Your brand’s voice is the way you communicate with your audience. It reflects your personality, values, and goals. It also sets you apart from your competitors and helps you build customer trust and loyalty.
But how do you determine and develop your brand’s voice? How do you make sure that it is consistent, authentic, and engaging across all your channels and platforms?
Here are some tips to help you find and refine your brand’s voice.
Define your brand’s core values and mission
What are the things that matter most to you? What are you trying to achieve? What are the benefits that you offer to your customers? Write down a list of words or phrases that describe your brand’s essence and purpose.
Identify your target audience and their needs
Who are you talking to? What are their pain points, challenges, and goals? How can you help them solve their problems or fulfill their desires? Create a buyer persona that represents your ideal customer and their characteristics.
Analyze your competitors and their voices
What are they saying and how are they saying it? What are their strengths and weaknesses? How do they differ from you? What are the opportunities that you can fill for your customers, and theirs? Conduct a competitive analysis and compare your voice with theirs.
Choose your voice attributes and tone
How do you want to sound? What are the words or adjectives that describe your voice? For example, do you want to be friendly, professional, humorous, or something else? How do you want to adjust your tone depending on the situation, context, or channel? For example, do you want to be more formal on your website, more casual on social media, or more empathetic on customer service?
Create a voice chart and guidelines
Write it down! Define it!
A voice chart is a tool that helps you define and document your voice attributes and tone. It also provides examples of how to apply them in different scenarios and formats. A voice chart can help you ensure that your voice is consistent and clear across all your communications. You can also create a set of guidelines that explain the dos and don’ts of using your voice.
Test and refine your brand voice
Once you have determined and developed your voice, you need to test it with your audience and get feedback. You can use surveys, interviews, focus groups, or analytics to measure how well your voice resonates with your customers. You can also use tools like Grammarly to check your grammar, spelling, readability, and tone. Based on the results, you can refine your voice and make improvements. Pro Tip: Record yourself and others on your team speaking "in your brand's voice." Put on your persona and speak as if you were your brand, and record it. Then listen to it later -- is it true to your guidelines? If so, great job! Use the recording to further define and refine. If not, then ask yourself which needs to change -- the way you're speaking, or the guidelines. Which is more true to your brand? Your brand’s voice is not something that you can create overnight. It is a process that requires research, creativity, experimentation, and evaluation. But once you find and refine your voice, you will be able to communicate with your audience more effectively and authentically.
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