Can a brand have a voice? Absolutely. In fact, in order to be successful, many would insist that a prominent and consistent brand voice is necessary.
The voice of a company or organization is what helps to identify it to its audience and sets it apart from competitors. Read on to discover more about this concept and tips for creating a voice for your brand.
Define Your Brand
Your brand voice is the personality you demonstrate through your company communications. It’s who your brand is online and is made up of your written communication, logo, tagline, identifiable colours, and more. Your voice is your comprehensive messaging. In order to have a voice that is recognizable by your followers, you must first define it.
Take time to consider the type of message you want to portray and how you wish to be seen. Get together with your team and jot down notes regarding the ways in which you interact with customers, the attitude you wish to portray, your preferred tone, and your top values as an organization.
When you finish your brainstorming session, look for patterns. What do you want your brand to be? What is it not? In the end, see if you can distil your overall brand personality into three words. Use those words to move forward in creating your overall voice.
Stay Consistent
In order to create a brand voice that is instantly recognizable, it must be consistent across platforms. You must meet with all of your team members who are directly involved with communication and social media to ensure they understand this voice.
You may even want to create a brand guide that lays out the most important aspects of your voice and the ways in which those should be portrayed. This will keep all members on the same page and consistent in their communication. Even your meme formats should demonstrate a certain unified look that fits with your overarching framework.
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Go Where Your Audience Is
There are so many social media platforms and online outlets for communication. It can be tempting to think your brand has to have a presence on all of them. Fortunately, this is simply not true. No one can be everywhere at all times. What matters is that you are in the places where your followers are.
You want to use your resources of time and money wisely. It’s also important to learn what lay of the land on each platform you intend to use. You don’t want to make a social faux pas that causes your brand to look foolish or worse. So take some time to study each platform you intend to utilize. Check out the competition.
Be sure you understand the written rules within the terms of service as well as any unwritten cultural norms so that you can fit in and reap the best results possible from your time there.
Engage Locally
For many brands, their location in the world has a big impact on their target audience and the kinds of outreach and social media campaigns they can have. If your brand is one with an emphasis on your location, be sure to engage with your area directly. Even if it’s just by tagging a photo at a local coffee shop on your Instagram, everyone loves to see businesses that engage with their communities.
If your brand is international or perhaps more focussed on a specific audience, try thinking about engaging directly with members of your audience or even other brands that work with similar audiences. Think of this as a collaboration. The right collaboration can work wonders for your brand building.
Try reaching out to local artists who are looking for more exposure for their work, talk to local vendors about working together to promote each other’s goods. The more engaged your brand is with other brands that have aesthetics and values that resemble your own, the more defined your own brand will become.
Be Prepared to Evolve
Growth and change are imperative in life. Just as they are an inevitable part of your personal life, these concepts also extend into business. You must be prepared for your brand voice to evolve over time.
You don’t need to make drastic changes or completely rebrand. Doing so would defeat the purpose of portraying a consistent tone and messaging. What is important is that you are prepared to make shifts as needed.
Your brand has to be ready to respond to social and cultural changes. Anything that affects your particular industry or niche may need to be addressed in the ways in which you portray your company. Refusing to adapt can reflect poorly upon your brand and have disastrous results.
In order for a business to stay successful, it must be trusted by its customers. One way to maintain that much-needed trust is to show you are listening, that you’re willing to make accommodations as needed and to grow with the times. Making adjustments will ensure your brand’s survival.
Conclusion
Of course, building your brand is going to take time and energy, but the process is invaluable as it can teach you a lot about what kind of business you want to become. The work you put into building your brand identity will go a long way in your professional endeavours as long as you remain true to the brand you’ve built and you always look for new ways to engage your brand identity.
Figure out what voice you want for your brand, and use these tips to help you develop that voice in an engaging way. These tips should help you to create a voice for your brand that is authentic and that portrays who your company is.
A well-executed brand voice is recognizable right away. It is trusted. Some tweaks will surely be necessary, but over time you will have created a presence that accurately reflects your brand.