A consistent brand voice is essential for any successful company. It exhibits your brand’s values, personality, and mission while ensuring the best possible communication with your target audience. It can be difficult to keep your voice consistent, or even to know what your voice should sound like. Here are some simple strategies for finding and maintaining an engaging brand voice that sets you apart from the competition.
Know Your Values
Voice is a reflection of the values your company upholds. Make sure you know what your company’s mission and personal values are before you begin working on your voice. If you don’t already have a clear mission statement or outline of values, take some time to brainstorm and come up with these core beliefs to make sure that you know where you want your voice (and your brand as a whole) to go.
Come Up with Three Brand Words
It can be overwhelming to figure out a unique voice for your brand, so a great way to break down the process is to come up with the three words that best describe how you want your brand to come off. Maybe you have “quirky,” “caring,” and “hip,” or maybe you have “polished,” “professional,” and “reliable.” Even with just three words each, you can see how different these two examples will be in terms of voice. Finding three descriptive words for your voice is a great starting-off point for building your specific brand going forward.
Imagine Your Perfect Client
Make up an imaginary person who you think represents your client base the best. Are they a man or a woman? How old are they? How do they dress? What do they do for fun? Are they married? Do they have children? Take your time coming up with this imaginary customer and then write all of your content specifically for them.
Imagine Your Brand as a Person
This is similar to the preceding exercise, but this time instead of imagining your target client, imagine your brand as a person. Ask the same questions. Are they a man or a woman? Do they have children? What do they look like? Answer as many questions as you need to until you have a clear picture of your “brand person” in your mind. Going forward, think about these two imaginary people having a conversation when you write new content.
Everything has a Story
You want to add an element of story to everything you write. Your readers don’t just want bare facts, they want a narrative that comes from your personal brand voice. If you put a little extra thought into it, you’ll find that each piece of content that you write can be made more exciting and enticing by creating a narrative line. A great place to really drive the idea of “story” is in your “about” page. Don’t just say what your company does, tell the story of how and why it came to be.
Who Inspires You?
Make a list of other brands who you admire. What is their voice like? Are they casual, quirky, funny, or personal? You want to be careful to use other brands as inspiration and a jumping-off point without copying their language. Remember, the whole point of creating a brand voice is to build a voice that is unique to you, so you don’t want to end up sounding like another version of a company that is already out there.
Be Consistent
It is important that your voice is consistent throughout all of your content, but the places where you want to pay extra attention to having your unique voice shine through is at all customer touch points. Anywhere where customers are interacting with your brand, such as calls to action, newsletters, and social media, should be exhibiting your voice especially clearly.
