Your company’s brand voice is its distinct personality. It’s how your company expresses itself and communicates your brand mission, vision, and core values, as well as how it interacts with the world. To stand out, it should be unique, engaging, and memorable.
Your brand voice should also be consistent across all of the platforms, media, and channels you’re on.
Strong branding evokes emotion. If you can connect with your target audience, you’ve overcome the first hurdle: standing out in a sea of brands. According to a Capgemini study of over 9,000 consumers and 500 executives, 70% of consumers with high engagement spend two times or more with brands they’re loyal to.
In this article, we’ll discuss the key features of a brand voice and why it’s important. We’ll also offer tips on finding a brand voice that is both unique and memorable.
Key features of brand voice
Aside from presenting your brand’s personality to the world, your brand voice also communicates a promise to your customers. Your unique way of self-expression connects you with your target market, and it forms part of their brand experience. Ensure your marketing materials have the following characteristics of a brand voice:
- Coherent. Ensure every element of your content marketing tells your story and strengthens your message. Create a brand identity that helps you be recognized across marketing channels such as your website, social media platforms, and advertisements. Show up with a cohesive and consistent brand voice every time.
- Memorable. According to Sprout Social’s 2020 Index, consumers prefer brands with strong, unique personalities. In fact, 40% of consumers listed memorable content as a factor that helps brands stand out on social media. So, take time to create a brand voice that captures your company’s personality, what you stand for, and how you want your customers to see you.
- Easy to understand. You are talking to your customers in every ad, blog post, or social media reel you put out. Ensure you’re using a tone, voice, and language your audience understands. For example, if your products are for young people, taking in a friendly tone with a few well-placed current slang terms will probably get their attention more than a formally worded post.
- Aligned. Whether you want your brand voice to be serious, witty, or quirky, remember that your first task is to form a connection between you and your customers. Your message should resonate with your target audience and align with their values.
Working with a brand specialist can help ensure these elements are reflected in your brand voice. Browse available brand consulting specialists on Upwork today with the skills you need for your next job.
How to successfully create a brand voice
Creating a brand voice is complicated but breaking it down into steps can help make it easier. Whether your marketing strategy involves social media platforms or print ads, let’s review how to find a unique way of expressing your brand’s personality.
1. Define your company’s mission statement
To build your brand voice, start with your company’s mission statement. If you don’t have one, now is the time to create one. Your company’s personality should mirror its values, which also depend on the industry and products you sell. When you identify your brand’s purpose, you can develop a focused message, tone, and voice that can capture the attention of your target audience.
Take a look at Starbucks’ mission statement for inspiration: “To inspire and nurture the human spirit—one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.” Starbucks is neither quirky nor funny, but its emails and posts come across as sincere and inspiring, just like its mission statement.
2. Study your assets
The next step is to comb through your marketing assets and study your top-performing pieces. Your assets include ads, emails, blog posts, website content, and social media videos and images. Note the type of content that got the most sales, replies, likes, etc.
Write down the characteristics of the voice you used in your top-performing copies. Were you using more direct language on those sales pages? Was the blog post an in-depth exploration of the topic? Did the social media post include pop-culture references or regional slang?
From there, you can create a brand tone of voice that communicates your brand’s message effectively and feels authentic to you. You can also observe how your audience interacts with you and mirror how they speak.
3. Sustain an open conversation within the company
As the representative of your company’s personality, your brand voice will ebb and flow. It may take on a different tone as changes in the market happen. For instance, language evolves and words can take on other meanings. Consider that emojis were not part of our vocabulary a decade ago. Now, they can convey more meaning than actual words.
You may also find yourself catering to a larger or wider audience. All of this means that your brand voice needs to change with time. For this reason, you must sustain an open conversation within the company to keep reviewing and refining your brand voice.
Your brand voice is how you communicate to the world. Hence, sticking to just one method can easily make you sound out of date and out of touch, making it difficult to connect with your customers and target market as times evolve.
4. Research your audience
One of the most effective ways to build your brand voice is to research your target audience. When you identify your target market, you can choose how to communicate and interact with them. The better you understand your audience, the more you’ll be able to focus your brand voice to connect with them and convert them into customers.
For instance, current pop-culture references may not land well if you’re aiming to engage members of older generations. Define your buyer personas—the specific group of people you want to reach and who are likely to be interested in your content, products, or services.
Your target audience will likely have common characteristics, demographics, and behaviors. They may belong to broad categories (e.g., millennials or remote workers), but you can also further segment them into smaller groups.
As you get to know your target market, list the characteristics, tone, and vocabulary you think they’ll appreciate. Balance these traits with your company values. Your brand voice represents your company’s personality, after all, so you want it to be authentic and sincere.
5. Create a brand voice chart
You can create a brand voice chart to make the process easier. This table should contain the key traits your voice will take on that represent your company’s personality. It would provide team members with guidelines for putting the brand voice you developed into practice.
This table will:
- Describe your brand’s voice characteristics on the left. This section will have the traits you’d like your voice to take on (e.g., relatable, witty, quirky, funny, empowering, educational, or authentic).
- Provide a brief description of each in the middle. This section explains how each trait should and shouldn’t be represented in your communications.
- Define how to apply it on the right. This is where you give some examples or guidelines that would make it easy for your brand voice to come through in all of your content.
Here’s a template to follow:
6. Supervise consistent application of your brand voice
Once you’ve settled on the key characteristics of your brand voice, ensure your team members learn it. Make a voice guideline for your content writers, social media managers, and customer representatives to follow. Keep an open conversation within the company to ensure that all your marketing assets are expressed in your brand voice.
7. Contact an independent corporate brand specialist
Whether you need help updating your company website or coordinating your social media efforts, brand consultants can help you build a cohesive brand identity. Brand identity specialists can also help ensure that your brand tone and message remain consistent across multiple marketing channels.
Develop your brand and grow your business with top marketing professionals. Upwork can help you find the best independent brand specialists from a global talent pool. Screen profiles on the following criteria to find exactly who you’re looking for:
- Industry fit. Find a corporate brand identity strategist who understands your industry. This saves time because they are already familiar with your industry, so you can get straight to figuring out how best to reach your target market.
- Teamwork. You want a brand specialist who’s an effective communicator, especially if they need to work with different departments.
- Feedback. Check reviews from past clients to get a feel for how to work with a particular brand consultant.
When making your job post within Upwork, be sure to include:
- Scope of work. From creative briefs to style guides, list all the deliverables you’ll need.
- Project length. Your job post should indicate whether this is a smaller or larger project, or an ongoing collaboration.
- Background. If you prefer experience with certain industries, software, or marketing channels, mention this here.
- Budget. Set a budget and note your preference for hourly rates vs. fixed-price contracts.
Why brand voice is so important
Whether you’re a new small business or you’ve been around for a while, you want your company to have a strong brand voice and memorable personality. In a sea of brands, you want to attract and connect with your target audience and turn them into customers. You also want your brand voice to inspire customer loyalty.
When you create a brand identity, you are developing consistent brand messaging that your customers can get to know, like, and expect. Visual markers can make you recognizable, and you can better serve and connect with your target audience with well-written content.
