What is Brand Voice?
In branding work, people often think about the visual side of the brand such as the colour, font, and logo. Often when developing a brand, the brand voice is overlooked. The brand voice is important especially in the social media era where taglines or the copy needs to be short due to character limits. The brand voice varies between different brands depending on the type of audience they are targeting, it's one way for a brand to bring the company’s personality across.
Why is Brand Voice Important?
In today’s digital landscape, any company can post anything and therefore gets crowded. For your content to stand out by posting unique content. Your written content needs the same attention and consistency as your visual brand presence. Your brand voice will help make your brand recognisable in the crowded market. Brand awareness can be achieved when consumers can identify a brand only by their content before even seeing who posted it.
Tips for the Development of Your Brand Voice
Documentation
Just like visual brand guidelines, you will need to document your brand voice guidelines. This will be a perfect guide for various people to follow when publishing content to the public. This will be the bible to ensure all media and marketing copy is consistent. The document should begin with the company values and core mission statement as well as defining personality traits. The document should also contain common vocabulary, brand phrases and examples. Giving examples in the document will help guide other departments on how to write their content.
Audit Your Brand Voice
It is all good and well-having brand voice guidelines and allowing people to have access to it. It is another thing to uphold those guidelines. Auditing your brand voice will help ensure everyone is posting content in line with the company’s brand voice. The brand voice might be inconsistent due to different writers or the use of certain words over others. Another reason to audit your brand voice is to analyse top-performing posts and see what they have in common. Possible certain use of phrases or words may have a more positive impact than others. From the audit, you can plan more traits that your brand wants to emulate. The brand voice is never static, it is always involved.
Identify Your Audience
When formulating your brand voice, it's best to adjust your brand voice to your target audience. Using the correct language that resonates with the correct audience will help deliver your message to the correct audience.
Brand Tone
The brand voice guideline will help dictate what you say but the brand tone will tell you how to say it. The type of tone will depend on the scenario you may encounter. For example, a happy tone would not be appropriate when responding to a customer complaint.
Summary
Brand Voice is as important as visual branding as it helps to deliver the message across to the consumer. Having a brand voice guideline will help ensure all your writing is consistent across all platforms and appeals to the correct audience.