What is a Brand Voice: Why It’s Important and How to Create Yours

In a day and age where it’s really easy for your company to get lost in the shuffle of your competitors, creating a branding plan is absolutely essential. Finding a unique voice for your brand and using it effectively can have a huge impact for your marketing efforts. Let’s talk about what exactly having a voice for your brand means, why it’s important, and how to choose and create your company’s voice.

What is a Company or Business Brand Voice?

To start us off, let’s define what a voice is when it comes to your business. When you think about it, you as an individual likely already have a specific voice you use, whether it’s a funny tone you use, a sarcastic tone, an informative one, a laid back tone, whatever it is, you likely use it on a regular basis. This is also your personality.

You may even notice that you use a specific tone of voice for your business already and you didn’t even realize you’re doing it. Bravo! Basically, your brand’s voice is a set of adjectives that you use consistently to evoke a feeling you want your clients to feel when you speak to them, write emails to them, when they’re perusing your website, following you on social media, etc. Having your business’s voice and personality established will help you keep all of your content consistent to deliver a message that’s clear and concise to your clients.

Why is Finding your Brand’s Voice Important?

Once you’ve dialed in your ideal client, you want to know how to talk to them and then bring them to your business. In order to do this effectively, it’s best to find your voice which will then help you attract those ideal clients you want coming to you for your services or product.

I have also found from experience that your brand’s voice is going to help you be consistent in the emails you write to your clients, the way you speak to them on the phone, the way you communicate with them via text and really importantly, it’s going to help you portray the message you want across all of your marketing materials.

How to Choose Your Brand Voice

I recommend you start by pulling together some of your existing materials and see if you have any themes you’re already using. That’s a good start. Then after that, or while you’re reading through it all, start thinking about some of these questions:

• How is your business different from your competitors?
• What makes you BETTER than your competitors?
• What is your business’s story?
• What adjectives describe you as a business owner?
• What adjectives describe your business as a whole?
• If your business were a person, how would you describe it? What is your company’s personality?
• What feeling or message do you want to convey to your ideal clients when they interact with you?
• What feeling or message does your ideal client want to feel from you when they interact with you? (this is a really important part-to attract your ideal client, you have to know what they want)
• What three to four words would you choose after thinking through all of these questions to use as your brand’s voice?

Creating Your Chart for Easy Use and Sharing

I recommend using the chart found in this article t to create your voice because it’s easy to use, easy to share with other employees at your company, and easy to keep handy at your work space when you’re writing content or working with your clients.

I do want to explain the columns a bit so that you can fully understand how best to complete the chart.

• Column 1 will be each adjective you’ve decided to use
• Column 2 is for defining that term. What does this term mean to you and your business? It’s very possible that this term has a normal definition, but it’s very possible that it means something slightly different to you, or slightly different to your ideal client. This column is where you’ll decide exactly what the term means to you.
• Column 3 is to list out all the ways you WANT to use this term. These are generally the positive uses of the term.
• Column 4 is to list out all of the ways you DON’T want to use this term. No matter how positive an adjective is, there are still negative ways to use it. This is the column you’ll use to ensure you’re not using the term in a negative way. For example, every business wants to be professional. That’s generally a good adjective. However, there is a point where you can become so professional that you stop being personable. It’s also easy to be so professional that you don’t build a relationship with your clients, and you don’t want to do that.

Below is our business’s brand voice just so you can have an idea of what our brand’s voice is, and how we have defined and decided to use our terms.

5 Easy Steps to Define Your Business’s Voice

1. Gather your current materials and see if you already have an existing voice.
2. Think about how your business is different from your competitors and how you’re better.
3. Decide on 3-4 terms to use as your voice, terms that will set you apart from your competitors, and attract your ideal customers and audience.
4. Use our voice chart to define each term and explain the dos and don’ts of each term.
5. Write all of your website and marketing content using your new-found voice and put it to use!

 

Thanks so much for the read! Please leave a comment below to let me know if you’ve ever done an exercise like this, or if you find this helpful. I’ll be happy to respond to any questions you have as you work through this project too. It’s a fun one! Enjoy!