What Is a Brand Voice? And Why Is It So Important? | Tone of Voice 101
The terms ‘brand voice’ and ‘tone of voice’ are often used in the world of marketing and branding, in particular. It’s something most small business owners and new fashion label founders are fully aware of. We need one of those. Must remember to sort that.
But actually, it’s often something that gets left behind during the thrilling and exceptionally busy early days of starting up and launching a new company or brand.
And that’s potentially because… well, what actually is it?
Here – I’m taking a closer look at exactly what a brand voice is, how to cover this in detail as soon as possible when starting a new brand and why it’s just so important.
Let’s start with the ‘what’ and keep it simple.
What is a brand voice?
Your brand voice is the way you evoke your brand’s identity and values to your customers through the words and tone of voice you use in all your communications.
This is the basics of branding. The very beginnings of the brand that you want to show off to all your potential future customers. This will be the voice you use to communicate with your customers, visitors and followers on your website, on all your social channels and on your emails and newsletters. It should be present everywhere, throughout every piece of content you create – no matter who has created it.
Your brand voice or tone of voice guidelines is what you say and how you say it.
This gives your brand a point of view, a vision and identity, a personality.
Why is tone of voice important?
All your other marketing and branding strategies depend on this unique brand voice. It’s the start of your marketing journey and should be one of the first things you consider when launching or refreshing a business.
There are so many reasons why tone of voice is important to a brand. Here are my top go-to mentions that I always discuss with new clients when they’re wondering if it’s worth doing.
Tone of Voice Humanises Your Brand
Today’s online marketplace is busy. Like, seriously busy. It’s becoming more and more difficult for brands to connect with their customers and that’s because customers don’t feel connected with brands. Humanising your brand allows your customers to bond with you. To visualise you as something other than just another online retailer. Having personality through everything you say online allows your customers to connect with you and relate to you on a human level. Something that is more important than ever before in today’s digital landscape.
Tone of Voice Makes You More Memorable
While your TOV humanises you and allows your customers to feel a connection with you, this instantly makes your brand more memorable. In the world of the web and particularly on social media, it’s very easy to get lost in the crowd. Forgotten and left behind. You could have a fantastic product and without something memorable to go with it, how would a potential customer ever find you again?
Your tone of voice will start to feel like an old friend to your customers. Its consistency forging a memory of familiarity in their minds.
Tone of Voice Allows People to Relate to Your Brand
Having a unique and distinct tone of voice means that you know your customers. You know how they speak and what they like and therefore, you communicate with them in a way that lets them relate to you. Because you, in turn, relate to them.
This connection is what encourages clicks, follows and purchases. And eventually, builds long-term brand loyalty.
Tone of Voice Develops Cohesion on All Your Platforms
With strong and distinct tone of voice guidelines, you will start to see a cohesion of all your content on every platform. Without needing the same person to create every piece of content, you’ll see your brand’s tone of voice shining through on your website pop-ups, your email blasts, your Monday morning Instagram posts.
It’s this cohesion that builds a real and tangible brand identity for your customers to really get to know and love.
Tone of Voice Equals Trust
Your tone of voice sets expectations for your customers without them even knowing. While they’re getting to know, relating to and bonding with your brand, their expectations of you are being set. The consistency of your brand voice throughout all your communications then meets your customers’ expectations and builds trust. Arguably, the most important thing in digital marketing and e-commerce, in general.
Whether it’s a customer care Facebook comment or a 404-error page on your website, responding to your customers in the tone of voice that they expect from you helps them to trust in your brand in the long-term.
Tone of Voice Differentiates You from The Competition
A crucially important point, in my opinion, your tone of voice is what makes you unique. Whether you have a truly distinct product or are a part of a very competitive industry, you need to stand out from your competition. In the fashion and beauty industries, this is incredibly important. And your tone of voice can help you to do this.
Here, I only need to offer a couple of examples to illustrate the point. The world of fast-fashion is one of the most highly-competitive sectors of industry there is. Yet, Pretty Little Thing has seen a staggering growth from £17 million in sales to nearly £400 million over three years. Alongside its trend-bursting metaphorical racks of product, the success of the business is hugely down to its branding.
13.2k Likes, 186 Comments - PrettyLittleThing (@prettylittlething) on Instagram: "Are you still watching? 👀 ERM YES, PLAY NEXT EPISODE 😂 @ someone who did this all weekend 💕👇"
If you were to analyse PLTs clothing collections compared to some of its significant competitors – Missguided, Missy Empire or I Saw It First – you might notice some pretty big similarities when it comes to product offering and pricing. And yet, the distinction between PLT and its comp is the undeniable ability to connect with its primary target customer – the young trendy, celeb-loving 16-25-year-old. Take a look at any communication from PLT and you’ll feel their brand voice.
88.5k Likes, 1,776 Comments - PrettyLittleThing (@prettylittlething) on Instagram: "OMG "IT'S HAPPENING" 😱😱 @friends confirm a reunion! 😭❤️👏Comment your fave Friends quote 👇"
Another example of a very distinct tone of voice in a competitive industry would be Glossierwithin the beauty industry. If you were asked to name beauty and makeup brands within Glossier’s price bracket that sells skincare, lip gloss, highlighter and every other current must-have cosmetic, it would take a long time to complete the list. It’s a jam-packed space with a huge amount of competition from brands that have been successfully leading the way for decades.
129.6k Likes, 473 Comments - Glossier (@glossier) on Instagram: "Introducing the Emily Weiss Set: the four Glossier products our founder + CEO loves the most (right..."
Yet, Glossier is only five years old and burst onto the scene with almost instant success. Why?
It’s branding completely set it apart from any other company. A digitally-native brand that started as a blog, Glossier has garnered a cult following, crafting communication with its online fans like no other.
67.4k Likes, 241 Comments - Glossier (@glossier) on Instagram: "Pro Tip at the ready"
The original beauty blog – Into The Gloss- is packed with passionate discussions about beauty and the voice of Glossier is a clear continuation of this. Creating the products that their customers want. And they know it because they talk to them. It’s this two-way communication that Glossier’s customer know, love and trust and is one of their very unique selling points as a brand.
Tone of Voice Creates Brand Association
If you want to gain a loyal following of fans and customers – and we all do – your brand needs to be noticeable and memorable. You need brand association. This is when certain things remind your customer of your brand. They associate things with you.
Think back to our first example of Pretty Little Thing. They have created brand association with a wealth of imagery, fonts, colour palettes and words. If you see something super pink, unicorn-based or brandishing the world ‘hun’ on your social media, there’s a good chance it’s a PLT post. And if they have created the post, their fans just know instantly through association before they even see the brand name.
This isn’t easy to do, especially if you’re starting from scratch with a small business. But get into the practice of being aware of creating brand association from the beginning and you’re on the right track. This is made much more possible by being prepared with both tone of voice guidelines and complete brand bibles – which we’ll look at in a little more detail soon.
Tone of Voice Keeps You in Control of Your Messaging
An important point about why brands choose to create tone of voice guidelines is all about retaining control of how their content and messaging is produced. It might sound unnecessary if you’re starting up a brand as a one-man-band. But it won’t be a one-man-band for long. And why wouldn’t you start as you mean to go on?
Pinning down from the very beginning these tone of voice guidelines means you’re much less likely to run into problems later down the line when freelance copywriters or even full-time employees end up creating and even posting content that if you’d seen beforehand, you never would have approved. Its keeps the control in your hands, even when you’re not creating the content.
Tone of Voice Gives Your Copy Style
Lastly, having a distinct and specific tone of voice gives all your copy and content style. Having a style gives your brand an identity which leads to all the other points on this list.
Having tone of voice guidelines makes it easy for your copy to have style as well as purpose because you’ve already detailed how it should sound. You’ve already decided who you’re talking to and how and it gives your copywriter or content creator the rules to follow to create copy that you can easily approve and that promises to engage your customer.
How to develop a brand voice
So, we’ve looked at what a brand voice is and all the many reasons that make it so important for companies of all kinds but how do you actually develop one?
Well, the answer is in the question. It’s all about developingthe voice. And there are several things you can do to start this process.
Look at Your Brand Values
The first thing to do is to look at, detail and dive into your brand values and principles. You need to be very clear and honest about this and not focus on things that don’t really apply to you and your brand specifically.
If you haven’t put pen to paper yet when it comes to your brand values and mission statement for the company, ask yourself:
Why did you set the brand up?
What do you stand for?
Who are your customers?
What problems do you solve for your customers?
What’s your main USPs?
What do you hope the company looks like in 5 years? In 10 years?
Think about all these points and try to write down as much as you can about the brand. Then, use this to create a mission statement that says who you are, who you help and how you help them.
This will really start to create focus for you and build a brand perspective to start developing your tone of voice from. Everything you do needs to align with this mission statement so see it as your starting blocks. Remember – it’s your brand. You can go back to this and make changes and adjustments and add extra bits in whenever you like. But start somewhere.
It’s also important to remember to be clear about your message. – Who you are, who you want to be and who you definitely are not.
Define Your Target Customer
This will be one of the most important things you do for your business. It’s a marketing technique that often gets left behind and then revisited further down the line when you realise you don’t know who’s buying your products. So, instead of that, do it now. Spend a good amount of time working on this and really get to grips with defining who your customer is.
To do this, you need to create customer personas. And note, I said personas. Because you most likely don’t just have one very specific customer. You’ll have several. So, you should create a customer persona for each of the different ‘types’ of customers your brand will target. Do this one at a time and get as specific as you can.
This exercise is about customer research, so the more information you can gather during this process, the better.
Start with demographic information. This might include gender, age, locations, ethnicity, family, education, employment levels, generations and several more factors.
If you’re not a brand-new company, you can use Google Analytics on your website to find out lots of this information or you can conduct interviews and focus groups with your customers. If you are a start-up, you will have to create these personas for the people you planto target as your brand’s audience. This is where you can use your imagination but this is only going to be valuable if you keep your personas realistic.
Once you’ve covered the basic demographic information, you need to delve deeper into the psyche of your customers and try to uncover how they think, feel and shop.
Ask yourself:
What are they like?
What do they do in their spare time?
What do they believe in?
What are they interested in?
Where do they hang out on social media?
What kind of content do they respond to?
Where do they shop online?
What are their pain points?
How do they like to spend their money?
When you’re researching, find real people online who are either customers or potential customers for your brand. Ask:
What are they doing online?
Who do they follow?
What content do they engage with?
How do they talk to each other?
Do this for each of your target customer personas. Give each persona a name and even a photo and create a mood board for each that details all the information from your research. Aim to have three or fewer personas with as much detail as you can so you start to feel like you truly know each person.
The point of creating target customer personas is so that you can target each individual persona with the type of tone of voice and content that will really speak to them. Without going through the exercise of creating these personas, who are you speaking to? And how do you know what your tone of voice should sound like?
This is all part of the process of developing your tone of voice.
Look at Past Content – This is for Brands That Are Not New
If you’re not a new company but your branding needs an overhaul, you’ve found yourself starting at the beginning. And that’s good. It’s a great place to start, actually.
Something you might find very helpful is to take a look back at some of your older content on your web blog and on your social media. Auditing this content will give you some valuable insights that can help to mould your target customer personas and overall tone of voice.
Look at your best-performing pieces of content and posts. Analyse what trends you can see between these well-performing pieces of content.
Were you being funny, formal, inspiring, respectful, informative, enthusiastic, trendy? Does this fit with the brand values you’ve mentioned in the previous section?
Defining Your Tone of Voice…
This is the step where you take all of the research and information from all the other steps in this blog and start to piece it together.
Depending on your brand values and your target customer personas, you can start to look at what you sound like and what you want to sound like and what you definitely don’t want to sound like.
Adding in information about what you do not want to sound like can be just as helpful for marketers and copywriters as talking about what you do want to sound like.
To start this process, begin with lists of descriptive words.
Flirty, sarcastic, cheeky, expert, fun, witty, professional, friendly, provocative, dry, upbeat, romantic, straightforward, passionate, self-assured, luxury, accessible, unisex, inclusive.
Do they sound like you? Pick out as many that sound like your brand as you can. Then review and get rid of any you’re not sure about.
Once you’ve pulled together the list of words that really describe who your brand is, take each word one at a time and create a chart to detail how you would sound like each word and what does not sound like each word.
For example – If your word was ‘witty’, you might say – “We’re clever and use sharp phrasing and a sense of humour to show that we’re smart but not super serious when we don’t need to be. We make dry and quick jokes within content, we use sarcasm, we’re confident, perhaps slightly cocky. We don’t do cheesy/dad jokes or dated things, we don’t try too hard to be “cool”, we don’t use humour to be mean to others but we are self-deprecating.”
If you do this for each word that you’ve chosen to describe yourself in your tone of voice, you’ll very quickly start to get a more rounded idea of how your brand voice sounds.
Once you’ve created a feel for who your brand is, create a list (which can be as long as you like) with words and phrases you like to use and another list with words and phrases you do not like to use. This is a very easy to way to instantly make sure marketers and copywriters don’t select words you wouldn’t approve.
It’s also very useful to create a Do and Don’t list for grammatical points.
Add a tips section at the end with any extra tips you can offer marketers and copywriters about the kind of copy you want. Even if this document only gets used for yourself for quite some time, it’s always a great reminder later down the line when your mind has been focused on bottom-line figures and buying budgets instead of tone of voice.
Your tone of voice guidelines should be looked at and reviewed regularly to make sure it still falls in line with your branding and the direction of your company. Any time edits are made, make sure you redistribute your TOV document to anyone that creates content for you.
Final tip - You should also write your tone of voice guidelines/ brand bible in your brand’s tone of voice. This sets the tone from the very beginning.
What to do when you’ve finished…?
What to do with your brand tone of voice
So, you’ve done all the work? You’ve looked at your brand values and mission statement and delved deep into the psyche of your customers, creating two very specific target customer personas at which to aim all your fabulous new content? You’ve defined your tone of voice and created Dos and Don’ts lists for anyone to use to get it just right?
But what now?
When you’ve done all this, you can create a tone of voice guidelines pack. This will include everything you have worked on. This can be a stand-alone document or preferably, be included in your complete brand bible. The rest of your brand bible would feature your logos, imagery, fonts and typeface usage, colour palettes and any additional branding.
Once you have this, you’re free to give it to anyone who will be creating content and copy on any platform or channel for your brand. It should be used for anything from a single tweet to a 20-page eBook.
A lot of work needs to go into your tone of voice at the earliest moment possible to make sure you get your communications right from the beginning. As we talked about at the beginning of this blog, it’s a crucially important part of your marketing strategy.
When you’re starting a new brand, spending so much time on your tone of voice is often overlooked or simply impossible. Brands begin pushing out content, particularly social content, without even considering tone of voice and it’s something that gets left behind.
Not only does that mean that there’s no direction for any of your content or social profiles and no clear tone of voice for your visitors and customers to bond with, but it also means when you grow and start to hire people to help you do these things, they have no real, tangible direction.
If you’ve already got all this down, you can simply hand over your guidelines and your hired copywriters or social media assistants can hit the ground running.
If you’d love to nail the basics from the beginning or you need to overhaul your tone of voice to improve your brand, I’d be happy to help. One of my favourite types of Lifestyle Copywriting projects is creating tone of voice guidelines for my clients. If you’re not sure where to start or you simply want to hand over everything to someone that can just ‘get it done’, you’re in the right place. Drop me a message or email at kate@lifestylecopywriting.co.uk and let’s get going.
Until next time…
