How To Establish A Successful Brand Voice For Your Business

Nov 3, 2021 14 min read

"A brand is a voice, and a product is a souvenir." - Lisa Gansky.

Brand voice is one of the vital elements of building a brand. Cultivating a unique brand voice makes your company instantly recognizable and aids to stand visible among the cut-edge competition.

77% of consumers refer to a product through its brand name. 75% of consumers recognize a brand only by its logo. It is followed by brand visual style; 60% of individuals recognize a brand by its visual style. 45% of users identify a brand through the brand's signature color and 25% by the unique brand voice.

With traditional media establishing a brand voice is easy for businesses. But with the uprising of social media, to develop and sustain a brand voice that resonates with your target market is a challenging task.

Understanding your pain points, we have compiled an article to help you get an in-depth idea of what brand voice is and why it is essential for your business, along with enlisted tips to help you develop a brand voice for your business. Dig deep in the article and establish a brand voice to avoid getting lost in the noise.

What Is A Brand Voice?

A brand voice is a personality you infuse into your brand communications with the target market.

Brand voice is a crucial part of brand visibility as it is the way you connect to your audience. It is how you establish a connection with your target market, set your company values, and most importantly, engage with your audience.

Brand voice comprises the words and language you use in your brand marketing efforts. Each of these elements ensures to deliver your brand's underlying message to your audience, cutting through the noise and setting imprints on your prospects minds.

Your brand voice is your brand's distinct personality that you leverage to carry forward all communications. You stand out among the crowd because of your unique way.

It may be the flow of words or the language you have used to give your prospects a memorable user experience while interacting with your brand.

When you're on social media, you should be consistent in using words and phrases, stylistic choices of your brand.

All these parameters together build your brand voice. And once your brand's personality is created, it applies everywhere, your website, social media posts, newsletters, or any company announcements or internal official communication or social media advertising.

Why Is Brand Voice Important?

Are you pondering upon the thought of why you should care about establishing a brand voice?

Social media has evolved immensely in the last decade, and the digital marketing landscape has gradually become crowded. Since the number of social media users has also increased and prominent social networks have created more opportunities to reach the target market, more and more brands are inclining towards social media marketing.

So you can find yourself among the noise of the individuals or brands just like you around the social media sphere. Your visual assets, visual content, logo, and product features are an excellent way to stand out.

The content you have used should have the flavor of the brand personality to maintain consistency and to gain attention of your target market.

According to a study 40% of users go with great content, 32% said effective storytelling, and 33% mentioned distinct personality is a vital part of a brand's personality.

Here, an important point to remember while searching for ideas on how to establish a brand voice is that content is not only about images or videos; it also comprises graphics and text.

Your content should be relevant to your target market; as per data, 45% of consumers unfollow a brand due to irrelevant content. When your social content does not align with your brands' personality, it creates a negative impact of your brand among your prospects.

The brand voice also matters because it creates your brand's awareness, and it boosts brand success on social media, increasing the probability of nurturing more qualified leads.

Prominent companies like Adidas or Puma adhere to a strong brand personality and clarity in their purposes. The message they deliver is consistent everywhere, which is why they are easily recognizable.

Besides, to make their brand voice prominent, they have segmented their social media account based on their product line or audience segments. It is helping them to produce more relevant content and adhere to the requirements of that particular audience segment.

Note that to establish a strong brand voice, you need consistency. If your brand personality frequently changes, it hinders your audience from perceiving your brand, and your efforts fall flat, or you may lose opportunities to nurture more qualified leads.

How To Create A Brand Voice: Steps

Are you struggling with establishing a brand voice for your business? Enforcing a brand voice across all your marketing efforts feels intimidating, but it is not difficult when you have a strategy. We have listed the steps, all you need to do is to follow the process, and your job is done. Let's check out the steps:

Step 1: Review Organization's Mission And Vision

Before planning a brand voice, you should go through your organization's mission and vision statements. Your brand personality should reflect values. And you can easily find your organization's values in your mission and vision. It is indeed a good starting point to understand and assess how to connect your marketing efforts to your brand values.

Step 2: Content Audit

The next step is to do an audit of your current content. Review all your marketing assets and content copy such as website, blog posts, social media posts, videos, podcast content, social media ad copy, infographics, reel content, print collateral, etc.

Note down all the common themes, tone and assess if your current brand voice fits the brand's mission and goals. If not, plan out how you can improve it.

In doing so, ensure to focus on your best performing content pieces on social, as it will help to understand the types of content your audience resonates with more.

To figure out the best performing content through measuring engagement rate, reach, and impression, you can leverage Statusbrew Reports Lab. With its extensive 180+ metrics, you can drill down the metrics from all major social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google My Business, LinkedIn and YouTube.

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The drag and drop customizable widgets are your magic wand to weave a report based on your brand goal to establish the brand voice adhering to your brand's mission.

Get Free Access To Reports Lab

Step 3: Assess Your Audience

Audience and buyer persona assessment is another way of formulating your brand voice. It mainly helps you to understand the language usages that can resonate with your target groups. If your audience is comparatively younger, you should choose words and phrases or social acronyms relevant to them. Otherwise, your audience may feel detached and alienated from your content.

When you assess your audience and accordingly prepare your buyer persona, you can list all your audience traits and common vocabulary used by your target audience to imply it in your brand's marketing effort.

However, while choosing the ongoing trends, make sure you hold on to the brand voice authenticity rather than blindly following trends. Keep it a spin of 50-50, 50% trend, and 50% about your brand.

To assess your audience, you can start with a poll on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram stories among your current audience. Ask questions such as How would you like to describe our brand? Or, If our organization were a person, what would be its personality, or what would it sound like? Do you find our communication tone appropriate etc?

  • Plan a content calendar with intriguing infographics and share your content when your audience is most active. You can leverage Statusbrew schedule features to schedule your post when your target audience is most active.

  • To get the data about the best time to post, you can utilize Statusbrew reports; it drills down your audience data across social and offers you when your audience are most active. Accordingly, you can weave a plan to start your audience survey.

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  • To research your audience and get social insights you can choose a set of unique sample audience who are actively engage on your social media posts. Search their name on Google or other social networks and find out their social media behavior, interest, way of writing, use of punctuations, sense of humor, etc.

  • Prepare a list of the words you have in your mind while reviewing your audience; find out the list of commonalities. It is a helpful exercise to set an impactful brand voice matching your audience tone, which is beneficial for building relationships.

Step 4: Prepare Fill In The Blank Content

To figure out how your audience perceives your brand, prepare posts such as we are not------, but we are-------. Check out what your audience replies.

Follow this process by yourself as well, within your company and teammates. Ensure your team writes down a couple of sentences like the one as mentioned earlier. Collect the sentences and discuss with the team which represents the brand values most.

Same research you can do on your own posts. Here, Statusbrew Sentiment analysis is your helping hand to give you the overall idea about how your audience perceives your brand, whether it's positive, negative, or neutral.

Step 5: Develop A Brand Voice Chart And Guidelines

Choke out the words and phrases that represent your brand best and develop a chart. Explain how each of the traits should or should not be included or embodied in your brand marketing. To prepare the list, keep a column for your brand characteristic on left and infuse a brief explanation of the traits right to it.

In the next column write 'to use or not to use' attributes. Prepare it like a template and share it among your teammates as guidelines they should refer to while preparing content. You can also stockpile it in the Statusbrew Asset Manager; it can be easily accessed by your teammates.

Adhering to guidelines ensures that your brand standard and tone consistency are maintained even if different people are engaged in writing content copy or creating visual assets.

Statusbrew’s post-approval workflows in Publish helps you to ensure that newly joined team members also follow the guidelines. It aids in effective team collaboration by creating multi-step and multi-user workflows.

The approval workflow facilitates submitting, reviewing, approving, or rejecting outgoing posts so that your brand voice is intact and guidelines are not deviated by the team.

10 Tips To Develop A Brand Voice For Your Enterprise

1. Concentrate On The Foundational Elements

There are three foundational elements to build a strong brand voice: Principles, Messaging and Training. First, you have to define the principles of your brand voice that will determine how your brand sounds publicly, which includes writing procedures and a vocabulary.

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Establish a messaging structure that will help you to convert customers into leads. You cannot implement the aforementioned foundational elements if all the employees are not trained to use them.

Train all of your employees, conduct lab-based exercises, which shall give them a good experience of real-world scenarios.

2. Build A Personality Of Your Brand

Voice is a human trait, and more often than not, it determines one’s personality. So, think of your brand as a person. What kind of a person would you want your brand to be? How do you want your brand to sound? Do you want your brand’s voice to be formal, bold, funny, cautious, contained or outspoken?

Choose any one which best suits your brand or when trying to build your brand’s voice, look up to the personality of your product or the most successful salesperson of your company initially. Then try to translate it into a voice.

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3. Build Authority And Be Yourself

Earned media and PR are the two ways through which you can make your brand’s voice heard most effectively. Out of these two, Public Relation is the most fruitful way to build your brand’s authority in the market.

However, while doing PR, you should make sure that the messaging in PR should oriented with your brand’s promises which are being made at other media platforms and in your marketing campaigns. If it is not, it will harm your brand’s credibility.

In a heavily competitive market, businesses may likely feel like they need to be astonishingly diverse to beat their competitors and gain the market. However, this is not the case.

You should be you. This will help you to concentrate and find ways through which your target prospects can find you. To be found is more important than to be unnecessarily different.

4. Be Consistent With Your Brand’s Voice

A brand spends considerable time and other resources to create a unique voice through its core values, mission, and vision. And it is obvious that building a brand voice is not an easy task.

And it doesn’t stop there; nurturing your brand voice is tricky. In today’s world, with so many mediums used to share your brand’s voice, maintaining consistency is the key. Make sure your brand’s voice is consistent across all the channels.

When your customers see your social media posts, open your email, receive direct messages or visit your website, make sure they hear the same voice.

5. Pay Attention To Your Clients

While creating your own brand voice and making your customers hear your voice, it is also essential to hear what your customers are saying. Most brands ignore this aspect and don’t pay enough attention to what their clients are saying. Try to listen to your customer’s voices, capture what organic language they are using.

Remember, the most original voice is your customer’s voice. Try to capture what your customers are saying, build a vocabulary based on key themes, high-impact words, and repeated phrases that matter to your customers. Then use those words or language in your voice. It will make you connect to your customers well.

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6. Develop A Well Thought Out Vision And A Strong Culture

Building a solid strategy is the key. Creating a robust vision, mission, voice, values, tone, positioning, feel, and look is as important as anything to make your organization stand out in the market.

Starting with these elements and indulging yourself to build a solid foundation will help you to execute all these elements to your product and services strategically. This way you will be able to make a firm voice.

Creating a strong culture that aligns with your brand’s values will help you create a solid and authentic voice. Your values and culture directly impact your efforts to make your brand’s voice heard in the market.

7. Let Your Employees Be The Voice

Before anything, you should make sure that the brand voice must be aligned with your company’s vision and promises you have made publicly. Moreover, the voice should be centered around your customers.

Once all that is done, all the employees of your organization, including you must incarnate the brand promises and present those authentically through their voice, work and culture maintaining the vision and mission of the organization.

8. Have A Clear Purpose And Be Bold

First and foremost, you should be clear in your mind about the purpose of the existence of your brand. When you are clear about the ‘why’, it will serve as the foundation to create your brand voice, marketing strategies.

So, take your time to determine and understand your ‘why’, followed by ‘what’ and ‘how’. This will help you give direction to your brand voice and nurture it so that it fulfils the purpose of your existence.

Be bold enough to take risks. Being bold doesn’t mean you have to be too aggressive and outrageous with your brand. Take calculative risk.

9. Build Your Own Style

To build your brand voice, it is vital to be original. Do not try to copy your competitors. To be recognized in the crowd you have to be different. Create your own brand voice aligned to your organization’s mission and vision.

If you are sounding like everyone else in the market, then there is a high probability that you will be left unheard. Your customers should be able to identify your brand easily from your brand’s voice.

10. Quality Customer Experience

Your clients remember your brand if you are able to deliver a quality experience to them. Everything from product, to customer support to customer service should be done with an intention to create that wow experience for your customers and should be aligned with your brand’s voice. Customers or clients won’t come back to you if their experience with you is not satisfactory.

Exceptional Brand Voice Examples

To help you inspire to get ideas to establish an impactful brand voice, we have figured out three organizations with a unique and distinctive brand voice. Let’s have a look:

1. Harley-Davidson

Harley-Davidson is a perfect brand example that can help you understand how an aggressive tone is rightly used to establish a brand identity. The tone used by the brand is aggressive, yet it’s solid and confident.

If you are a business looking for ideas to challenge your clients that they are worthy of using your products, Harley-Davidson is the brand you should follow.

Harley Davidson bikes are cruiser bikes with a rough and rugged personality, and the exact value is adhered to in brand voice. Their personality is unique, and the consistent tone of voice is used for their target market. The tone is bold, fiercely independent, and rebellious.

The brand's marketing content evokes freedom, confidence, and vigor, and you can feel it just scrolling through their content and the captions they have used.

2. Tiffany & Co.

Tiffany & Co. is far more than a shade of baby blue; they are all about their personality. Their brand voice is elegant and classic, just like their products, and there is a dash of wittiness.

When you scroll through their social profile, you can observe the sync between their content team and social media team to maintain brand consistency between the branded content and the social media posts.

Besides, their identity is so recognizable by consumers they are ready to invest in their products for their logo designs and the box with the color blue that holds the jewelry.

They attract consumers even for their high-quality jewelry with their brand voice and the elegant communication process. Their voice is so classic that the targeted customers can easily resonate with them.

3. Starbucks

Starbucks has a clear and concise brand voice that is functional and expressive. The functional tone is primarily observed in their ways of finding products and guiding customers to order. And it mingles with the expressive tone, which brings the brand personality into life. The expressive voice is particularly used to deliver a passionate coffee story or share a product's narrative.

Their brand tone crafts a sense of connection, joy, and it creates relevance among their target customers. The content copies are intriguing; some can make you smile while others are compelling enough to navigate you to the purchasing experience.

Summing Up!!

While you are working on your brand voice, work on your brand tone as well. Besides, it is an excellent practice to be flexible towards your approach as your company's vision may change with changing trends and time. Hence your voice guidelines are always "work in progress".

Statusbrew helps you to develop a cohesive brand voice and to craft a unified presence across social media. You can leverage Statusbrew features to establish a brand voice for your business.

Statusbrew Publish simplifies creating, scheduling, and publishing multiple social media posts across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google My Business at once.

  • You can customize each post, and centralized publishing allows you to expand your reach in minimum efforts. You can schedule posts at the custom time, leverage category queuing systems, or the intuitive planner for marketing strategies.

  • With its inbuilt Asset Manager, you can compose posts with a faster and consistent workflow and keep all your brand images, videos, and text snippets just a click away. Besides, you can share the content assets with your team for instant use.

  • Statusbrew’s configurable workflows and approval permissions empower brands to hassle-free content planning, streamlining work, and strategizing among teams.

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  • You can drop a note on a post and get it approved by the right person—an easy way to review your content adhering to your brand guidelines. Besides, using its extensive analytics, you can get insights about your marketing efforts and strategies.

Want to know more about how Statusbrew can help in establishing a brand voice? Explore Statusbrew!

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Rajashree Goswami

Rajashree is a content creator & researcher at Statusbrew. She loves to create content that is expressive & communicative.

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