Insights From Our Experts
Every brand has a distinct personality. Yes, even yours. We call it a brand voice. It’s how you sound when you’re communicating with customers and it encompasses your tone, style, and messaging across platforms.
You can also think about it this way: It’s who your brand would be if it showed up as a guest at a neighborhood barbecue. Would it be laughing and cracking jokes, or would it be more of a wallflower? From casual conversations to more pointed questions, you could probably predict how your brand would interact with other people because you know how your brand would interact with your target audiences. (A hint regarding Liger’s brand: Ours would be the center of attention, confidently telling a story that makes it stand out from its fellow guests).
But why does brand voice matter? And how do you build a strong, consistent voice that allows you to champion your marketing challenges and be known in your industry?
It’s All in the Branding
Brand voice is a critical component of your values, your visual identity, and your overall tone. A strong voice is shaped by strong brand values as the two work in tandem to build a real personality that remains clear and consistent no matter where your customers encounter your content out in the wild.
Consider the beauty brand Glossier, for instance. Their voice is conversational and authentic, striving to connect with customers the same way you’d connect with a friend as you swap mascara in the bathroom. The approach is clean, simple, and effective, producing a level of emotional intimacy and comfort that encourages customers to make repeat purchases.
After all, voice is crucial to establishing brand recognition and loyalty. Slack is another great example of this. Their focus on collaboration and user feedback shows in both their product and their messaging, delivering a continuous feedback loop of positive customer interactions (hello, loyalty) and, on the flip side, demonstrating that their brand’s values and voice are more than empty propositions. Slack is genuinely committed to improving peoples’ work lives through digital communication and their voice plays a serious supporting role.
Finally, your brand voice should complement your logos, colors, and fonts as they appear across platforms and provide the kind of consistency that allows your brand tone to be flexible, shifting as needed to convey the appropriate level of emotion or formality depending on the context.
Remember: You’re more than just another bland, boring iteration of your competitors. You’re YOU, and with a strong, consistent brand voice, you can truly shine and reach your customers in a meaningful way.
Telling Your Brand Story
Now, it’s time to execute. Here’s what we recommend to create (or perhaps recreate) a stellar brand voice and elevate your marketing strategy from script to story:
Audit and Review
This will involve assessing how your brand has changed over time, how well your current messaging aligns with your values, plus how and where inconsistencies have crept into your different marketing channels. A true audit will help you create a side-by-side portrait of your brand and your audience, highlighting what resonates and what just falls flat. And don’t forget about your company’s mission statement! Your goals should inform your brand voice on a foundational level, giving you the knowledge and power to form your brand’s true personality.
Research and Compare
Shying away from competitors won’t do you any favors. A careful analysis of the language, emotions, and themes driving your competitors’ messaging could inspire you to rethink your own approach, and you may even encounter brand voice mistakes you’d rather not make yourself.
Research also extends to your audience. Who are they? What do they care about? Basic demographics and lifestyle factors will influence the content and messaging they’re most receptive to and give you a better idea of how your voice should sound. Developing a customer persona is a particularly effective way to do this.
Decide Who You’re Not
How else can you decide who you actually are? This process can be as simple as putting together a list of descriptive words and adjectives that you would never use to describe your brand. From there, you can start building a voice that feels authentic and aligned with the characteristics that represent your purpose and your product on every level.
Decide on Some Guidelines
Now we’re getting official. Once you feel confident that you’ve identified your brand voice, you can create a set of guidelines that can continually be referenced to develop marketing materials. We recommend including a statement that describes your brand, three to five characteristics that most fundamentally describe your brand, examples of what these characteristics would actually sound like in messaging, and solid examples of tone and voice in action.
B2B Branding? We’ve Got It in the Bag
We know how passionate you are about your brand, and yet it can still be difficult to identify a distinct, powerful brand voice that represents what you believe in and what you’ve set out to accomplish. Thankfully, Liger can help with that. In fact, we’re subject matter experts in all things branding. We understand that having a strong brand voice is about more than just being heard. It’s about being remembered.
So, what do you want to be remembered for? With a combination of compelling content, social media storytelling, voice and tone guidelines that speak directly to your customers, and more, we can help you craft a brand voice that feels etched in stone. Reach out today to get started on your brand’s story.
