5 Tips For Finding Your Brand Voice

When people think about ‘branding’ their minds often automatically go to the visual. They think of logos, fonts and colours. Brand voice is something that often gets neglected and yet it forms an essential part of who you are as a business and how your customers connect with you.

What exactly is brand voice?

Essentially your brand voice is the way in which your business uses words to convey personality, tone and core message. It’s the personality that your brand uses to connect with its target audience. It helps to give your customers a sense of your core values and who you really are as a business.

Why is brand voice important?

The words and phrases that you use to connect with your target audience are what make you stand out in a world where, let’s be honest, there’s lots of content out there. Having a unique and distinctive brand voice makes your brand more memorable and really helps to showcase your business and what you’re all about.

To help your business really get clarity with your unique brand voice, I’ve put together five simple steps that you can follow to put you on the right track…

Examine a sample of your current content

Spend some time looking at your current content, across all channels, to identify what makes your brand unique. Can you see a pattern or trend emerging? Which examples are unique to your brand and really encompass what you want to say? This works really well if you can print out your favourite examples and pin them up somewhere to look at them collectively. It’s worth thinking about which pieces of content you gained most engagement from too, as this can help you to identify what really connects with your target audience.

Describe your brand in three words

What adjectives best describe your brand? How would you describe the personality of your business? Sit down and look at your existing content and brainstorm. You may be collaborative, fashionable, authentic, energetic, fresh, caring, reliable, unconventional….

Once you’ve narrowed things down to your top three brand traits you can develop things even further by defining each characteristic in more detail. So ‘unconventional’ could also be quirky, unexpected and unique. Once you’ve identified the top three words that really get to the heart of your brand, you can start to ensure that these values are communicated to your audience in the content that you’re putting out. Remember to be consistent across all platforms, so whether you’re writing for social media, newsletters, blog posts, or website copy, you need to ensure that these key elements of your brand voice shine through.

Get clear on your target audience

It’s so important to get to you know your audience and the kind of language and tone of voice that they use before you start creating content. Your audience is much more likely to engage with you if you’re using language that is familiar to them. If your target customer is in a younger age bracket, think about the words and phrases they’re likely to use. If your brand voice makes use of language that is more familiar to an older clientele, you’re likely to alienate a younger audience and vice versa.

Devise a brand voice chart

If you don’t currently have a brand voice chart, this is a really useful tool to help you get super clear on your brand voice. Your brand voice chart is perfect to refer back to when you’re creating content and is helpful if you have more than one person creating content for your business.

Putting a brand voice chart together is a really straightforward task. It’s simply a case of creating a table with three rows for your individual brand characteristics and then adding three columns: description, do’s, don’ts. It’s worth spending a bit of time on this as, once created, it’s something that everyone in your business can make use of whenever they’re creating content. Remember that your brand voice encompasses graphics, photos and videos as well as words, so make sure you’re sticking to the correct brand voice for all of your content. If you need any help devising a brand voice chart for your business, just drop me a message.

Keep revisiting and revising

As your business changes and evolves, your brand voice needs to do the same. Perhaps the products you’re selling or the area that you specialise in has changed over time and you now have a different target audience? Your brand voice needs to be able to evolve with your business. It shouldn’t be viewed as something that is fixed and can’t be altered. I’d always suggest reviewing your brand voice chart at least annually and seeing if it still represents your business accurately. If not, it’s time to think about making some changes.

One of the most important things to remember about brand voice is that it represents your business and it needs to be authentic. I know I’ve said it before, but if you wouldn’t say it, don’t write it. There’s no point manufacturing a brand voice to fit in with a younger target audience if it comes across as being unnatural and stilted. You need to find a way to use language that resonates with your target audience in a way that feels natural for you. If you’re not being authentic, that will come across in the content that you’re putting out and your audience will switch off.

If you need a bit of help when it comes to finding your brand voice, just drop me an email to see how I can help. I’d love to hear from you!