Whenever we’re talking about branding, we need to start with one simple question: Why do customers choose to buy one product over another? Oftentimes, they will cite quality and say that one is simply better than the other, or maybe it’s about price, or even convenience.
But the truth of the matter is usually this: one brand is more appealing than the others. Why? Well, it’s probably better at educating and persuading its target customers, and a lot of that comes down to brand voice.
What is Brand Voice?
Brand voice is all about how a business gets its message across. Usually, it’s an agreed-upon style that ensures consistency and, therefore, unity across the brand, elevating it and training customers to recognise it whenever it appears.
Brand voice needs to be an important part of any marketing campaign, because it is used across every single channel: social media, email marketing, and paid advertising will all utilise that same tone.
When formulating your own brand voice, you need to first consider who your customers are. Are they serious buyers, making serious purchases, like a superconductor manufacturer needing ultrapure water for the production process? Or are they teenage boys who idolise professional footballers?
Serious buyers will almost always prefer formal branding, while informal buyers will be more inclined towards brands that are marketed in fun, creative ways.
Defining Your Brand Voice
Deciding on what your own brand voice should be isn’t as easy as asking yourself whether you’re a so-called serious brand or not. But it does, in fact, involve asking yourself a couple of questions.
What Are Your Goals?
Quite a straightforward question. What is your business’s purpose? What do you want it to achieve?
What Are Your Values?
Corporate lip-service won’t help you here. Think about how you work and the principles that you want every member of your team to have, as well as traits that can be attached to the brand itself.
Moreover, it’s always important to consider your potential customers’ traits. Formulate a buyer persona that represents a typical customer by evaluating what customers want from your brand, how they prefer to be marketed to, how they engage with your business, and even more trivial qualities, like their movie/television preferences and favourite clothing outlets. A small high street shop that sells novelty socks will have very different buyers to a large company like Xylem, which provides sterile water for injection.
Conclusion
Overall, if you invest the right amount of thought, time, and resources into nailing down a consistent brand voice that will be used consistently across all marketing channels, you’ll likely be able to win over more customers and evolve existing ones into staunch loyalists. Whatever your business goals are, you need to market yourself effectively to achieve them. And to market yourself effectively, your brand needs a voice.
So define your own brand voice by clearly stating your goals, values, and knowing your customers. That way, when you’ve decided exactly who your are and how you want to put your message out to the world, you’ll be more likely to find your base.