The voice of your brand is going to represent the personality of your brand. It needs to be steady and consistent. This is especially important in a world of digital media messages where content can very easily appear to feel and look the same.
The best way to break through the noise and make sure that the audience is picking up your messages the way you want them to is to establish and build a strong brand voice – and then stick with it.
Your brand’s voice begins with your brand promise. It needs to help your brand connect with your customers across all mediums and engage them.
Of course, this is easier said than done. That’s why we are here to help. So keep on reading and we will walk you through how to build a strong brand voice.
1. Review Your Brand Promise
Your brand promise is the foundation of your brand. It’s something that you can’t really say to your customers. Instead, it is how you promise to relate to the people who come into contact with your brand.
Without a solid brand promise, you won’t be able to develop a strong brand voice.
Your brand promise is an essential piece of your content vision. After you figure out what your brand promise is, you will then be able to develop your brand’s voice as part of your content strategy.
2. Audit Your Current Content
It doesn’t matter if your company is an established organization or a start-up. It’s crucial that you get a handle on all of the available and searchable content that your brand has published and evaluate that content. You need to make sure that all of the content matches your brand promise.
While you perform this audit, you should look for chances to get rid of any content that is not properly representing the brand promise.
As hard as you might try, you can’t develop an improved brand voice if you have a lot of older content that people are able to pull up on web searches that doesn’t fit your brand promise.
3. Ask Your Audience
If you’re having trouble visualizing what a brand actually is, you can think of it this way – your brand is what people say about you when you aren’t in the room.
It doesn’t matter what you think your brand is all about. It is your audience that is actually going to decide how your brand is received.
This is why it is so helpful to find out what your customers think about the brand and figure out what they think about what you are trying to communicate. If you are able to make a simple survey for your customers, you can end up gleaning a lot of useful information.
4. Describe Your Brand in Three Words
The point of describing your brand in just a few words is to help you get down to the essence of the brand. If the brand were a person, how you would describe that person.
After you have figure out what these words are, you should share them with people in your company. Any time a person creates content for the brand, that person should measure the content against these descriptive words to know if their content is on target.
5. Look for Inspiration
If you are only now just coming up with your brand voice, then the good news is that you have many other examples from companies that you can learn from.
Some of these voices are respectful, while others are informative, and others are snarky. None of them are wrong or bad, necessarily.
You should learn and read from the content created by other brands who have come up with their voices with content that is consistent.
6. Develop a Brand Voice Chart
Now that you know what words will represent the brand, you should come up with three columns, one for each word.
Then, include the following rows in the chart:
- Description
- Do
- Do not
Fill in the blanks for each descriptive word to help you stay consistent in your tone and style.
7. Document Everything
As you perform the steps listed above to build your brand voice, you want to document everything that you learn. Then, you should make these findings available to everyone in your organization. You especially want to show the documents to content creators and company executives.
When you include best practices and brand voice guidelines in your company style guide, you will be able to make sure that there is a standard against which communication coming from the company can be measured. If you do not have a documented style guide with a section for your brand voice, then it is important that you add one.
While undertaking these tasks can help you develop a strong brand voice, they still won’t be enough if you don’t stay consistent in your content creation. And make sure to keep researching and discover more about building a strong brand voice.
The Importance of Knowing How to Build a Strong Brand Voice
Hopefully, after reading the above article, you now have a better idea of how to build a strong brand voice. Just make sure that you stay consistent and true to what your brand promise is. If you do that, then you shouldn’t have any problems.
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