How can you find a brand voice that resonates with your audiences and reflects your company?
What is a brand voice? In essence, it’s the building block that sets you apart from other brands, a set of characteristics that your audiences can perceive in your messaging. You’ll want to aim for one voice pushing a consistent image of your brand instead of multiple fragmented ones. It’s about making sure that all components of marketing, the style guide, key messages and marketing material work towards reflecting this brand voice.
Related: How to Build Brand Trust on Social Media
Here are some practical tips for identifying and leveraging your brand voice on social media.
Make it Unique
While keeping it authentic, you should always strive to stand out from competition. What is it that makes your brand and product different? Focus on your specific set of qualities and make use of your best-performing content.
You may even consider using a template for jotting down your key qualities and wishes. As you fill them in, think about the tone you’re setting, and whether it reflects your brand truthfully. Be consistent with this tone in the content you produce, whenever you share it on social media.
Think Audience Needs
Ragardless of channel, whatever type of content and marketing you do online should always factor in audience needs. You need to make sure your content is of value to your readers to attract them to your brand in the first place, and then draw them into the product or service you offer.
Here are some cool writing goals and principles to consider, as revealed by MailChimp’s Content Style Guide. Make it useful, be truthful, and (respectfully) educate people on something you’re the expert in. Once you've narrowed down your style and strengths, seek out niche social media sites where you really have a chance to stand out.
Keep Refreshing it
Whatever methods and tools you use to put your brand voice forth online, you need to revisit and adjust it from time to time. Your brand voice may change, as the organization and circumstances evolve. Social media sites' algorithms and criteria for gaining visibility may also change quite quickly.
Remember to measure sentiment around your brand and content. Use, for example, a content curation and employee engagement tool that allows you to measure how your content is performing across audiences, and revise your branding and content strategy against actual performance.
Encourage Employees to Participate
This shouldn’t be a question of allowing but encouraging employees to create and distribute content for the brand. Employees make up the brand and are the most accurate reflection of the company’s core values and culture. If they share content on social media about the brand, their networks can spot this, and this in turn can snowball into something bigger.
There are plenty of options available for employee content creation, whether you encourage employees to write for the company blog, set up their own blog or use an Employee Advocacy tool that supports employees in actively participating in content marketing on social media.
Keep in mind the practical aspects of building a brand voice and the big picture of who you are as a brand, and let loose!
