Digital Marketing: What’s your voice?

When it comes to communicating as and for your brand, there will come a time when you will want to establish a particular ‘voice’ for that brand. This is a marketing principle which applies offline too, but it is very easy to lose your way online and end up sending out confused messages which do nothing to root your branding in a way that makes sense to you and your customers.

Brand voices are particularly tricky to maintain across your social media platforms. If you have more than one person controlling your social media, they may communicate in different ways, meaning that any consistency your followers come to expect will cease to exist. For example, one person may be uploading funny YouTube videos whereas another may be trying to establish a dialogue about serious news stories, which doesn’t send out a solid message about your brand.

If we think about advertising, it is obvious that certain brands have certain voices which set them apart from other, similar brands. The smoothie brand Innocent, for example, are known for their fun, light hearted attitude, which is carried seamlessly into their online presence with funny photos and social media updates, whereas a broadsheet newspaper such as the Financial Times chooses to use a more serious brand voice to appeal to its target audience.

If you’re setting your brand voice for the first time, it can be tricky to decide whether you opt for a voice which speaks to your existing customers or that speaks as the brand you want to be. Do you want to be quirky, informal and chatty, or sincere, trustworthy and respectable? The beauty of social media is that you can test out a few brand voices before you settle on anything without major repercussions. A series of TV adverts run in the wrong brand voice could be expensive and damaging to the brand, but a few tweets won’t do too much harm, and you could even use social media monitoring (or Twitter’s own Analytics service) to see which voice performs best.

A good tip for coming up with a brand voice is to select three traits you want your brand to convey. That might be ‘easygoing, youthful and edgy’ or ‘sophisticated, forward-thinking and powerful’. Whatever you decide, make sure you keep it consistent in all of your brand correspondence and communication.

If you want to find out more about establishing a solid brand for your company, get in touch with Artemis and we’ll be happy to discuss it with you.