Susan Friesen

How to Define Your Brand Voice

When you are building a business, one of the most critical areas of focus is creating a brand identity – that is, what your company is and what it offers the customer. It sounds simple enough, but it’s layered with complexities.

3 Steps to Help You Create This Essential Part of Your Business Brand Identity

Creating your brand identity involves many different facets including the logo, taglines, website colours and brand voice.

Every brand has a voice. Your brand is unique, so your brand voice should be too. Your brand voice is the constant personality you use when communicating your message to the world.

Is your business all about you? Read our article: Embracing Your Personal Branding Uniqueness for Business Success

From digital advertisements to social media posts to product packaging, it’s important to have one consistent and unique brand voice across all your marketing materials. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a muddled message that won’t resonate with your customers on any level.

Here are some brand voice examples from well-known brands:
• Dollar Shave Club: quirky, casual and fun.
• Coca-Cola: friendly, optimistic and joyful.
• Nike: inspiring, powerful and positive.
• MailChimp: helpful, encouraging and funny.

No matter what you’re selling, you need to create an engaging brand voice that’s authentic to your values.

Here are 3 ways to make defining your brand voice easier:

1. Make your brand voice relevant.
Think about who uses your product or service. You want to define your brand voice to speak to your target audience and create an emotional connection to what you’re offering.

If your audience is millennials who love yoga, your voice is going to be different than if you’re targeting 40+ women shopping for clothing.

Some good questions to ask are:

1. How do your customers (or how do you want them to) define your brand identity?
2. What’s the greatest benefit your product or service provides to people?
3. How do you want people using your product or service to feel?
4. How does your product or service stand out from the competition?

Once you’ve answered questions like these, you can…

2. Start with three words.
What three words do you want to reflect the personality of your brand? Three is the number commonly used by organizations to define brand voice. Choosing more will just duplicate what you already have or water down your core characteristics.

Here are some examples of words to describe brand voice:

• Enthusiastic
• Confident
• Helpful
• Innovative
• Inspiring
• Fun
• Authoritative

Next, choose limitations for each word. For example, confident but not cocky. Funny but not silly. This will help you further define your brand identity and write targeted brand copy (or give your writers a guide when they’re writing your copy).

3. Implement your brand voice everywhere.
If you’re going to keep your brand voice consistent, you need to ensure every piece of writing reflects your brand’s personality.

This means looking at your website, emails, social media accounts, and print materials such as business cards. You may have to rewrite older copy to reflect your voice or create totally new content, but don’t skip this important detail.

Imagine getting an email with no defined brand voice or a totally different brand voice than the one you get on a company’s website – it’s jarring, confusing and doesn’t evoke a feeling of trust.

These three steps will help you define your brand voice as part of your bigger brand identity. Once you’ve defined your brand’s identity, you can start speaking to your customers in an authentic and compelling way.

Article Tags: Brand Voice, Brand Identity

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