A brand’s voice is among the most important and distinguishing features of all its marketing initiatives.
What is brand voice? It is how you communicate with or express yourself to your audience, forming an integral part of your brand identity.
Why is brand voice important? Simply put, brand voice in content marketing is the element of your digital presence that helps you stand out from the crowd. For instance, brands with a well-defined and consistent voice across platforms are easily recognised by audiences at first glance.
Apple is a good example of a brand that commands such control over its voice. Its branding highlights minimalism along with innovation, a theme that is present in all formats of its content, right from advertisements to live presentations and even the leaflets that come with its devices.
Like Apple, it is key that you craft your brand voice in a way that does justice to your industry and captures your audience’s attention. As complicated and nebulous it may seem, creating content with a clearly-defined brand voice isn’t rocket science. To reap the benefits of getting your brand voice right, here are 4 ways to go about it.
How to effectively establish your brand’s voice through content and do it consistently
Identify your brand’s key personality traits
A crucial aspect of establishing your brand’s voice is to first define it clearly. This part of learning how to frame your brand’s voice starts with identifying your brand’s personality traits. These are integral to your brand’s voice as they ultimately make their way onto your content. For instance, a brand with a passionate personality should ideally create content that is more expressive and heartfelt as these characteristics complement the trait. Similarly, some of the other personality traits include being authentic, quirky, sophisticated, friendly, positive, and so on. This is the first and most crucial step to developing a voice that, when published, helps content do what it should.
Create and adhere to a brand voice chart in every phase of the content strategy
Once the personality traits are finalised, the next step is to clearly outline characteristics, noting what content tonality works and what doesn’t. This is done by creating a voice chart, which is then referred to by content creators as a guide. Based on the personality traits, you can easily create a unique voice that steers clear of all possible cues or messages that may harm your brand. For instance, a brand with a quirky personality may want to avoid being overly casual or making too many pop-culture references. Even though these characteristics fit the personality, they may not work for the brand on the whole.
A voice chart also helps you keep content creators within the playing field during all the stages of the content strategy. By referring to the chart, they know what is the voice of the brand and have a ready set of brand voice guidelines. This breeds consistency and audiences react favourably to brands that do not have varying voices at different stages in the purchase journey.
Schedule regular team meets with content creators to maintain consistency
Gathering key content creators and discussing the voice chart is important, especially when brainstorming how to frame your brand’s voice for a particular campaign. Here, the vision must be clear and, while the voice chart does offer clarity, you must ensure that all content creators are on the same page. Further, regular team meetings can also help you revise the voice chart as needed and create the best brand voice in your niche. In many cases, there may be personality characteristics that simply do not translate well over to content and ironing out these issues is important when you devise a content marketing strategy.
Make timely changes to the voice chart as your brand grows
While consistency is vital to effective communication, your brand’s voice should also naturally progress alongside the brand. Besides growth, other external factors such as competitors and new-age media may also serve as reasons for revision. Further, periodical changes help you position your brand, through content, as if it were a living organism with a lifecycle. What started out as quirky can slowly evolve to passionate, reliable, and authentic without too many deviations.
Establishing your brand’s voice with content is a process and is one you should see through to build a strong following. Failing to establish your voice has many downsides, among which is the failure of audiences recognising your content on different platforms. For this reason, it is also important to employ a team of skilled content creators or marketing specialists who not only understand how to incorporate a given brand voice in content marketing verticals but also know how to do so seamlessly on various social and digital platforms.
Partner with Edisol and let us help you bring your brand’s voice to life in all marketing efforts moving forward.
