Brand awareness drives conversions and promotes customer loyalty, and creating a consistent brand voice is an essential part of increasing recognition.
When 73% of consumers research and shop for products and services across multiple platforms, establishing a presence across the myriad of platforms your audiences use is critical. However, your company needs to stand out from the competition.
Consistency is vital, but obtaining it is tricky when working with large teams and multiple channels. Defining your brand’s voice and tone should be part of your content strategy, which helps your producers establish and maintain its unique voice across channels.
It, of course, also helps when you’re using a centralized content operations platform like DivvyHQ to aid in planning, collaboration, and production workflows across multiple teams. More on that later.
Why Is a Consistent Brand Voice Important?
Hubspot reports that 46% of American consumers consider how much they trust a brand when they make a purchase. Customers need to feel as though there’s a real person behind a brand to trust it, and a consistent voice is the best way to do that. You have to consider the personality that comes through when you communicate with your customers.
The tone is the emotional feeling that you convey through your messaging. It can be serious, playful, bold, and so on. A no-nonsense professional tone may be better for a B2B audience, while a more down-to-earth, friendly tone can appeal more to your B2C customers. It’s important to keep your target audience in mind when you plan your content so your voice doesn’t fall on deaf ears.
What Defines a Brand Voice?
Your voice is more than words and tone. It conveys your emotions, thoughts, and values through language. Even your body language has meaning. You can think of your brand’s voice the same way.
Understanding what elements contribute to a brand voice can help you develop one for your company and harness its power.
Image Source: Nettl.com
Values
You have to know what your brand stands for and represents. Whatever values, principles and ideals you’ve already established within your company, you should make sure they’re clear in your marketing efforts. You can weave values such as honesty, integrity, and authenticity into your content to help your customers recognize your brand.
Language
With language, you can tailor your message to your target audience and make them more likely to engage with your content. This is essential for creating content that resonates with potential customers. By understanding your audience’s needs and interests, you can choose the words that appeal to them and drive sales.
Visual Elements
Visual cues are another important aspect of your brand voice. These elements can include anything from your logo and color scheme to your font. Choose a color palette to ensure you’re using colors in a consistent and branded way. It also helps to use the same font in all of your branding materials.
How Do You Develop Your Voice?
There are several ways you can go about creating a unique and consistent brand voice. We’ll walk you through some important elements.
Create a Brand Voice Guide
Defining the attributes of your brand voice and tone helps your team maintain focus during the creation of any content you produce. This guide should apply to everything from blog posts and emails to social media posts, marketing materials and sales pages.
Establish a Brand Mission Statement
A brand mission statement should be a short and clear summary of what your brand is all about. Your mission statement should explain your brand’s unique value proposition, who you serve, and what problems you solve. You can include your brand mission statement on your website, social media pages, and any other marketing materials.
Image Source: Wordstream
Ask Your Audience
It doesn’t hurt to directly ask your customers what they want and what problems they’re trying to solve. Once you know this information, you can choose the most effective words to use to connect with them better. Doing so will make your content more appealing and memorable to your audience.
Be Consistent
Once you’ve created a good brand voice, it’s important to maintain it. To do this, make sure you’re hiring the right people and working with a team that aligns with your goals. You should also regularly check your content: If anything starts to flip or becomes inconsistent, make the necessary changes to stay true to your brand. Checking for consistency is especially important when content and assets are produced by third parties.
Can You Alter Your Voice?
Keeping a consistent brand voice does not mean you can never alter it. There are some circumstances where it’s good to tweak your messaging to engage more people, but you have to do this tactfully.
For one, each social media platform you use might call for a different approach. On Instagram, you might want to go heavier on the visuals, while Facebook will be more text-based. Perhaps you normally write long-form posts, but Twitter will require you to break up your writing into shorter passages.
There also might be certain keywords and hashtags that perform better on one platform than they do on another at a given time. The video below can help you better understand how different channels call for different strategies.
It’s a good idea to modify your style for the channel you’re using, but whenever you do this, you must remember your brand’s core. There should be something in your branding that stays the same regardless of the medium.
You might also find that your content isn’t getting as many results as you’d like, so you’ll have to make improvements. This is especially common in the beginning stages of a campaign. However, while you should always aim to get better at what you do, you should also consider the elements that are resonating with your current audience. Be careful not to sacrifice those elements while you adjust your strategy.
The Right Approach for a Consistent Brand Voice
Coming up with a brand is a long-term strategy, and sticking to it is an even bigger challenge. It can take some time for customers to recognize and trust your content, which is why you must be persistent.
DivvyHQ makes it easier to create and maintain a consistent brand voice. Our comprehensive content operations solution will allow your team to collaborate and share ideas, edit content, and publish the finished product across multiple channels. Request a demo now to find out more!