Why your brand needs its own tone of voice

If you’ve read the first blog, you’ll hopefully now have a persuasive value proposition in place and a clear idea of your audience personas. So, what’s next? Well, now you need to define how you speak to that audience in a way that they engage with and clearly conveys all that’s great about your offering. And that’s where your brand tone of voice comes in. Every communication a customer or prospect receives from your brand should sound consistent and clearly spell out why they need your product over a competitor. It needs to be so consistent, that even if they read an email or an advert without seeing your brand name or logo, they’d instantly recognise your brand.

If you’ve never done it before, defining how your brand sounds can be a strange concept to get your head around. Here are some handy hints from the team at Brewd to help you through the process…

1) Do your research

Read around to see what others in the market are doing. What do you like and don’t like about their style? Are there any brands you aspire to be like? If so, what is it you think they’re doing well – pick key learnings from their work and add your own USP to it. It’s not copying, it’s just a case of looking for inspiration and then making it better. 

Once you’ve looked at what others are doing, revisit any communication materials your brand has already produced – be it an email to a customer, web page or social media posts. Which of these pieces are distinctive to your brand and what you offer? If they’re too generic or too similar to a competitor, put those in one pile and those materials that you think best represent your brand in another.

2) Sum it up in a word

In the brand workshop, you will have come up with single, persuasive adjectives to describe your brand’s attributes. (Can’t remember this? Revisit our first blog to refresh your memory.)

Go back to these and look at them in relation to the copy examples you’ve selected in the step above. Do they still stand? Do they still sum up how you want your brand to be perceived?

3) Put it in writing

Now take these key words that you feel best describe your brand and its personality and write them down for others to refer to. Brand voice charts are a clear way of doing this; they include a description of the word and how it should/shouldn’t be used in relation to the brand.

For example:

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4. Share it with the team

Once these tone of voice guidelines have been set and agreed with all key stakeholders, the next step is to make sure that anyone who produces content for the brand understands them. Set aside some time to take them through your new guidelines, so that no matter who writes for the brand, be it an external copywriter or members of the team that contribute to blogs, they all sound the same.

And finally…

As your business grows and develops, so will your tone of voice. Regularly check in on your tone of voice chart to see if it still applies to your business, and if your content curators feel these words are still working for the brand. If they’re not, revisit, tweak and adjust them, until the tone of voice fits your business of today.

We hope you’ve found this blog useful, but if you still need help establishing a tone of voice for your brand, then get in touch.

Next in the series…      

The next blog in our mini-series, “How to build a strong B2B brand”, takes us through developing a visual identity for your brand and the importance of getting it right!

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