Hello this is Brian Lewis.
It’s important for your target market to get to know and understand your brand so they can feel comfortable doing business with you and hopefully be a long-term client or customer of yours. You can help your customers achieve this by using a consistent brand voice throughout all of your touchpoints, which includes your website, blogs, ads, social media, even your email.
So what is a brand voice and why is it important? Well, it’s essentially the “what”, the “why”, and the “how” you’re going to be communicating with prospects and clients. Let’s talk about a couple examples.
For instance, Nike. You know “just do it”. Their style is very confident and assertive. On the other hand, Coca-Cola comes across more with a kind of a positive and friendly type feeling. You’ll notice that those companies do apply that that brand voice and tone throughout all of their advertising: their website, their communications. It helps customers connect with the brand and understand the brand much better.
So when you think about your brand voice, you can think about in terms of two major areas or components. The first component is what we call the character language in tone. I’ll give you some examples. Would you say that your communication style is more formal or informal, serious or funny,
traditional or techy, or understated or bold.
The second main area then would be the purpose of your communications, again thinking about your website and your blogs. Is the purpose of your communications to entertain, to educate, to sell? It’s likely going to be a little bit of all those. But you’re going to see that you’ll be leaning one way or the other and that again will help define what your brand voice and style is.
We’ve seen some interesting examples of companies taking very divergent approaches. One example is a case study page. We saw one company with a target market that prefers to be spoken to in a very informal manner. Their case study page had a panel heading that said “Some of our projects are hush hush” and then their call to action was “give me the deets'”. Very, very informal.
Then we saw a kind of a polar opposite example of a case study page from the Harvard Business Review. Their panel heading instead was “Learn about these real-world outcomes” and their call to action button was “View all case studies”. So you’re going to want to think about, as you really define and refine your brand voice and style, what is going to resonate best with your target audience.
Brand voice and tone are very important. They help shape your business persona and they help customers connect with your brand on an emotional level.
So to get the most out of your brand voice and style be sure that you’re using a consistent approach to all customer touch points and if you’d like to know more, please contact us, we’d be happy to help. Thank you.
