What Is My Brand Voice & How Do I Find It?
Creating a brand identity involves many aspects including brand voice, logo, taglines and even website colours. Every brand has a unique voice. Your brand is an individual entity, and this should be reflected through your brand voice. Your brand identity is the ongoing personality your business uses when communicating your message to prospects.
From social media posts to digital advertisements and product packaging, it’s imperative to have a consistent, unique brand identity across all marketing platforms. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a confused message that will fail to resonate with consumers.
Here are some examples of brand voices from famous companies:
- Boost: Fun, joyful and healthy.
- Pepsi: Easygoing, optimistic and enjoyable.
- Nike: Empowering, inspiring and determined.
- Hootesuite: Easy-to-grasp, helpful, approachable.
Regardless of your product, you need to create an engaging brand voice that’s authentic to your goals and values. Finding your brand identity doesn’t have to include countless hours of marketing analysis; it just comes down to knowing what you want to convey and how you should go about conveying it.
Here are three simple ways to define your brand voice so that you can create engaging, interesting content that is directed to your target audience.
1. Make It Relevant
Consider the people using your product or service. You want to define your brand voice to speak directly to your target audience and produce an emotional connection to what you are providing. If your audience consists of millennials who love health foods, your voice is going to differ from that of a company selling clothing to an older generation.
Some things to consider include:
- How do your customers define your brand identity?
- What’s the ultimate benefit of utilising your product or service?
- How do you want prospects to feel when engaging with your company?
- How does your business stand out amongst the competition?
Once you have answered these questions, you can then go on to…
2. Begin With Three Words
What three words do you want to reflect the style and personality of your brand? Three is the number generally used by companies to define their brand voice. Choosing more will only duplicate what you already have as well as convolute your core values.
Some examples include:
- Confidence
- Enthusiasm
- Helpful
- Determined
- Inspiring
- Fun
- Authoritative
You then go on to choose limitations for each chosen word. For example, you are fun but also serious about what you do. You are confident but not arrogant. This will help you further define your brand voice and create targeted copy (or gives your writers an idea of what copy to produce).
3. Implement Your Voice
If you’re going to keep a consistent brand voice, you have to ensure that every piece of copy reflects your brand’s personality.
This means looking at your emails, print materials, social media channels and website. You have to rewrite older copy that doesn’t align with your brand voice. Imagine receiving an email with no defined brand identity or something that is completely different to your other channels – it’s confusing, jarring and doesn’t invoke consumer confidence.
These three simple steps will help you define your brand voice as a part of your overall brand identity. Once you’ve developed your brand’s identity, you can then commence speaking to your customers in a way that they will trust and easily identify with your brand.
