Defining Your Brand Voice

No matter the size of your business, defining your brand voice is a crucial part of your marketing strategy – right up there with establishing your logo and visual identity.

The prospect of developing that voice, however, can feel a little daunting – especially if you’re a business owner who feels out of your comfort zone when it comes to creating content for your website, emails, newsletters, blogs, social media and, well, anywhere else you connect with your audience through words.

The following are questions I often hear from clients, along with some of the advice I give them on honing and applying their brand voice:

What exactly is a brand voice?

Put simply, your brand voice is the way you talk to your customers. You make a decision about HOW you want to sound when you say WHAT you want or need to say. Then you use that voice every time and everywhere you talk to your audience, from responding to a comment on social media to describing your products or services on your website. And, quite literally, everything in between.

Why does it matter?

In life, the impression we make on others is influenced by many things, but the way we speak and the words we choose are a huge part of that. And the same is true for brands. You’re far more likely to engage your ideal customer if you speak their language and forge an emotional connection, and your voice is the most powerful tool you have to achieve this.

How do I develop a brand voice?

It’s common to feel like you don’t know where to start, especially if marketing and content creation is totally new to you. But the important thing is simply to start! You may well find you already have a pretty solid understanding of what your voice is or should be, even without knowing it.

I find that working through the following stages really helps to structure my thoughts when I’m helping a client define their brand voice:

1. Core Characteristics

How would you describe your brand personality? Considering your mission statement – the reason your business exists – can be a good starting point in terms of thinking about what your brand stands for and how this is reflected in its character. For example, if your mission is to inject fun into occasions by selling an original range of witty greetings cards, then your brand voice should be equally original, witty and uplifting.

If you’re a small-business owner and the face of your brand, think about your own personality. People like to buy from people, and there is a lot to be said for writing like you talk. It gives your content authenticity and relatability, with the added bonus of making it almost effortless for you to maintain a consistent voice!

In doing this, you should be able to generate a list of adjectives that describe your brand. Is it authoritative? Quirky? Funny? Helpful? Insightful? Edgy? Modern? Traditional? Identifying these core characteristics is the key to developing a clear and compelling voice that attracts your ideal customer.

Which brings us to my next step…

2. Customers

As well as looking inward to define your brand personality, it’s essential to look outward and really think about who are you talking to. Who is your audience and what kind of voice will get their attention?

Creating personas for your ideal customers is always an incredibly useful exercise. Literally build a bio for them – give them a name, imagine their life. How old are they? Where do they live? What’s their job? How do they spend their spare time? What’s the problem you’re offering them a solution to?

It’s much easier to tailor your content when you can imagine yourself talking to an actual person. It becomes instinctive.

3. Definition

Once you have worked through your personality and understand your audience, it’s time to focus in on how your voice should sound in order to convey those key characteristics and connect with your customer. I always find it helpful to develop a set of balanced statements that describe what your voice should and shouldn’t sound like.

For example, the greetings-cards brand I mentioned earlier might say:

Our voice is warm. It is not fluffy.

Our voice is witty. It is not silly.

Our voice is confident. It is not arrogant.

Our voice is chatty. It is not overfamiliar.

You could also build out from this to add specific examples of what your brand should and shouldn’t say. If you already have content out there, go through and critique it to pull out the things that feel right for your brand and the things that don’t.

Like this:

We would start a customer email with “Hello there!”. We wouldn’t say “Hello lovely!”.

We would introduce a new product by saying “Check this out!”. We wouldn’t say “Isn’t this amazing!”.

4. Consistency

When it comes to applying your brand voice, consistency is everything. Customers like to know where they stand and, in the same way that seeing a recognisable logo or colour palette reassures them that they’re in the right place, so too does a familiar voice.

Once you have a good sense of how you want to shape your voice going forward, get to work on creating a set of guidelines. This doesn’t have to be War and Peace, but it should contain enough detail to make sure that anyone representing your brand through writing absolutely gets it.

As a minimum, I’d suggest the following:

• An overview of your brand’s mission and core characteristics

• Information about your audience

• Defining statements: what are you? What are you not?

• Examples of on-brand content – ideally samples from a few key areas, e.g. a product description, a social post, a piece of website copy, a customer email. You can continue to add to this as you create more.

• Any must-haves and must-nots

Make sure that ANYONE who writes ANYTHING on behalf of your brand has access to your Brand Voice Guidelines and really understands them.

This is especially important if you’re the owner of a business that has grown and suddenly has people other than yourself creating content – employees, agencies and freelancers, for example. As the founder of your brand you may be able to write in the perfect voice without even trying, but it’s important that others can pick up the baton without compromising the way your customers hear you.

That way, you’ll always have confidence that your content is hitting exactly the right note.

Need some help defining your brand voice? Let’s chat.