How do you ensure that the messages you send to customers are memorable? Does your brand make a holistic impression on them? Answering the questions positively begins with defining your brand voice. The question is, how do we accomplish this tricky goal?
As important as your products and services are, the way you communicate with your customers is just as important. You can’t go unnoticed if you project a strong and memorable brand voice that makes people pay attention.
At Accentuate Web Design and Marketing, are we engaged in designing beautiful and engaging websites for our clients with a holistic approach. We have in-house specialists who are experts in graphic design, branding, and social media management, designed to help your brand establish its voice through consistent visual and written mediums.
Having a brand voice is an essential part of your company’s marketing strategy that helps in keeping your target audience engaged.
There’s a lot of confusion when it comes to a brand’s voice, personality, and tone. But the thing to keep in mind is that all are so intertwined that their distinction can’t be set in stone. What’s important is keeping these characteristics in mind in your communication practice.
To clarify these distinctions:
- Brand Voice – is the consistent representation of your brand’s personality and showing the world what you believe in.
- Brand Tone – is an adaptable quality that adapts to current situations and the target audience you’re talking to. Your tone sets the perception in the way you communicate to everyone around you.
- Brand Personality – is your brand’s distinct character compared to your competitors. It defines how your brand communicates with your audience.
These three distinctions make up how your target audience/s identifies who you are. Their combination creates the connection between you and your customer.
You may not realise it, but at the very beginning, your brand already has a voice. All you have to be aware of is, what it is for you to change and evolve. Evaluate your content, what tone does it impart? Are there phrases that you keep using again and again?
What is a Brand Voice?
A brand voice is how your business speaks to your audience and the world, and when used properly, it has the power to show who you are, what you stand for, and what it is you’re trying to accomplish.
Your brand voice is the personality behind the business and sits at the core of how you build a relationship with your customers. Similar to the personality of your closest friend or acquaintance, it is as unique as the business it belongs to. In essence, it represents the main goals and values of the business in a way that is easily recognisable.
For your brand voice to be effective, it must be distinctive; it must be recognisable as belonging to your specific brand. It is for this reason that developing a consistent, compelling brand voice that reflects your brand can help you stand out from the crowd and cut through the noise of the marketplace.
Why is a Brand Voice Important?
It is easy for marketers to slip into clichéd communication styles, making their messaging sound unauthentic, even when they have the best intentions. Brand voices make each company recognisable in a sea coming from different streams of information.
A distinct brand voice helps a business create better connections with its customers. Once a customer feels connected to a brand’s story, they often remain loyal to that brand. What this means for you is that you’ll be able to spend less time and money on acquiring new customers and convincing them to convert.
Another importance of a brand voice is that what you say and how you talk about your brand shapes its identity. A brand identity can have a strong influence on a customer’s buying decisions.
Along with that voice, you have to make sure it remains consistent on every digital marketing platform you are on, be that your website, social media, press release, or email marketing.
What is a Brand Tone?
A brand voice is not all about what you say, but it also covers how you say it. A brand tone of voice is the mood or emotion you convey in messages through specific word choices and writing style. In a nutshell, it is the way you express your brand voice.
In a study by the Journal of Interactive Marketing says that the tone of voice used by firms can influence purchase intentions on social media. When you’re representing a company or an individual on the internet, it can be tough to control your tone of voice.
Why is a Brand Tone important?
Your brand’s tone of voice affects how you communicate with your audience and how they perceive what you’re saying. A customer’s entire perception of a brand is significantly influenced by how they are addressed and spoken to during the introduction stage.
When it comes to brand tone, the focus is specifically on what the message sounds like and how it is conveyed. Furthermore, tone can be adjusted based on the context and the channel you’re exposing your brand to.
Regardless of the channel you use, your brand’s tone of voice should be distinctive, recognisable, and unique, to ensure that your messaging rises above the digital noise and makes a long-lasting impression on potential customers.
You can develop and cultivate a combination of tones that will best suit your target audience in the channels they frequent.
What is a Brand Personality?
A brand personality is a set of attributes that humanise your brand. It is how a consumer would describe your brand if it were a person.
Communicating your brand voice and tone is extremely important. But just like an individual – your business has its distinct personality. These are the human characteristics and traits that your consumers can relate to.
Your brand personality is the foundation of your brand tone and style you use in all your content and style in advertising your brand.
Why is Brand Personality important?
Almost everywhere you look, brands compete with each other to resonate authenticity. Therefore, if you cultivate an attractive brand personality, it keeps your consumers feeling concerned by your behaviour and values.
Additionally, they will feel they are talking with a person, which generates an attachment to your brand. A well-cultivated brand personality helps to maintain or generate an edge in the marketplace.
How can your Brand Personality come to life?
A brand’s place is much like how a human’s personality is. Much like a human, the fruitfulness of their interaction with others is determined by how well they communicate, which they can implement throughout their marketing.
You can bring your brand personality to life by answering the following questions:
What is your brand’s energy level?
There is no question that to fare well online and stand out from the crowd, your brand needs to have life. A brand’s energy is a holistic measure of the power of your brand. Unless your brand is among the few exceptions, it needs energy!
A brand with energy has high visibility. With high visibility, it will be among the brands that come to mind when customers consider a purchase. Additionally, a highly visible brand drives differentiation with its competitors is perceived as trustworthy and provides great quality and innovation.
Strong brand messaging and consistent visuals create a trustworthy and recognisable brand energy, which strengthens your message and illuminates your brand identity.
What is your brand’s dialect?
Defining your brand’s dialect ensures consistency. A brand dialect checks the words you use, even the images you use to define your purpose, your tone, or your products and/or services.
One of the most effective and straightforward ways a brand understands its audience is by talking to them. If you come to them in a language they fully grasp and understand, it’s the most effective way to get to know your audience.
What’s the point of this? You get to understand their behaviours better, and customers do love brands that are involved.
What is your brand’s persona?
A person makes efforts to present oneself to the world, no different from what a company must do. You must make the effort to present your goals, how you present yourself to your customers, and what you can offer.
Building a brand persona is part of a complete online strategy and an important tool in creating a successful online brand. A good brand persona is one that people can visualise as someone they know. Think of your brand persona as the character that best represents what you are all about.
What is your brand’s attitude?
People are motivated by feelings and emotions. When consumers make a purchase, they most frequently rely on feelings such as comfort and their trust in a business in addition to reasoning.
You create a strong perception of your brand among your target audience, with a focus not on what you sell, but on the sentiment you bring into it, which is what makes what you offer more appealing to buyers.
Your brand attitude personalises your company’s image and increases customer loyalty.
What is your brand’s overall mood?
If you have come this far, you now get a feel of how much goes into building a brand. You need to decide who you are, what you’re about, what kind of message you want to impart, and how you impart your message.
The words you use can create a lasting impact on your target audience, but you can enhance this further and set the mood by communicating your message visually. This covers the way you use colours, images, text, or any other themes, visual, design, and interactive elements you use to show the world who you are as a brand and the kind of message you are putting out there.
In a nutshell, your brand’s overall mood represents your product’s tone and aesthetic style that is inviting and appealing to your target audience. Our process at Accentuate Web Design and Marketing involves collaborating with our clients to exchange ideas and refine the results until both of you are satisfied with the result.
Conclusion: Finding your voice, tone, personality, and overall brand identity.
It does take a lot of work to portray your brand’s emotion and tone and make it appear cohesive and professional to your target market. Yes, it can be overwhelming if you do it on your own. It is doable but can be quite frustrating if you have no idea where to start. For this reason, many companies opt to perform such projects in collaboration with capable digital marketing experts.
If you need help finding your voice, setting the tone, building your brand’s personality and establishing your overall brand identity and digital marketing strategy, it is best to get in touch with our experts. Book a digital marketing session to perfect your business’s digital marketing process, make your business name known and make it a trustworthy and winning brand.
