by Jon Allo
The obvious parts of a brand such as the packaging of a product and the logo of the company are easy to create, but other parts like the brand’s voice and tone can be difficult to get right and define.
What is a brand? It’s the sentiments people associate with your business. This includes the feelings and thoughts when they see a logo, hear a name, or use a product.
Defining the personality of a business is the main part of branding. A good brand builds trust, familiarity and makes the company memorable among consumers.
Defining and controlling a brand voice is crucial in increasing brand awareness and credibility. As a marketer, you don’t want to break the perception of the business’s personality. If a brand voice is inconsistent, communication is ineffective. A brand without personality will struggle to get loyal fans.
Steps to Defining a Brand Voice to Increase Awareness and Credibility
1. Know your brand
Struggling to define your brand’s voice? First, know your brand. Start by gathering together your understanding the company, its goals, products, and services together with the market, clients, and competitors.
The best place to start is with a brand style guide that has a mission statement and clear, unique selling points. This will help you establish the goal of the business and its unique offer to consumers.
2. Setting the style
The style is crucial in ensuring consistency. We uphold a standard of quality and uniformity across websites, products, marketing, sales, and editorial. Whenever the customer reads the message from the brand, the copywriter behind it is invisible.
So the brand’s voice remains the familiar personality of the business. By having a style guide, you can define and control the voice of your brand. Print it out and give all the relevant stakeholders a copy to keep a close look. However you store your guide, ensure it’s accessible to relevant stakeholders – from writers, agency professionals, and salespeople.
3. Identify the context
For branding to be valuable, it needs to set the right voice across every customer “touch point”. A consumer can encounter a company and its brand in different places, such as the website, social media, apps, and software, email, advertising, messenger, and media.
It’s important to tailor the message to the context of the audience by using the right voice and tone. For instance, a promotional email uses a different tone from an online display ad. Likewise, a social media post on Facebook can differ from a post on LinkedIn.
Always deliver the right tone at the right time. Consider how the message may change according to readers’ emotions, and use the right voice.
Branding is important for small business owners as well as large ones. If you have a limited budget, smart branding is perhaps the most inexpensive business tool you can create.
About the author
To learn more about how to make you and your business stand out, download my free checklist, Branding For Small Businesses at https://jonallo.com/branding
