How to Define Your Brand Voice: Witty, Snarky, Surreal and Everything in-Between

When we say Nike is inspiring, Coca-cola fun, and IBM sophisticated, we’re referring to the brand voice. Your company’s brand voice helps you build meaningful connections with your customers and prospects.

The opposite is also true— a poorly structured brand voice can cause distrust and a lack of connection with customers. 

Knowing how to define your brand voice lays a good foundation for communicating with customers and prospects. But, making a meaningful connection with customers goes beyond defining the brand voice. It’s also key to ensure you’re consistent with your brand voice.

Today’s guide explores all you need to know about defining and polishing your brand voice. 

What is a Brand Voice?

A brand voice is simply how a business speaks or communicates with its customers. The brand voice unveils the proverbial corporate veil to give a glimpse into the personality and values of a brand. 

Your brand voice is one way that customers and prospects rely on to identify you from a sea of competitors. It’s also a way to start building a connection of trust and loyalty with your target audience. 

But your brand voice is not just about how you speak on the surface level. It will also encompass the tone, visual elements, choice of words, and the emotional impact you hope to achieve with your messaging. 

Why Should You Care About Your Brand Voice?

You're right if you’ve had a nagging feeling that a unique brand voice is important. In fact, in one survey,  88% of marketers admitted a distinct brand voice is vital in creating better customer connections.

Having a well-defined brand voice is not just a matter of being professional as a brand. Your brand voice tells customers who you are, including your personality and values. It sets you apart from the sea of competitors and other brands clamoring for customers’ attention. 

And when customers feel connected to how a brand presents itself, they are more loyal and trusting of the brand. For instance, 83% of customers cite trust as a mandatory prerequisite before buying from a brand.  

In another study, 86% of customers believe an authentic brand voice significantly influences their decision to support a brand. Finally, a transparent and consistent brand voice can increase trust by up to 33%. 

Most importantly, a consistent brand voice creates a seamless customer experience across channels and customer touch points. 

Check out this guide to learn more about the importance of a brand voice. 

How to Create a Brand Voice
 

Below are 8 approaches showing you how to identify and create your brand voice:

1.  Know Which Aspects of Your Company to Consult

Creating a brand voice might look challenging— and it is, to some extent. However, if you know which aspects to look at, you’ll develop your brand voice in no time. For starters, here’s everything you need to create your brand voice. 
 

• Your mission and vision

The mission and vision will inform the type of personality and values your brand wants to create. 

• Company culture

The brand voice is not separate from the company culture. In fact, brand voice is an extension of your company culture. If you’re witty and fun in your internal activities, you should also exude the same in your marketing and advertising copy. 

• Competitive advantage

Here it’s all about the one or two unique things about your brand. Is it your technology, your people, the products, or the emotional impact you have on customers? This competitive advantage will help you create the perfect-fit brand voice.

• Target audience

Your target audience will have several expectations of what your voice and tone should be like. They will also be subconsciously comparing your tone to the competitors. 
 

That’s why you must first understand the industry trends— this doesn’t mean conforming to the standards. Next, you need to understand the customer’s pain points and goals and figure out how best you can communicate so you’re relevant and helpful to solve these pain points. 

2. Study Your Target Audience

Your target audience will be the biggest contributor to how you define your brand voice. 

• Who are they? 
• What do they care most about? 
• What are their goals and ambitions? 
• What are their biggest pain points? 

The answers to these questions will help you decide how to pass your message to your target audience. 

For example, if you’re targeting diabetes patients, then you know their biggest pain point might be managing the disease easily and cost-effectively. In turn, your content should reflect an empathetic, relatable, and professional voice. 

Conversely, your content will most likely be carefree, upbeat, and casual if you're targeting digital nomads. 

You can decide to survey your target audience to get a more definite picture of how they view your brand. Be sure to focus on these questions when creating your audience survey:

• How would you describe our brand in 5 words?
• Do you find our voice and tone appropriate?
• Which personality do you liken our brand to?

3. Consult Your Internal Team

How do people within your organization view your brand?

Often, a brand’s voice is determined by the people who work in it. If you have a warm, welcoming atmosphere within your brand, this will often be replicated in the content you share online. 

You can start with a simple survey asking employees and leadership to describe how they view your brand. Their feedback will be a great way to understand how you can define your brand’s voice and personality.

4. Check Your Existing Content

Is there any existing voice within your content you can pinpoint to?

For example, you might notice that your content comes across as relatable, business-casual, and empathetic. If you decide to proceed with this voice, review how customers are responding to this voice. If you’re getting more engagement in terms of comments, requests for quotes, or any feedback, it might be a sign your customers relate to that particular voice. 

5. Imagine Your Brand As A Person

Is your brand like the witty and helpful neighbor next door? A classy and elegant entrepreneur? A rugged, carefree adventurer, a kind go-to friend, or a reliable, professional, and friendly person?

When you define your brand this way, it’s easier to identify how it would communicate, the tone, and even the emotional impact your brand should present. 

6. Define What Your Voice Is Not

Describing how your brand voice should be might be challenging. However, defining what it shouldn’t be is much simpler. Start simple by pointing out what your brand voice isn’t. 

For instance, you might decide that you’re carefree but not sloppy, authoritative, but not cocky, etc. In addition, you might decide to incorporate humor in your content, but be clear about never making fun of your clients. 
 

You might also prohibit the use of some words from your content in the spirit of keeping your brand consistent. 
 

MailChimp describes this perfectly in their publication style guide:

7. Create a Brand Voice Chart

A brand voice chart comes in handy when defining your brand voice. It’s also super helpful when you’re outsourcing content writing. Here’s how to go about it:

• List 3-5 characteristics(traits) of your brand
• Each trait should be accompanied by more explanation
• Describe how to use or not use this trait during communication

Source: Coschedule

8. Create a Brand Voice Style Guide

Imagine you had to define your brand voice, tone, and style, each time you’re preparing for a campaign, discussing promotion deals with a partner, or creating a content strategy with an agency.
 

That would be annoying.
 

Fortunately, you can avoid the nerve-racking situation by creating a brand voice style guide. 
 

Basically, a brand voice style guide describes everything about your brand voice. It will define:

• The brand persona
• Tone of voice to use
• How the brand voice is connected to company values
• Unique phrases and terms preferences
• Brand tone for each channel
• Grammar and syntax rules
• Examples of content with desired brand voice

With these items well-described, your voice will be more consistent across your brand’s messaging. 

Examples of Brands with a Clearly Defined Voice

Below are 4 brand voice examples from some top brands to help you get started with your own. 

Skittles

Skittles’ voice is playful, youthful, and relatable. Everything from their advertising copy to their social media content features playful and relatable posts to capture the attention of their young audience. 
 

It all starts with their mischievous Twitter profile;

Then comes the pop culture-relevant and playful tweets;

Tiffany & Co.

On the other end, Tiffany & Co. brings elegance and sophistication in its voice to reflect its high-end brand and products. Because Tiffany’s clients are looking for unique products, the brand uses a confident and classy tone with a dash of wittiness in its adverts and marketing messages. 

Here’s an example of Tiffany & Co’s brand voice in its product description;

The witty and sophisticated brand voice stays consistent all through the brand’s social media pages;

Chipotle

Chipotle has learnt the art of infusing modern trends into its content. The fast food brand’s voice is fun, confident and sassy in equal measure. You’ll often see the same tones reflected in their content on Instagram, Twitter or email newsletters. 

Chipotle’s Instagram posts

Apple

It would be a crime to do a post on brand voice and leave Apple out. Aside from owning one of the most popular mobile brands, Apple knows how to win a large market segment with its voice. 
 

This brand’s voice is confident, assertive, and informally personal. The mixture of Apple’s character traits makes it easily accessible to consumers while exuding an air of confidence and elegance. 

Detailed, confident and straightforward as always

Get a Writing Partner That Gets Your Voice

Defining your brand voice is one step toward great marketing. The next step is infusing your voice into every content you create. This is only possible if you have a partner that understands your voice inside out. 

Here’s where Zoey Writers comes in.

We’re the writing partner that gets your voice. In the past, we have worked with multiple brands, each with a unique voice which we managed to capture every time. 

We can create content with a perfected brand voice, whether you need blog posts, product descriptions, white papers, or website copy. 

To learn more about how we can help you, shoot us a message, and we’ll get back immediately. 

Before you leave, check out: Why Good Writing is a Survival Skill

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash