When brands interact with their audiences, every sentence, word, character, and image associated with that message is crucial. Audiences can perceive any given message as reflective of an organization as a whole. Therefore, how you tailor your brand voice requires careful thought and consideration.
What is Brand Voice?
Beyond logos, identity, and slogans, brand voice remains an oft-overlooked yet critical asset in communications. Unlike any of the brand assets mentioned above, where a quick rebrand can swap an aging color scheme for a cleaner look, brand voice can take years to shape and refine.
Brand voice can be a tool to engage deeper with your audiences, informing them about the services you provide and the values you care deeply about. As a result, brand voice remains a critical element in earning audience credibility and trust.
A successful brand voice is implemented consistently across your owned collateral. That means your website should sound like your social media posts and email blasts. You want audiences to have exposure to a unified front, one where they won’t think your channels are night and day different from each other.
How Do Audiences Interpret Brand Voice?
Brand voice hits deeper than more material marketing aspects. You can think of it as the essence of your brand, perhaps even its soul. Brand voice must be anchored to the values and missions foundational to your organization. Missing this step will yield messages that fall flat, as your audiences will quickly identify them as inauthentic.
Authenticity rules the day for customers, a vital segment of a brand’s stakeholders. For example, a 2019 study from Stackla found that 90% of customers said authenticity is important when deciding which brands they like and support.
Moreover, a 2023 report from Edelman found that 79% of the fledgling yet powerful consumers in Generation Z think it’s more important than ever to trust the brands they buy, more than any other generation surveyed.
There are plenty of instances where a company’s communications run in the face of brand voice and established values. Check out our blog on how brand voice plays a vital role in corporate social responsibility campaigns to learn more.
So then, how can a brand cultivate its voice to ensure its customers perceive it as authentic and trustworthy? To get there, brands will need to start at the beginning.
Developing Your Brand Voice
In message ideation and creation, brand voice needs to be the first stop on the journey. Well before your creative teams take a crack at fonts, color stories, and the like, your marketing team needs to vet the message itself and ensure it is consistent with your brand values.
Aligning your communications with your brand values and missions should feel somewhat natural. You should begin by identifying keywords that you think customers associate with your brand. If you’re in the finance game, you may think of “professional,” “courteous,” and “secure.”
Indeed, you hope that audiences perceive you as these ideal keywords. But do they? Some simple audience research can get you real data on exactly how your brand voice is heard.
Sweet, Sweet Data
Quantifying your audience’s emotions towards your brand may seem like an uphill battle, but it’s a relatively approachable exercise. In fact, audience research can provide insights on overall brand perception and how a brand’s messaging campaigns are being heard or not.
Developing a survey is one way to get more in-tuned with your audience. This questionnaire can ask your audiences directly their thoughts through short-answer responses. Some industries will have an easier getting responses than others.
For retailers, a QR code at the bottom of a receipt that promises a 10% discount upon survey completion can help. While in the finance industry, a survey link could be neatly packaged in a quarterly newsletter to great effect.
When exploring how communications campaigns are faring, social listening tools are an excellent way for brands to keep their fingers on the pulse. These tools can dig into social media and networking websites to report on and assess how people interact with and talk about your messages.
Interpreting Data and Existing Mindsets
Maybe you have some data on hand that illustrates your brand voice, either through audience research or social listening. Or perhaps you’re tapped into the conversation and have observed how your organization is perceived. In any case, there are action items ahead to churn this data into your brand voice refinery.
How are your audiences perceiving your brand? How closely are they tied to those keywords you identified before? If they seem to be aligned, your voice executes positively— your messages reinforce your brand values.
On the other hand, while misalignment with the ideal picture of your brand may seem negative, think of it as a great opportunity to fortify your organization’s foundation and messaging strategy.
Shortcomings often arrive due to an inconsistent voice utilized across owned channels. Try this: read aloud your website copy from your homepage. Next, go to your social media accounts and read your posts aloud. Does it seem like you’re hearing from two different companies? If so, you may have found a break in your brand voice experience. Remember, brand voice needs to be implemented consistently across all your assets to make it more recognizable for your customers.
Update, Refine, Test, Repeat
Your brand voice could also be weak in how you communicate with specific audiences. Say your brand deploys a laid-back, casual brand voice on your website and social media. While this is a perfectly valid approach for some companies, certain instances require you to button up that informal tone, such as when your support team communicates with a disgruntled customer.
Brand voice is not meant to be static, far from it. As vocabularies evolve, certain words, phrases, and even emojis fall in and out of favor. As a savvy marketer, you’ll need to gauge if specific messaging elements are still in vogue. Doing so will keep your brand voice on the cutting edge and not stuck in the comms dark ages.
Finally, you can effectively test messages on audiences to see if your brand voice is on target. These tests, such as social listening or surveys, can check if your voice is being received as intended, is recognizable to your audiences, and reflects your values.
As a living, breathing component of the business, brand voice can be tricky to nail down. At Longview Strategies, we have decades of experience in messaging strategies that help brand values consistently shine through in all communications.
Are you looking to audit or shake things up with your brand voice? Let’s start a conversation today.
