Proper communication and interaction with the target audience is critical to any brand’s long standing success. However, what several brands – especially the newly established ones – may forget, is that finding the ‘right’ voice for your brand is as important as maintaining the voice itself.
What do we mean by that? We mean that since every brand stands for a particular value (or a set of values), it has to develop its own unique voice with which to reach out to its audience. Of course, the tone of the voice and the language it will use will depend on what the brand represents.
For example, if you’re in the business of selling luxury footwear, your tone will most likely be one that appeals to high end customers who are very particular about their attire. Your language may therefore use words such as ‘polished’ and ‘suave’, and not words such as ‘hip’ and ‘çool’.
The point we’re getting at is – because you have to maintain the same voice for your brand in all official pieces of communication, how do you select that one “right” tone? Well, consider these points:
A. Ask your audience
Now we don’t mean that you individually grab hold of each and every registered user of your website or every offline customer and ask what your brand’s voice should be. Instead, conduct a brief survey. Give them content in different voices and let them be the judge. Then, when you see a general consensus emerging, see if you like what the results say, and if you’d like to develop your voice along those lines.
B. Fine tune it
Once you have a general tone that almost everyone agrees upon, you’ll have to start tweaking it and fine tuning it till you have it exactly where you want it to be. This might take a while and several iterations with content pieces. However, do undertake this step as it’s absolutely critical.
C. Don’t overdo or under-do it
Resist the temptation to overwrite things, no matter how talented your team may be. By this we mean that you should avoid using excessively expressive words where simpler alternatives will work just fine. For example, don’t use words like “verbose” when you can very easily work with “wordy”.
However, in an extension of that principle, don’t under-do it either. Which means that if you need to use “wordy”, don’t write “using a lot of words”. The idea again is to use the correct words, instead of words that may sound very good or very simple.
Keep in mind the above pointers. Finding your voice can take some time, but finding it is very important. Therefore research your audience well, understand what works with them and set about tweaking your voice till it’s just right.
