How to find your brand’s tone of voice
PARTNER: DPDK Branding Agency Rotterdam
For your company to create meaningful connections, it needs to be clearly heard. Through brand tone and voice, your audience will get to know and understand where you’re coming from, as you create a dialogue. Your tone of voice, or brand voice, helps you communicate effectively with customers, whether prospective or loyal ones. As with any business, you need to find your own identity. If you’re not a brand, you’re a commodity.
When it comes to presenting your brand, you must select the right tone and voice. The words you choose to communicate matter but pay close attention to their order, rhythm, and pace. Customers recognize the way they’re addressed, so they’ll perceive you as being reliable and understandable. Making a good first impression is crucial. You and your business have very little time, so present yourself appropriately. Don’t you want people to stick around?
Finding your brand’s tone of voice isn’t easy, but you need to give it a try. Perhaps these suggestions will come in handy.
Determine who has the expertise to define your tone of voice
The brand’s tone of voice can be defined by an in-house specialist. There’s no position in the organization that specializes in such matters, so who is responsible depends largely on your team’s expertise and areas of need. The in-house specialist can be a brand strategist, a creative director, or a content marketing strategist, just to name a few. They’ll be responsible for creating and enforcing the overall tone of voice.
If you want to complete the project quickly, consider hiring a branding agency, which will provide the right toolkit to embed your purpose, values, promises, positioning, and identity. Your brand’s tone of voice will be defined strategically and, most importantly, professionally. If you dream about growing big in the digital world, you should accept some help. To have effective customer communication, you must put your tone of voice into practice.
Exercises to help find your brand’s tone of voice
Take into account communication channels
Finding your brand’s tone of voice starts with getting to know who your audience is and choosing the right language to reach out to them. Carry out in-depth research and find out where your audience is. Millennials, for example, prefer Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. So, it would make sense to focus your efforts on these communication channels. This will have a big impact on your engagement. Needless to say, each one accepts a different tone of voice.
Know how your audience talks to one another
You have to speak the same language as your audience. You expect people to be intelligent, but not experts. This is precisely why, if you resort to a specialist language, you should take the trouble to explain it. Try to imitate the vocabulary of your audience to create a sense of belonging. Be and sound real. Avoid using fancy terms. It’s recommended to be casual and humorous. Create copies and stories that sound like those of your audience and address their problems.
Figure out what tones to use
It’s not uncommon to make changes in tone of voice. As a matter of fact, if you make announcements or prepare to address serious issues, flexibility is paramount. Your brand tone of voice can be:
Empowering and uplifting: The adverts are thought-provocative instead of sales-oriented. Encourage people to improve, excel, and achieve any goal.
Friendly, yet informative: Stick to a friendly façade. Influence, inspire and reassess the warmth context excludes. You can create question-based content, quizzes, etc.
Professional and ambitious: Define and refine your area of expertise. The more articles you write, the wider the audience will be. Ground discussions in terms that people most care about.
Weird, wacky, and irreverent: If you’re not afraid of the status quo, just be yourself. Take contrarian viewpoints or offer unexpected examples. Push beyond the traditional idea of a brand tone of voice.
Keep in mind that what works for one company doesn’t work for another.
Demonstrate your company goals, values, and mission
Before deciding what to write, pin down your goals, values, and mission. They’re the personality traits that make up the tone of voice. Not only will this help you communicate your message effectively, but also shape the community surrounding your brand. Think about why you set up the business in the first place. Why did you become an entrepreneur? Get back to that initial spark of creation. Show a more human side when communicating directly with people.
When you’ve written some content, read it out loud
To keep communication clear, establish a message architecture. More exactly, arrange the words (terms, phrases, or statements) hierarchically to convey priorities. Make up a list of adjectives used in your industry and sort them over into the following groups: who you are, what you’d like to be, and who you’re not. When you’re done writing some content, read it out loud. It's the best way to discover how your copy sounds to other people.
Revisit your brand’s tone of voice as your company changes
Change is vital to your company’s growth. Organizations of all sizes and stripes have to keep up with the times or they risk being left behind. Rather than focusing on stability and predictability, you should take action and realize your company’s full potential. As your company changes, it’s necessary to revisit your brand’s tone of voice. Gather your key content creators and communicators and come up with a good strategy. It’s time for a makeover.
If you’re going through a rebranding process (like updating your logo, website, etc.), update your tone of voice as well. Find out what tone of voice works for you and your audience. There are no explicit rules to adhere to, so you enjoy full liberty when it comes to making decisions. Don’t forget about the new competitors in the market. Your tone of voice should be distinct and recognizable. It would be bad if, say, a product launch would strike customers exactly the same way. Your brand’s tone of voice should stand out.
