4 Steps to Discover and Define your Brand Voice

Ciao Bella! Thank you for taking the time to read my blog. 👋

I’ve blogged quite a bit about Pinterest marketing and today I want to share some insight into a topic that relates to another field of online work that I’m involved in - content marketing. Today, I’m going to jump right into sharing with you the best way to define a unique voice for all your content. So let’s not waste any more time - let’s get started!

Why focus on your brand voice? 

So why is ensuring that you have a consistent brand voice important? Well, having a distinctive brand voice will allow your content to stand out instead of being drowned out in the noise of an overcrowded marketplace. Your brand’s tone of voice is also a reflection of your brand personality and helps you connect with your audience.

What does a brand voice consist of? 

Your brand voice consists of the language, words, and tone you use to communicate through your content and is a strong reflection of your brand personality and values. Your brand voice can be reflected in your website content, social media posts, emails, and any other content formats.

Now that we have a brief overview of why a brand voice is important and what it consists of, let's dive into the steps of uncovering your brand personality, and the different elements of your brand that you want to communicate to people.

4 Steps to define your brand voice: 

1. Perform customer research

Start by performing some comprehensive customer research with the goal of understanding your customer’s needs, motivations, pain points, and triggers that get them to purchase your product or service. You want to try to discover what drives them to make their purchases and how your products or offerings fit into this overall picture. You can start by first looking at any data you already have on your customers. Use data on customer demographics, customer purchases, and any interactions you've had with customers either directly or through online channels like social media. In addition to data you collect passively and through casual customer interactions, you can also conduct more formal email surveys, install website pop up questions, look at blog and social media comments, and examine your client testimonials. 

Whenever possible, seek out and ask for direct encounters with your customers like face to face meetings and one on one calls, since these are going to give you the most authentic information and real-world examples of language that your customers already use.

2. Identify your core values

Your next step is to assess and identify your core values. Every business needs to know it’s core values so that you can reflect them in every aspect of your business operations. Core values are an essential part of the consistency of your brand. Customers expect to see and feel them in all your communications. 

Some examples of core values might be a commitment to quality, innovation, trust, accountability, high level of integrity, excellent customer service, or anything else that you feel strongly about and that drives all your business decisions.

When you've identified your values, remember that strong core values have to be sustainable, constant, motivating, personal, and applicable. They shouldn't be abstract concepts or impossible ideals. Again, if you're not sure, look at how your business already operates. What are its strengths? What do customers come to expect from you already? What sorts of values were in your mind when you first started your business?

3. Describe the personality of your brand

Step three is to describe the personality of your brand. Start by brainstorming a huge list of adjectives that describe who you are as a business. Pick these adjectives as if your business were an actual person you'd met and gotten to know a bit. 

A good way to brainstorm is to think of words or phrases that describe your business and how you want your customers to feel when they encounter your brand or use your products. For example, if you consider your brand to be caring, then you’d want to leave your customers feeling that you care about them personally. If your brand personality is empowering, it might be about your customers feeling that they can achieve new things they weren't able to before. 

Once you have a large list of descriptive words and adjectives, start narrowing them down to the top three that define your personality as a brand. Try out each word, see what image it suggests in your mind. Find the words or short phrases that really sound like you, but that also reflect the research you've done with your customers and the core values you just defined. In other words, which of the keywords or phrases most accurately reflect the feelings your customers already report experiencing and which ones reflect the way you want your customers to feel about your brand? Keep narrowing down and prioritizing your list until you've identified the top three adjectives or short phrases that are the most important feelings you want to elicit in your customers.

These are going to form the initial foundation for defining the specifics of your brand voice and tone.

4.  Identify your differentiators

Finally, you need to uncover your differentiators. Now that you know the core values and personality you want to communicate to your customers, you need to find a way to make your brand voice unique and to set it apart from your competitors. Look at all of your data, ideas, and distinct things that make your business different from others. Make a list that describes your differences point by point. The research you did on your competitors is going to be useful here. For each core value or personality keyword you identified to describe how you are different from your competitors, you can incorporate your differentiator into the tone and language of your content in order to cut through the noise of all the businesses in your market, and show that you are truly a unique person and a unique brand.

As a quick recap, all of the first steps I talked about regarding your customers, your values, your personality, and your differentiators help you determine the voice you're going to use and all of your content. 

Your next step is to drill down into the specifics of the actual wording, phrases, and other languages you'll use or avoid in your content, no matter where you publish it. 

Keep an eye on my blog for future content marketing tips and tricks!