Brand Voice: What it is & How to Use it
Have you ever thought about what makes your company different and stand out? That’s where brand voice comes to play as it is what makes your brand unique and enables you to stick out from the sea of voices online.
What Is Brand Voice?
Brand voice is the personality your brand conveys for all of your communications. It serves as a blueprint for what to say and how to say things including tone, style, and messaging. Your brand voice should be individual to your company and express your company values.
Brand voice is applied wherever your brand speaks such as advertising, newsletters, social media posts, customer services responses, and internal communications. This is essential in building your brand identity.
Why Brand Voice Matters
Brand voice is what makes you recognizable from the sea of competition. Due to the digital landscape being so saturated, your written content needs to be consistent to establish a strong brand presence.
Although AI can assist with developing marketing content, it does not have personality. As AI becomes more prominent in the marketing space, there will be an increased demand for human marketers to shape a brand’s unique voice and differentiate itself from the online clutter. Marketers have the ability to understand their brand voice and draw from personal experiences and should be leading the organization’s voice. Successful brand awareness is when one can identify a brand based just on its unique content.
How To Use Brand Voice
Know Your Audience
Your brand voice should encapsulate your company’s values and goals, but also be tailored to your specific audience. As you figure out who your target audience is and why you are speaking with them, you will want to create a list of personality traits, adjectives, and common vocabulary to use for your branding tool kit.
For example, take an Indiana popcorn brand that is targeting Indiana natives to sell their products. They could use region-specific language such as “Hoosier,” which is a term used to refer to an inhabitant of Indiana.
Tailor Your Tone to Different Content
As much as brand voice is about defining your communication style, it also will vary based on the content type. For example, a post on social media will require a different tone than when responding to a customer inquiry. A casual and cheerful tone is standard for social media and a formal and polite tone is appropriate when communicating with customers.
Even across social media networks, you will need to alter your tone as they require different formalities and serve different audiences. For instance, LinkedIn is considered a more formal platform than X (formerly Twitter). LinkedIn’s audience is primarily composed of people looking for career development and personal growth compared to the latter where the audience thrives on the exchange of quick and short messages.
Review and Monitor
Your brand voice does not exist in a vacuum and is subject to change. It should be reviewed regularly and edited to reflect changes in trends and social climate. Languages are always evolving and the words popular five years ago may not be relevant today. If you do not check in on your brand voice consistently you risk sounding out of date, especially to your audience.
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