want to imagine that your brand is a person to help you gage these core words you would use.
From your core list of adjectives to describe your brand, you may then consider creating a brand voice chart. This tool will be extremely helpful in continuing to craft the messaging, language and tone of voice your brand would use to communicate to your customers.
Remember, defining your unique brand is as much about determining everything your company is as well as everything it is not. To build your brand voice chart, you would develop columns that explore words and phrases you would use in your copy and messaging that align with your brand’s core values, goals and themes, as well as zero in on the kinds of language that your company would never use. For example, maybe the words that you narrowed down to describe your brand are authentic, passionate, and straight-forward, but you decide that in your messaging and copy you want to avoid cliches or sounding overly sentimental to develop a voice that sounds more confident and timeless.
Build a Strong Content Marketing Team
You wouldn’t hire a novice to paint the walls of your house, or do your electrical engineering, right? If you want your copy and content to convey your professionalism and expertise in your field, you need to hire people who are also masters in their craft. Content creators and copy experts will help you bring your vision of your brand identity to life. Depending on the platform and medium used, whether it is a blog or a welcome email for example, an expert will know how to manipulate the tone of your brand voice to cater the copy and messaging to that platform.
To build out your content marketing operation, you can choose to hire full time copywriting and marketing experts within your company, outsource to an agency or do a combination of both. Here at Firon, we provide a full suite of all your marketing needs to help you attain new heights of success and growth. Talk to us today to learn how we can help you reach your marketing goals.
