Business Benefits
Establish a consistent voice that represents your brand’s values and personality.
Examine your mission statement and identify your brand’s values.
Your brand’s purpose will heavily influence how your brand will present and express itself across all platforms. Begin with the core beliefs of your brand to better match your brand voice to your brand’s personality.
For example, Dove’s brand mission states that they aim to inspire beauty, confidence, and body positivity through their work. These values can be recognized across all of their brand’s messaging, such as their #NoDigitalDistortion campaign.
Study your target audience and describe their personality based on their behavior, interests, and demographic information.
Research your target audience by observing your existing and ideal customers in person or online. To get more details, refer to your social media or website analytics to get demographic data and identify common interests among your target audience.
For example, if much of your target audience are female college students who own dogs and are interested in entrepreneurship, you can describe their personalities as passionate, playful, and ambitious.
Choose at least three adjectives that align with your brand’s values and match your target audience’s personalities.
Consider brand voice characteristics that will both reflect your mission statement and complement the personalities of the people you are trying to reach. For example, if your target audience takes a playful approach to life, you may want to match that by incorporating humor into your brand voice.
Make a brand voice chart with the column headers Brand Voice T
Consider creating your chart using a tool that’s easily shareable with your team. Use Google Drive or PDF files you can email to everyone. Consider using a template for this chart instead of starting from scratch. Plan to add the completed chart to a style guide or handbook that your whole team can easily access.
Fill in the Description column of your brand voice chart by briefly elaborating on each brand voice trait to provide more business context.
If your brand strongly values incorporating business practices that positively impact the environment and one of your brand voice traits is passionate, you can elaborate by saying, We’re passionate about finding innovative ways to conduct business while placing sustainability at the forefront of everything we do.
Fill in the Do and Don’t columns on your brand voice chart to accurately reflect important elements in your messaging.
For example, if casual is one of your traits, you may add our brand voice should be laid-back and conversational or use simple and easy-to-understand language under the Do column. Under the Don’t column, you may specify that your brand voice should not use overly technical language or take too serious a tone.
Share your brand voice guidelines with your team to ensure consistency in all messaging and customer engagement efforts.
These guidelines should be given directly to each member of your team, especially those who create your content, run your marketing channels, maintain your web pages, and handle customer service. Keep your brand voice guidelines somewhere easily accessible for your team and any future contractors or freelancers your business may hire.
Review your brand voice characteristics and guidelines quarterly or bi-annually and determine whether any adjustments are needed.
Your target audience and market can change over time, so it’s important to assess and revise your brand voice periodically, and make any necessary changes in your messaging. Analyze your brand voice in conjunction with the performance of your content and any changes in your target audience’s personalities.
Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T11:25:16Z