Aaron Agius is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of the award-winning global marketing agency Louder.Online.
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Ultimately, your brand voice is your company’s personality. It’s the way you speak, your tone, the words you choose and the themes you talk about.
And having a brand voice that is genuine to your company is crucial for influencing your audience. Eighty-eight percent of consumers say that authenticity is key when choosing brands. If you nail your brand voice, you can get your market to know, like and trust you. And this ultimately leads to more growth long term. But how do you create an effective brand voice that cements your place in the market? Let’s discuss the seven building blocks that allow you to create your voice from the ground up.
1. Start With Your Mission
Your company mission statement or vision can help bring out some key characteristics of your brand voice. This mission is your guiding light. Everything your brand “says” should reflect your journey toward fulfilling your mission (i.e., your ultimate goal).
For instance, let’s say your mission is to promote mental health by helping 1 million people across the world learn how to practice meditation. With every piece of brand content, you can ask yourself, “Does this get us closer to realizing our mission?” If it doesn’t, you need to determine why. Then, either rework the content or avoid publishing it altogether. Publishing something that goes against your mission is worse than having no new content at all.
2. Elaborate On Your Values
Some people confuse mission statements with values. But they’re actually different parts of the puzzle when building your brand voice. Your mission is your North Star—the big long-term goal of your brand. Values, on the other hand, are the traits your brand must have in order to fulfill your mission.
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Values are a key building block for crafting a powerful brand voice that remains authentic while influencing your target market on a deep level.
To incorporate your values into your brand voice, first define a value, and then provide examples of how that translates into words and actions.
For instance:
Value: “We are open and honest.”
Traits:
• “We don’t make claims without proof.”
• “We don’t over-promise results.”
• “We address limiting beliefs, even if they’re uncomfortable for our audience.”
• “We are completely transparent with our team, clients and vendors.”
You can perform this exercise with all of your values. Aim to write down at least the top five. Then, you’ll have a powerful reference point when determining what is on-brand.
3. Use Your Target Audience As Inspiration
Defining your mission and values is absolutely key. But the true test of your brand voice is whether it resonates with your target audience. That’s why an essential building block for creating your brand voice is understanding your buyer persona.
Your buyer persona often includes basic information like:
• Age range.
• Nationality.
• Occupation.
• Values.
But that’s not enough. To truly get inside the minds of your buyers, you need to understand what drives them. What do they like? What do they not like? What are their biggest fears and dreams? Researching your target market can be time-consuming. But it’s worth every second you spend on it because ultimately your audience has the final say in whether your brand voice works.
4. Analyze Your Top-Performing Content
Another source to draw inspiration from is your previously created content. If you’ve already been creating content for months or years, you’ve got a great backlog to work with.
Analyze your top-performing content. Which blog posts, videos, webinars or emails stood out the most, and why?
Does your target market engage in pieces with more objective research? Do they prefer to read up on the most current trends? Do they appreciate humor, or are they looking for a more direct, bare-bones style?
Your top-performing pieces likely have at least something to do with voice. Of course, be sure to cross-check your data against anomalies—are there certain periods of the year when your entire industry receives a spike in engagement anyway?
5. Define Your Do’s And Don’ts
Defining your do’s and don’ts gives your brand a set of rules to operate within. It makes it much easier to create a brand voice template and stay within your brand guidelines.
For instance, you may have do’s like:
• Use second-person point of view.
• Include recent research.
• Use humor.
And don’ts like:
• Don’t offend the audience.
• Don’t attack the competition.
• Don’t reinforce discriminative stereotypes.
This creates a quick checklist for you or the content creators you hire. Whereas much of your brand voice is ambiguous, these do’s and don’ts should serve as a no-nonsense guide to adhere to at all costs.
6. Create A Unified Standard Operating Procedure
Once you’ve performed the steps above, create a unified standard operating procedure document that encapsulates your brand voice. This document will serve as the official brand voice standard for all of your marketing and content team.
Whether you work with in-house writers or external contributors, they need to have this document in front of them so they’re ready to create content that communicates your brand voice perfectly.
7. Review And Improve
The best brands are always evolving. Once you’ve created your brand voice, the work still isn’t finished.
As market conditions or social norms change, so too will your audience’s expectations. Brands that stand the test of time continually review their voice to ensure it serves their mission and resonates with their buyers.
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Author: Aaron Agius, Forbes Councils Member
