Can You Hear Me Now? Your Organization’s Voice Speaks Louder Than Words
The way your brand sounds is just as important as the way it looks. It’s easy to understand why the visual aspects of a brand are important for initially drawing customers and clients to your business, but how do you keep them after that? Short answer: authentic communication. By communicating through a distinct language and tone, better known as your brand voice, you have a better chance at forming a connection and keeping the right customers and clients around.
What exactly is a Brand Voice?
Brand voice is how your brand shares its personality with its audience. A clearly defined brand voice includes the tone, word choice and attitude behind your messaging. These are important pieces of your brand that are meant to help connect people with both the personality of your brand and your brand narrative.
When you establish a clear, consistent brand voice, it is easier to build trust authentically with your audience. 88% of consumers say that authenticity is a major factor in what brands they choose to support (Stackla, 2021). Customers that have developed a bond and feel that a brand cares about them are also over 50% more valuable to the organization as a “fully connected customer” (Harvard Business Review, 2015). Forming an emotional connection and trust with a brand is done through consistency and care, similar to personal relationships. Using your voice to showcase the personality behind your organization gives you the opportunity to form a bond where your customers and clients are more likely to become loyal to your brand.
Discovering your brand voice helps to connect with your audience but also guides your entire team to consistently communicate on all platforms (email, social media, advertising, etc.) This way your brand stands out and your customers know what to expect.
Brand Voice vs. Tone of Voice
Your brand voice may stick to a specific tone in most of its content, but it can change slightly based on the material being shared. The difference between voice and tone is your brand personality (voice) will always stay the same.
Think of how you interact with others on a daily basis. You are yourself in every interaction (your personality), but your tone may change depending on who you’re speaking to and why or what you’re speaking about. Would you talk with your boss the same way you would talk to your best friend? Well… maybe you would, but that’s not always recommended.
At HAVEN Creative®, we take the quality of our work very seriously, but we definitely don’t take ourselves too seriously. Our brand voice combines our no-nonsense approach to work ethic with our love of laughing so hard that our face hurts! This helps showcase our true personality. We make it clear that we are here to work hard but that we’re also fun creatives. You can be sure that we’re going to imbed the process with positivity for everyone! Take our brand ethos as an example:
Good Example
Because marketing is full of B.S. and buzzwords and it’s hard to know what kind of agency you need or don’t need, we believe the best thing we can do to help our clients is to help them become experts in their own communications. By making them a maven, we can ensure they have the skills needed to make the most of limited resources, changing industry trends, and navigate the never-ending sea of agencies. We do better when our partners and clients succeed, so it feels only natural to make sure they are best equipped to tell their stories and achieve their goals.
Bad Example
There are a lot of marketing agencies out there, but we’re the best because we make sure you understand your marketing needs.
In the bad example, the word choice and tone exemplify a haughty attitude that we really cannot stand for ourselves. Our voice is meant to be positive, confident and empowering. These are the emotions we want you to feel when you work with us!
How to Build Your Brand Voice
When developing your brand voice, consider asking yourself these two main questions:
- Who is your target audience?
- What are your core values?
By looking at these answers, you’ll be able to determine how you would speak to your target audience. This allows you to then reflect your core values in your communications in a better way. To consistently stay on brand, you need to find your organization’s sweet spot between tones such as:
Formal and Casual (too formal and you risk sounding indifferent, too casual and you risk sounding inexperienced)
Respectful and Irreverent (too respectful may seem like inauthentic flattery, too irreverent can come off as offensive)
Funny and Serious (too funny = unprofessional, too serious = stale)
Enthusiastic and Matter-of-Fact (too enthusiastic = irritating, too matter-of-fact = lacking personality)
As branding experts, we love sharing knowledge. We want to help you market your business in a way that works for you with the resources you have. Since we love making mavens of others, we’ve created a free downloadable guidebook (cheat sheet!) for you to work through each aspect of branding for your organization called the “ABC’s of Branding”. If you still feel like you need a helping hand, you can also Contact a HAVEN Maven™ today so we can work with you to get your business on track to where it needs to be.