Every great brand has a unique voice that allows it to deliver a strong and cohesive message. A brand voice is one of the most basic and essential elements in a business’ success because it helps it build a solid reputation, communicate its core values, and makes it stand out from the competition. Without a relevant brand voice that is consistent across all channels, brands lose their identity. This in turn, makes it harder for customers to trust and relate to them. And it’s not just about picking any tone and voice, but about choosing the right one - a tone and voice that’s relatable toward your specific audience.

What is the brand voice?

Every brand has an identity and unique characteristics like any person. Through its voice, a brand speaks to its audience and conveys many aspects of its identity and personality - core values and beliefs, culture, and attitude. Since a brand voice is a personality that permeates a brand’s words and communications, it needs to be congruent and relevant for its followers. If it’s not, messages have a hard time cutting through the noise, and it becomes next to impossible to influence the intended audience.

How to create your brand voice?

Understand your target audience and build a persona. Your marketing persona is about the traits and personality of your brand. To create it, you have to first pin down who exactly your target audience is.

To find your target audience, ask yourself questions like:

How old are they? What do they like to do? Why are their interests? What are their pain points? Once you have an idea of who your ideal customer is, you can do a little exercise to personify your brand by writing a list of adjectives that describe how it would be like if it were a real person. Key: Your brand’s personality traits must be relatable and trustworthy to your specific audience. For example, picking the “funny” trait if your company sells board games is okay, but probably not if you sell dental services.

Where does your audience live?

If you’re not where your audience is, then you should be. Not only are those the best channels to use to communicate with your audience, but they’re also the best places to learn about who your audience is. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, engaging with your audience will help you to understand it on a deeper level. Their needs and wants will become second nature to you, and developing an appropriate brand voice will come much more easily. Take a look at Redbull

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The @redbullskate team just dropped a heavy-hitting skate edit to launch our ALL NEW Red Bull Skateboarding YouTube Channel. 📼 Hit the link in bio, subscribe, peep game, and hit the streets. 👊 #skate #skateboarding #youtube #givesyouwings

A post shared by Red Bull (@redbull) on Apr 3, 2019 at 1:04pm PDT

Red Bull nails its brand voice by communicating intensity and adventure - just what its product promises to deliver. They promise that by consuming Red Bull, you’ll get wings - a reference to becoming a higher-performing version of yourself. Their marketing campaigns do an excellent job of communicating their identity by using words associated with adventure, sports, and thrilling experiences. You can almost get a taste of how the product feels by looking at their ads. It’s easy to see how they represent their audience by being funny, informal, and showing thrill-seeking activities full of adrenaline in their posts. After all, those are the characteristics of their consumers, and implementing them in their brand voice is an excellent way to appeal to them. They even go ahead and place video game - looking visuals at the end of their videos to appeal to their audience, which is, to a large extent, made of adrenaline seeking youngsters - who very likely to like video games.

Finding the right voice for your audience is key

Your brand voice encompasses what you say, and how you say it. Finding the right voice to use for your specific audience is an essential component of your content strategy. Think about it, if you were to address your audience and they were, for example, 14-18-year old teens, with the tone and voice that you would use to speak to 60-year-olds, it would be hard for them to relate to your brand. Many teenagers these days prefer to be spoken to in an informal and relaxed way, and also find it easier to trust humanised brands that sound less like companies. They also use a different vocabulary, that’s often impossible for their older counterparts to understand. Just imagine how the use of an inappropriate voice and tone would make your efforts come to nothing? So now that you're aware of how much this matters, take that next step to find your brand voice and you'll see that somebody will want to listen. To find out more on why it is not always a good idea to jump on social trends like Game of Thrones for example click here

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