Finding your brand’s voice is an important yet often undervalued part of any branding strategy. Many companies tend to focus on the visual representations of a brand, believing these to be most important. While a brand’s aesthetics, of course, have a significant role, that does not mean to say that a brand’s voice is not equally important. This guide is here to help you learn more about how to find your brand’s voice.
Why is a Brand Voice So Important?
A brand voice dictates your communications with customers. As Tatango explains, if you intend to do any form of written marketing or direct communications with customers, whether this is through SMS, RCS, or MMS messaging, or email, you need a brand voice. It is not only in the form of direct customer communications that your brand voice is important. It will dictate the tone and style of any written copy you have on your website, social media accounts, or anywhere else.
Essentially, your brand voice is just another means of communicating and representing your brand. Therefore, it has the power to attract consumers and deepen relationships with customers.
How to Find Your Brand’s Voice
Now that you understand a little more about why a brand’s voice is so important, it is time to focus on how you can find your brand’s voice.
Consider Your Brand Archetype
The first step to building a brand voice is to nail down who you are as a brand. If you have not done so already, you should choose a brandarchetype that most appropriately represents who you are as a brand. Choosing a brand archetype will inform your brand voice as you will better understand who your brand is and what it should sound like. You can also look at other companies that have successfully implemented your brand archetype in the past.
Create a Customer Profile
When it comes to finding your brand’s voice, you not only need to consider who you are as a brand but also who you are speaking. You should consult an understanding of your target audience and any existing customer data to create a customer persona.
A customer persona, otherwise known as a buyer persona, is an archetype that represents the key traits and characteristics of your target audience. Creating a customer persona will help you to better understand who your target customer is, what motivates them, what they respond to, what they value and how they spend their time.
The more that you can humanize your target audience and actuallyvisualize your ideal customer in front of you, the better your chances are at finding your brand’s authentic voice. You want to make your brand’s voice as natural and appropriate as possible. The best way to do this is to imagine your customer and brand’s persona directly interacting with each other. What do they sound like? What do they talk about? What language do they use?
Once you considered your brand’s voice in terms of a conversation between your brand and customer archetype, you can start to consider the different forms of communication more closely. You should think about where you will be using your brand’s voice and what content you will be focusing on. Considerations of these aspects will help you to further define the tone, style, vocabulary, and rhythm of your brand’s voice.
