An inconsistent brand voice leads to customer confusion and can negatively impact marketing performance.
Research shows brands that invest in buy Instagram followers and maintaining a consistent tone across all customer touchpoints experience 38% higher social media engagement and 40% greater sales conversion rates.
With various multichannel content being created daily, brands must establish solid brand voice guidelines. Developing a comprehensive brand voice chart allows companies to foster one cohesive voice and protect their branding integrity.
The Importance of a Consistent Brand Voice
A consistent brand voice unifies how a company presents itself to customers. It serves as the foundation of the brand’s identity and reputation.
Customers today are bombarded with messages everywhere – maintaining a recognizable tone makes the brand stand out in the clutter. A harmonious brand voice:
- Builds Trust: Customers connect more with brands they can recognize based on a reliable voice. Inconsistency breeds distrust.
- Enhances Engagement: Familiarity breeds affinity. Recognizing the brand’s unique tone across all interactions motivates customers to engage more.
- Improves Marketing Effectiveness: Targeted campaigns perform better when customers can easily link it back to a brand they already understand based on its distinct voice.
- Establishes Authority: Maintaining an authoritative yet relatable voice positions the brand as the expert in its domain and a thought leader worth paying attention to.
- Strengthens Employer Branding: Current and prospective employees take pride in working for a brand with a solid cultural identity communicated through its unique voice.
- Drives Higher Revenue: Consistent branding ultimately impacts the bottom line, boosting key metrics like conversion rates, average order value and lifetime customer value.
Failing to establish a uniform brand voice risks damaging brand equity built over time. A diligently designed voice chart provides structure and guidelines for content teams to represent the brand authentically.
7 Steps To Make A Brand Voice Chart
Follow a systematic approach to guide multichannel communications for years to come. The resulting impact on customer relationships and business goals makes this effort worthwhile.
Step 1: Preparation
The first step is to gather relevant internal teams focused on marketing, content creation, brand strategy, customer service, and other related functions. Members should represent diverse functions that interact with customers.
Next, analyze a wide range of current brand materials, such as websites, blogs, social media, emails, brochures, advertisements, and so forth.
This is to understand existing linguistic patterns, voice inconsistencies, and strengths and weaknesses, recognizing areas for improvement alongside aspects to retain within the new identity.
The evaluation provides invaluable insights for refining the brand voice blueprint. It also obtains initial buy-in across departments by demonstrating the need for uniform guidelines.
Step 2: Define Your Brand’s Core Attributes
With learnings from content audit in mind, articulate the brand’s foundational mission and value proposition guiding goals and growth. This high-level direction serves as the true north for all activities.
Next, create in-depth buyer personas around key audience segments to deeply understand motivations and pain points.
Relating to these profiles helps determine an authentic, overarching personality that best embodies the brand, whether it be friendly, casual, sophisticated, bold, or another.
Finally, solidify the preferred tone of voice—cheerful, serious, or motivational—based on ideology and target customers to establish approachability and credibility.
Step 3. Create a Brand Voice Chart Template
With core foundations clearly outlined, develop a structured yet adaptable template specifying essential voice parameters. For instance, include categories like tone, style, and terminology that capture linguistic nuances.
Then, populate the template with tangible examples, hashtags, or adjectives to operationalize theoretical concepts. Phrases around being helpful, encouraging, and solution-driven bring the empathetic tone to life, while hashtags like #DoBetter and #KeepImproving instill a progressive stance.
This stage materializes the abstract brand voice into tangible touchpoints for content teams.
Step 4. Develop Brand Voice Guidelines
Building upon the now-populated template, create granular yet comprehensive brand voice guidelines. Customize for significant assets like the website, blog, social channels, emails, and so on by outlining their unique needs.
For blogs, suggest frequently recurring positive and motivational terminology. For Instagram, recommend lighthearted emojis and hashtags. Provide clear dos and don’ts, approved words, and phrasing tailored by channel.
Set typographic conventions, formatting best practices consistently conveying the identity. To reinforce reliability, explain nuanced differences from competitors’ tones, setting the right industry expectations.
Step 5. Review and Refine
Continual vetting and iteration are necessary to strike the right balance. Conduct focused feedback sessions internally with cross-functional teams as well as externally engaging customer panels.
Obtain quantitative and qualitative perspectives to make evidence-based refinements, balancing practicality with brand essence preservation. Validate guidelines address weaknesses while accentuating strengths.
Establish regular review cycles and benchmark KPIs to refine the living document over time, retaining relevance.
Step 6. Implementation
Educating teams is critical for adoption. Kickstart immersive workshops that explain background research, templates, guidelines, and best practices using real examples.
Demonstrate proper usage across team projects for experienced learning. Integrate brand approval workflows with checklists and dedicated reviewers for accountability. Appoint subject experts to motivate compliance, resolve ambiguities and update documentation regularly maintaining consistency.
Step 7. Monitor and Maintain
Schedule periodic quantitative and qualitative audits, analyzing touchpoints against guidelines and customer sentiment. Gauge impact on core metrics, including lead generation, engagement, and conversational rates. Identify lapses requiring reinforcement or areas necessitating change due to strategic pivots.
Adapt the living brand voice chart through minor iterative improvements rather than complete overhauls, ensuring sustained relevance. Formally review and socialize valuable updates at set intervals, engaging teams proactively.
Conclusion
A well-planned, meticulously executed brand voice chart embodies the organizational vision and values. It establishes consistency, increasing trust while allowing flexibility to evolve.
Follow a 7-step approach practical framework for crafting an authentic voice resonating with audiences. A booming brand voice will productively guide multilingual communications toward elevating customer relationships and business goals flawlessly over the long run.
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