A tone of voice is how your business communicates with a target audience. It comprises various factors, including the choice of words, emotion, use of punctuation, and your general communication style. A tone of voice is an essential communication tool that helps your business to build trust with your target audience.
Ensuring that your business develops a deliberate tone of voice consistent across all messaging gives you a better chance of the audience perceiving you for who you are and how you want to be. Your mission statement and values should guide you towards developing a tone of voice.
Work with your team to create an outstanding personality for your brand. However, you might find it hard to achieve it on your own. For this reason, seek further guidance from a top digital marketing agency NYC and follow these four rule of thumb principles for using tone of voice in brand marketing.
1.Understand Your Target Market
Understanding your target market can help you figure out what the audience wants in a voice and target your outreach accordingly. Take time to go through popular blogs to read about popular marketing strategies within your industry. Analyze the type of personalities you find in your readings and figure out how your brand will do the same and how different it will be.
If you are a travel brand whose target market is gap year students, you may want to be laid back in your communications. However, if your target market is full of corporate professionals, you should embrace formal messaging. While you might properly understand your audience, it doesn’t harm to go deeper to find out about their age, interests, gender, or professions.
2.Create a Brand Personality
Brand personality is a set of human characteristics attributed to a brand. It is also a collection of intellectual, emotional, and behavioral patterns unique to a brand that is consistent over time. Conveying a personality that makes your brand likable and approachable can help you positively engrain your brand in customers’ minds.
To create a brand personality, you need to determine what makes your brand unique, what your brand stands for, the type of culture you promote at work, and who your audience is. Come up with a content strategy on how to communicate all the above. Brand personality is a positioning strategy; therefore, ensure you get it right.
3.The Brand Tone Should Be Adoptive
Whenever you send out a communication to your audience, your tone tells them how they should feel about your brand. You may need to adopt different brand tones when speaking to different audiences who operate from other countries or different age groups.
Therefore, when defining a tone for your content, ask yourself how your audience will feel when interacting with it. Content that makes the audience feel inspired, motivated, reassured, and optimistic is different from content for direct selling.
Therefore, the key to creating impactful content is not telling the audience what to feel but purpose to set the mood with a great storyline and the right choice of words. A complementary structure and rhythm should also accompany impactful messaging.
While the brand tone changes with different content types, it should retain the characteristics of the overall brand voice to enable you to deliver a unified customer experience across all communication channels.
4.The Brand Tone Must Be Consistent Across the Board
A consistent brand tone lets the audience absorb your brand easily and quickly. A consistent brand tone allows you to capture your audience’s attention within seconds before the consumer chooses to keep scrolling. Brand tone consistency also leads to brand recognition, where it leads consumers to subconsciously connect certain words, emotions, and ideas to your brand.
A simple way to maintain a consistent brand tone across the board is to create your content following the same guidelines. You can also achieve consistency in your brand tone by making your design elements standard and establishing a benchmark of a good content strategy that demonstrates your company values through effective brand messaging.
Ensure that you also adopt an in-house screening process for all content so that anyone who creates content on behalf of your brand is well versed in your brand tone, voice, values, and mission.
Why Your Brand Needs Communication
Communication plays a crucial role in helping your brand create meaningful connections. For your brand to achieve these meaningful connections, it needs to be heard clearly, through a set of brand tone and voice.
Through communication, the audience will get to know and understand what your brand stands for. Therefore, follow the aforementioned golden rules for a chance to express your brand’s unique persona and seamlessly build relationships with your audience.
