Keep A Consistent Brand Voice In All Your Content Marketing Material

What Is Brand Voice?

It's How You Say The Things You're Saying.

Your brand voice is one of the most important aspects of your content marketing. Don't do what the majority of business people do and leave the development and care of your brand voice up to chance.

Brand voice is what your customers, leads and prospects respond to when they experience your brand. If you imagine your business as an imaginary person, you'll recall that person has a personality (positioning) and character traits (branding) that work together to create a distinct, unique presence in the marketplace.

Continue to imagine that person talking to you. Say you're at a conference and this stranger walks over to you, introduces themselves and engages you in conversation. What would you expect to happen during that initial meeting?

I think it's fair to say you'd want to know why the person is talking to you, and you would be making a lot of decisions based on a lot of input - from speech mannerisms, clothing style and estimated cost of the clothing, shoe style, jewellery, complexion and hair style, voice tone and sentence structure and intonation and pronunciation, and maybe even a hint of an accent. All of that is giving you clues to whether you want to continue the conversation or not. You're deciding whether this person might be able to solve your problem (you're at a conference, remember), and you're deciding if they're trustworthy.

What a brand does is similar, it conveys to strangers confidence and trustworthiness.

Reverse the above scenario: now you're on the internet searching for a specific problem-solver. You're looking for clues in all the search results for the right place; you're searching for clues on the websites you visit that they understand your problem and are able to fix it.

The only difference between this and the conference is that we're more aware of judging people and are slightly more aware of the clues that direct our perceptions. When you visit a website you make snap judgments about quality, professionalism and trustworthiness, even though you may not be aware of the cause of your judgement.

The stronger your brand is the deeper and more personal the brand experience is. One aspect of brand strength is how closely aligned positioning and branding are. Another aspect of brand strength is a well defined and planned brand voice. It's knowing how to say things, not just what to say.

Every published word, color and graphic and photo on your website conveys impressions and are a part of your brand voice. Have you actually taken the time recently to "see" your website and brand through the filter of brand voice?

There's quite a bit of confusion about what brand voice is. Some believe it's the mannerisms and local touch language that create brand voice. They would have you thinking this is a list of brand voice options:

• jest' plain folk copy
• down home personality copy
• you-you-you copy
• shouting copy
• quietly upscale descriptive copy
• image all the way copy
• touchstone copy
• narrative copy
• minimalist copy
• all the facts copy
• informational/educational copy
• snob appeal copy
• I'm the greatest copy
• plain vanilla copy

Do you see one major flaw in this kind of thinking? It's that these aren't actually voices, they're mannerisms.

They're not expressions of character.

Brand voice is about so much more...

Brand Voice Is How You Communicate

Get this straight and your content marketing elements will be remembered long after the readers has forgotten the actual words and messages in the elements.

Brand voice is the power of adding ideas, concepts, and thoughts to your brand, that both support and mold the brand character in productive ways that let the product value and corporate personality (positioning) shine through and become a base for the customer's perceptions of need and value.

Brand voice is the final differentiator in the struggle to make you and your stuff be the obvious choice to your customers, leads and prospects. Positioning starts the differentiation process by creating a personality for the business, branding extends the personality by giving it character and style, and brand voice demonstrates the unique qualities of the brand in the way the brand communicates and the what it communicates.

The Way Brands Communicate

There are myriad ways in which brands communicate, from the logo design and selection of color palette to packaging, to television commercials and online banner ads or free offers. Every medium is an expression of a different type. Today QR codes seem new, in a few years hip and trendy brands will have traded their QR codes for the next new thing, and QR codes will become mainstream, if they aren't already.

The way you choose to communicate determines the reception your brand will receive from your target audience. Your goal is to find, recruit, nurture and close new customers - to create a loyal customer base.

A carefully planned and rehearsed brand voice communicates on many different levels. What we're concerned with in content marketing is that every campaign element communicate the same qualities of confidence and trustworthiness that gives your campaign elements enough time to get read.

Part of planning the brand voice involves mapping and creating brand standards. You can find out more about brand standards through this link.

Call us today to get sales-ready lead creation campaigns started for shorter sales cycles. We'll get you started. You'll see results.

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