A brand voice, also known as a brand identity, is a reflection of a company’s personality through the consistency of certain messages and their values. A voice can usually be summed up through a few different personality traits that will be displayed within a company’s content, such as social media, websites, advertisements, and more. Establishing a clear voice ensures that your company presents a consistent image and message to its audience. Therefore, a brand voice helps the audience recognize the brand on any platform because it is showing the same consistent message. The main goal of a brand voice is to create a uniform personality for a brand so that its purpose is clear.

Benefits of a Brand Voice

An easy way to understand the point of establishing a clear brand voice is to imagine the following situation; if your brand logo or name did not appear with your content would your consumers know it was yours? If the answer is no, that is probably because your brand voice has not been established. Having a consistent voice makes your brand distinguishable from competitors and ensures your values are always clear to consumers.

Emphasizing Brand Purpose

Given that one of the main reasons to create a brand voice is to emphasize the company’s purpose, it is necessary to understand why having a brand purpose is so important. A brand purpose can be understood as to how the brand sets out to change its consumer’s life. It sets out to explain the problem it’s product or service will be solving. Therefore, having an unvarying brand voice will make sure that the purpose is clearly emphasized.

Increased Trust

Also, having a consistent voice will help make the brand more trustworthy. This is because emphasizing the purpose and values will make it easier for a consumer to notice the shard values it has with that company.

Repetition and Familiarity

Additionally, a critical factor in marketing is repetition because the more a consumer notices a brand, they will be more likely to favor that brand. So, having a brand voice can help establish that repetition. The uniform voice will make the brand noticeable for the customers, and even if the company is promoting a new message, the consistency of the voice will allow the consumer to remember the priorities of the brand. With the clarity and repetition of the brand’s values and purpose through the use of a distinct voice, it will help make a lasting impression on the audience and the target customers.

Six Simple Steps

Step 1 – Understand your brand

The first step is to make sure you know what your product or service provides. This may seem obvious, but to ensure you are selecting the right voice, it must coordinate with the problem your company is setting out to solve. For example, if your company creates a drug to relieve severe back pain, your voice should not be lighthearted or fun.

Step 2 – Examine past content

The next step is to take a look at all the content your company has created in the past. You should try to see what voice may have been reflected from the content, even if you were not aware that you were displaying a particular voice at the time. While looking at that content, see if it seemed humorous, informative, or appealed to people’s emotions. Once you find a common theme check to make sure the content displaying that particular characteristic was successful. If they were, then that should be one of the voices you make sure to use in almost everything from now on.

Step 3 – Look into your mission statement

Another good step is to see if any type of voice is noticeable in your brand’s mission statement. If so, that voice should be apparent in any further content your company creates to maintain a consistent image in the mind of the consumer.

Step 4 – Research your consumers

An additional way to find a voice characteristic is to talk to your consumers. Send out a survey and ask them what they like about the company or what the company reminds them of. This way, you will be able to use a voice that you know works for your company and your consumers. Also, it is very simple just to do web research on your target demographic to make sure the characteristics you are planning to use are relatable to them. For example, if you worked for a retirement home, the voice should not be too modern or edgy because that is not relatable to the senior citizen age demographic.

Step 5 – Brainstorming

Now that all your research is done it is time to determine what your brand voice will be. Come up with words and personality traits that match the characteristics of your brand and consumer. Narrow down the voice options to three that work well together and perfectly demonstrate your company’s values and will appeal to your audience.

Step 6 – Implementation

You officially have decided how you want your brand to sound! Now make sure the rest of your company knows as well. Ensure with your team that from now on all content should reflect the three voice characteristics you determined suit your brand the best.

Example

Imagine you work for a technology company that makes phones, tablets, watches, and any other cool gadget that targets young people and millennials. As a technology company, you want to get the message across that your products are continually changing to keep up with the times that you have the best products and inventors and that the products work. Therefore, three words that could work for the company are modern, intelligent, and reliable. After narrowing down the most important values, your company needs to get across; you can make sure that your content displays at least one of these voices. Determining the most important characteristics to use in your voice includes a lot of research, analysis, and process of elimination. Take an in-depth look into your company to see what makes the most sense based on your values and purpose. Then eliminate any characteristics that would not be appealing to your target audience.

Overview

The purpose of having a brand voice is to position your brand in a way so that it is easily identifiable. It also has other benefits such as making the brand more understandable, relatable and trustworthy. After looking at your mission, company content, advertisements and the values of your consumers you can select three words that sum up your brand’s purpose which will make up the voice.

If you’d like, you can have more information on this article about Brand Awareness.