It’s easy to conflate and confuse “brand voice” with “brand tone of voice,” but the two elements are separate pieces of your marketing and outreach efforts.

A brand voice represents a unique perspective. It speaks to your values and vision while establishing the personality that people can expect when interacting with your company. 

The brand tone of voice is how you choose to communicate. It includes word choice, emotional inclusion, and communication style. It can change based on the situation faced, whereas your values and vision are relatively static.

Content overproduction is a serious issue in today’s online world. The Internet provides a steady information stream that is too much for anyone to handle. That’s why finding a tone of voice that speaks of your value and expertise is essential for your brand. 

Here are the steps to take to begin building your brand’s tone of voice.

1. Know your audience

About two-thirds of customers expect a company to understand their expectations and needs. That’s the same sample size that also doesn’t want a brand to treat them as statistics. By understanding your target audience, it’s easier to create a tone of voice that develops a persona they’ll connect with when they need what you have.

Here’s a guide to Buyer Personas and how to create them.

2. Discover your channels

Different generations have unique communication preferences. It's easier to create a stronger community when you recognize where your audience prefers to be.

• Generation Z wants personalized and authentic experiences. Your tone of voice must reflect this desire while reaching out across social media, email, and mobile apps.

• Millennials are more loyal to Facebook and Twitter because those platforms were some of the first they got to use. This generation is reliable, driven by cross-channel experiences and consistent brand philosophy. 

• About one-quarter of Baby Boomers opened an email account separate from their primary inbox for communicating with brands and businesses. 

3. Define your core values

Transparency is a crucial asset when building trust within your community. It helps to ask a few questions to establish your core values so that your tone of voice feels authentic.

• What makes your brand unique?

• What do you stand for as a company?

• Are there specific values you want to share with others?

• Why was the brand created/What purpose do you serve?

Instead of trying to follow a template, be yourself as a brand. The tone of voice that develops from that process will work hard to create connections. 

4. Audit your information

What does your content sound like right now? What would you like it to be? Four dimensions of the tone of voice exist: casual, formal, serious, or funny. Each one has advantages and disadvantages to consider.

You can add depth to that tone of voice by being respectful, enthusiastic, or irreverent. Some brands even use a matter-of-fact approach.

Once you’ve made those decisions, you can incorporate the tone of voice into your brand communication. You can’t please everyone, but taking these steps will help you connect with the people who want to be your customers. 

One of the things I like the most about Mailchimp is that they understand their user. To keep up with where their customers are at, they create and experiment with new experiences that effectively allow them to walk in their users' shoes, in creative small business terms. From this, they have established a great deal about their customer, which in turn has given them great insight as to how to speak directly to that audience base. 

They have established that in order to serve clients well their content must be clear to the layman and plain-spoken, genuine and from time to time humorous.

You see their tone of voice come to life through their copywriting, starting on their home page.

You’ll also see it in their choice of content. For example their animated series on a day in the life of an entrepreneur.

Start right at the beginning and look at your website copy, specifically your home page. How are you talking to your customer in their language to establish what you do?

Reading back your existing copy can give you a great insight as to whether you are talking at someone, or talking with them. You want your words to be inclusionary and emotive, creating engagement through a call to action. 

Step back from your copy and ask yourself, “Does my copy align with my core values?”, then ask, “How would my customer like to hear this important information?” It may be the case that you need to update your customer research in order to establish how they talk and the terms they use for pain point descriptions.

It may also be that your content itself needs to be displayed in an alternative way. Maybe you need a video instead of reams of written text? Or maybe you need punchy and quickly digestible points for skim readers?

Once you have your home page updated you can then move on page by page through your website, revamp your email marketing and redesign your social media content and caption templates.

If you need a copywriter to create compelling copy, someone who understands the customer journey, fill in the project brief form below!