Finding and Using Your Brand Voice
Studies have found that consumers prefer brands with strong, unique personalities and great storytelling. Establishing a strong brand voice is truly the secret to making your brand come to life.
However, finding, developing, and most importantly maintaining yours can be a challenge. Luckily, the experts at Radiant Marketing have assembled some tips on creating a brand voice that will resonate with your audience, as well as some of our favorite brand examples.
What is a Brand Voice?
First, let’s learn the basics. Before diving into how to find and use your brand voice, it’s important to fully understand what a brand voice is.
A brand voice is simply the personality of your brand. Now, you may be thinking how can a brand have a personality? Between your website, emails, blogs, social media, and advertising there are hundreds of opportunities for your brand to take on a unique persona through both the written word and visuals.
Let’s take a look at some of our favorite examples of brands that let their unique brand voice shine.
Brand Voice Examples
Let’s take a look at a brand that has built a universally recognizable brand voice, focused on friendliness and positivity – Coca-Cola.
Between their happy-go-lucky advertisements, and uplifting marketing campaigns, Coca-Cola has successfully created a positive brand voice that is known around the world.
A great example of this is Coca-Cola’s Twitter which emphasizes its values of kindness and warmth, key identifiers of their brand voice.
On the flip side, a brand voice does not always have to be cheerful and positive. Sometimes brand voices that take on more witty and sarcastic personas can gain even more attention and recognition than positive brand voices. The most successful example of this is Duolingo.
Between its vaguely threatening tweets and hilarious interactions with followers on social media, Duolingo has created a brand voice that is a loveable jerk, gaining record-breaking exposure for their product. The Duolingo brand also strategically does not use punctuation or capitalization in a majority of their written communication, which gives a more human-like and personable feel to their brand.
Finding Your Brand Voice
Now that you have an idea of what a brand voice is and looks like, you can begin to find your own. One of the best ways to begin to create your brand voice is by utilizing the Brand Voice Chart from the Content Marketing Institute, which has 4 categories – Voice Characteristics, Descriptions, Do’s, and Don’ts.
When beginning this process, you should start by first filling in the voice characteristics you want your brand voice to have. If you are struggling with this, you should use your brand’s mission statement or values and choose voice characteristics that align with them.
Once you have identified the characteristics and described them, you can create “Do’s and Don’ts” based on how you want these characteristics to come across when writing any copy.
Below is an example of a Brand Voice Chart that has been filled in and can be shared with the company to help align strategy and maintain consistency.
If you are still struggling to identify voice characteristics for your brand voice, we recommend taking a look at your audience and brainstorming some characteristics of their demographics. For example, is your audience composed mainly of Gen Z or Millenials? Voice characteristics such as “casual” or “witty” may be able to parallelize with this audience and your brand voice.
When To Use Your Brand Voice?
When it comes to brand voice, the most important thing to remember is consistency. Any written copy or communication happening within the brand should reflect the brand’s voice. This can be achieved by ensuring any members of your team responsible for writing and communication have the Brand Voice Chart to refer to and ensure all content is uniformly written.
It’s also important to note that no matter how public or private, the opportunity to use a brand voice should never be missed. This will also help maintain cohesion. Everything from the copy of a mass marketing email, to a reply on Twitter should be aligned with the voice characteristics decided on within your Brand Voice Chart.
Let Radiant Marketing Help You Find Your Voice
Don’t do it alone! Radiant Marketing can help you find and use your brand voice! We have the knowledge and expertise to help you create a unique voice for your brand, and offer services to help you maintain consistency in your content.
Schedule a Discovery Session with us today to get started. We have years of experience creating original, engaging, and creative content for our clients that is tailored to their specific brand voice and audience.
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