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By: Ellen Gomes
Posted: January 4, 2016 | Content Marketing
It’s a new year, which means it’s time to get started on making your resolutions a reality (both personally and professionally). If you’ve set personal goals already (like seeing the inside of 24 Hour Fitness more than once a week), but you’re looking for a professional goal that will make a tangible impact on your brand and organization, you’ve come to the right place.
Does your business communicate with its customers? Yes, of course it does! So this resolution is vital to any and every business: create and maintain a consistent brand voice. This blog is here to help you make this an actionable resolution by sharing the importance of a consistent brand voice and some tips and tricks on to create and maintain it.
It’s important to present a consistent experience across channels, and the best way to do this is to define your brand’s voice. Whether you’re creating content for your blog, your website, or on social, the style you write in will become the “voice” of your brand. Think of your brand’s voice as its personality. It helps make your brand more genuine and personable, but it needs to be consistent. While you might adopt a more playful voice on Twitter and a more professional voice in a whitepaper, consistency is key if you want to create a brand that your customers recognize and engage with over time.
The voice you use for your brand depends on the persona you’re creating content for. In some organizations, you may address different personas. It’s important to identify both a “go-to” voice that addresses everyone and one that addresses individual personas.
Stephanie Schwab of Social Media Explorer breaks down a brand’s voice into four categories: Character/ Persona, Tone, Language, and Purpose. Here’s her list of attributes for each category—which of these descriptors resonate with your brand? (Note: You may decide that some attributes fit with one buyer persona, but not with another.)
Character/Persona
Tone
Language
Purpose (different content will probably serve different purposes)
Once you’ve defined your voice, you’ll want to aim for consistency across your entire company—allowing for some variability for each persona.Here are some strategies we use at Marketo to achieve a consistent voice:
A consistent brand voice is one way to make sure that your customers recognize you and understand that you are talking to them. Take these tips with you into the new year and see the impact it has across your organization. Do you have tips to share on building a consistent brand voice? I’d love to hear them in the comments section below.