Why Brand Voice and Tone is Critical to Earning a Legendary Brand Perception
Your business is a well-oiled machine, so what’s next? How can you improve your brand awareness and ultimately increase leads or sales? Start with reviewing your brand perception, aka the way you want your brand to be perceived by your existing and future customers.
What are the benefits to reviewing your brand perception? By taking the time to define and document our brand’s voice, tone, and style parameters, creating brand guidelines will empower you to create better content that resonates with the right people you’re trying to attract in three ways:
- Putting your audience first with your content.
- Encouraging best practices within your organization.
- Breeding consistency with your content across everything created.
All employees and members of an organization should be bought in to the brand guidelines and reference them in their daily roles and responsibilities. For example, sales reps may need more background or insight on the brand’s personality and style for in-person meetings or creating their own materials.
How to Create Your Brand Perception
Three components make up a brand’s perception including tone, voice, and style.
What is voice? Your brand voice is constant, never-wavering. It describes your brand’s unique personality and what people outside your organization think about your business.
What is tone? Your brand tone changes with the content, it is dynamic. Adapting to various internal and external content scenarios, it delivers on the promise of your voice based on the message you are trying to convey. For example, the tone of a blog post may be a bit more approachable than that of a case study, which is more results and bottom line-focused.
What is style? Brand style is how the content is written including grammar, formatting, capitalization, punctuation, and more.
Is this type of messaging what your brand should be using? ➝
Establishing Brand Tone
Tone varies based on the message you are trying to convey.
Example: If your brand voice is casual, approachable, and
direct – your tone for a product announcement could be playful with fun words
or images, call out the benefits in a direct matter, even call out how the
product is better than others on the market.
Wendy’s has built a legendary social media presence through their direct and witty tone.
Denny’s uses fun imagery to capture their audience’s attention while promoting their passion for giving back.
Steps to Establishing Brand Tone
- Review core values, mission statement, value proposition, uniques, etc. Ground yourself in the type of business you want to be and put down on paper.
- Establish attributes your tone should and should not represent. We like to use the list below as a starting point. What words does your business identify best with? Who do you not want to be and what should you avoid?
- Document a list of phrases, taglines, and words that represent your brand and can be matched with your brand’s tone to align with your messaging and audience.
- Review your customer base and audience
- How would they respond to your selected tone?
- How do they interact with you in email, social media, your website, etc.
- Establish tone and voice guidelines in a document that all employees can reference. This brand guideline may include:
- Core Values, Mission Statement, Uniques, Core Purpose, etc.
- Your brand’s voice
- Your brand’s tone
- Common taglines, phrases, words, etc. that represent your brand architecture
- Style guidelines – grammar, punctuation, formatting, etc.
Next Steps
Now that you have a detailed document describing your brand voice, tone and overall desired perception, it’s time to get to work! Start creating content that aligns with the voice and tone you identified and start gauging how your audience reacts. Make changes along the way as you find the best approach to serve your customers and gain the best engagement.
Still unsure where to start? Our expert navigators can help guide you through our roadmap to establishing quality brand messaging. Contact us to start your marketing adventure over coffee or cocktails!
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Faith Hagen
Faith graduated from the University of Sioux Falls in 2018 with a Business Administration and Marketing degree. Her passion for creativity has driven her to explore interior design and teaching before finding her niche in digital marketing. She is passionate about meshing creativity and technology to develop campaign strategies and building websites. Faith has experience delivering WordPress and Magento website projects and is considered the expert on the team in content creation/writing. In her free time, Faith enjoys watching sports, spending time outdoors, and playing with her dog, Thor.