Why Brand Voice is Important (And How To Build One)
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When you’re building a brand, a lot of time and energy often goes towards your logo and brand colours.
And while the visual appeal of your brand is a critical element in attracting your tribe, your brand personality is made up of more than just pretty pictures.
I would argue, that the most important element of building a strong brand personality, is your brand voice. In an ideal world, you would actually define your brand voice first and then make sure that this is expressed within the visual representation of your brand.
In this article, we’re going to look at what brand voice is, why it’s inherently connected to your brand values, and how you can get started with documenting a brand voice that will help you build a stronger brand story.
Why are Brand Personality and Brand Voice so important?
Brand Personality is one of the six foundational elements of building a brand story strategy.
It’s how your brand speaks and behaves. It’s how you sound (or speak) in any type of communication, whether it’s written or verbal.
And the most critical part of building an authentic brand personality is building an authentic brand voice.
If I took away your logo and brand colours from all your content, and stripped it back to just the words, would your clients or customers still be able to tell that the content belonged to your brand?
If not, then it’s time to get to work on building your brand voice.
Yes! You should document your Brand Voice!
Here’s why.
It makes your marketing message stronger
Plenty of brands get away without having a documented tone of voice. But the fact is, that once you have one, you’ll make your marketing message stronger.
This is due to the fact that you’ll become consistent with your brand personality. And consistency is the key to creating a connection with your tribe.
It makes it easier to be consistent
While many brands start out with a party of one, even the smallest of brands will want to bring on support as they grow.
Having a documented tone of voice means that everyone is singing from the same songbook.
If you don’t document your brand voice, you’ll find that each person that communicates for your brand will do it in a different way. And where there’s no consistency, there’s no trust.
Whether it’s a copywriter in charge or writing your blogs, to a virtual assistant who’s responsible for customer experience or even a social media manager, when you’ve got a documented tone of voice, your brand will sound the same across every communication channel, no matter who the author is.
It allows your Brand Personality to evolve
Over time, things will change for your brand. And they’ll change for your brand voice too.
While the fundamentals will likely stay the same, a documented brand voice allows your brand personality to evolve.
As your tone develops, you can add to your songbook and give practical tips and examples of what good brand tone sounds like.
It will help your visual brand too
Earlier I wrote that in an ideal world, you’d develop your brand voice first so your visual identity can be influenced by it.
And if you start with brand voice, you’ll find that it is much easier to also be consistent with the visual elements of your brand too.
When you’re choosing images for blog articles, or lead magnets or social media, you can apply the tone you choose to your visual brand identity, and ensure that all your graphics and images are working to strengthen your brand story, rather than take away from it.
How To Get Started With Building A Brand Voice.
If you’ve gotten this far, and I’ve convinced you that a documented Brand Voice is a good idea, you’re now of course wondering how you go about getting started.
Let me walk you through it.
Step #1: Know Your Brand Values
The first thing you need to know about Brand Voice is that it’s heavily linked to your Brand Values.
You can absolutely get started without knowing what your Brand Values are, but you’ll find that your brand personality will develop more naturally, and come more easily if you already have a defined value set to weigh it against.
Brand Voice is one of the ways you can show what your brand values, without spelling it out for your tribe. And this means it plays a vital role in building trust with your audience.
Here’s what I mean –
Let’s say that one of your brand values is Innovation. How would you demonstrate innovation in your tone and choice of words?
Depending on what type of brand you’re trying to build and what innovation means for you, you might demonstrate your innovation value through a tone of confidence. Or through a tone that’s academic. Or through a tone that is thoughtful. Or a tone that is challenging. Or a tone that is curious.
If your brand value was People, you might demonstrate this by having a tone that’s caring. Or friendly. Or uplifting. Or conversational.
Again, this all depends what the value means to you.
But knowing what you value as a brand, will help you make these distinctions as you build (and refine) your brand voice.
Step #2: Understanding What You Are. And What You Aren’t.
An authentic brand personality is built in nuance.
Nuance is the subtle shade of difference or shade in meaning or expression that will give your brand its uniqueness.
What a Confident tone is for you, will be different for another brand.
And your unique combination of tonal words, will all need to work together and play off each other to create your unique brand personality.
But how do you achieve this nuance?
By understanding that what your brand ISN’T is just as important as what it is.
Let me explain -
When you’re building your tone of voice, you need to choose words that describe what your brand IS as well as what it ISN’T.
For example, there’s often a fine line between –
Confidence and Arrogance
Fun and Funny
Quirky and Strange
Empowering and Overpowering
Academic and Inaccessible
Leadership and Bossiness
These pairings of words will become important in showing a copywriter, social media manager, content creator or designer, the subtle nuance in your brand voice. It will allow you, and anyone who writes for your brand to harness the power of your brand voice in the right way, and communicate in a way that is “on brand”.
Step 3: Workshop it.
Just like any other strategic brand activity you do within your business, workshopping or brainstorming your brand voice will help you narrow down the field.
To help you get started in building your own brand personality, I’ve created a special resource for you. You can download your free Brand Personality Worksheet here. It’s an awesome brainstorming prompt and comes with all the instructions you need on how to use it.
Step 4: Ask your Tribe
Getting stuck on your brainstorm? Not sure whether you’re getting the words to describe your brand tone quite right?
It’s time to ask your Tribe.
If you already have an established brand with loyal customers, be brave and ask them what words they would use to describe you to someone else.
And if you’re an emerging brand who is still working on building loyal customers, then ask your favourite customers the words they’d use to describe your brand (because it’s your favourite customers who you want more of!)
Step 5: Write it down.
Once you’ve completed your brand voice workshopping activity and narrowed down your tone choices, you need to document your Brand Voice.
For my clients, I line everything up in a nice, neat table:
We Are | We Aren’t | What this sounds like | Tips for Achieving This Tone (Dos and Don’ts)
Your Brand Voice document (especially those last two columns) should be a living document that you update regularly as your brand voice evolves and becomes more and more refined.
If you’d like some help to get started, I share a heap of practical brand voice examples here.
Your brand personality will grow over time.
While the first step to a strong brand voice is to actually document it, the more you implement your tone of voice, the stronger it will grow.
Look to apply it everywhere – not just in what you write, but also in what you say, and the things you communicate without words all together.
The more you practice, the better you’ll get at it. The more you update your document with good examples of how your brand tone should be applied, the more authentic it will become. And the more it will become the voice you’re known for – the one that identifies your brand, even when there’s no logo.
