Essential Branding Strategies: Creating a Voice

Small Business Branding > A Consistent Voice

In this series of blogs, we’ve covered some major factors for how small businesses can brand themselves, including how to improve all forms of communication and how to create a memorable persona. In this article, we’re going to provide some additional tips for how to create your business’s voice. Before reading on, protect your business with a comprehensive Business Owners Policy (BOP).

Why is a voice important?

According to Content Marketing Institute, you may be asking why a brand voice matters – isn’t it more important to work hard to make your brand sound more human? A brand voice, though, isn’t about the creation of a non-human voice. It’s about being consistent with the voice you are creating and positioning yourself as an easily identified and authoritative source for your area of expertise. Similarly, a consistent brand voice and vocabulary is essential to implementing localized content and intelligent content strategies effectively.

Gather a sample.

Evaluate your social media channels and any platform in which you post content. With a critical eye, weed out the pieces that could be written by just anyone, and focus on the pieces where you feel your mission and voice shines through. If there are attributes you want to see more of, make a note of it.

Describe who you want to be.

Jot down a few words that you want your brand to embody. Then, have your coworkers share their thoughts. As a group, collectively pick out the words that everyone chose. Then, decipher how you can implement these words to be action-based in your content strategy.

Share your ideas with your writers.

Go through some examples of content that hits the mark, and show in real time how you would revise some existing content that isn’t reflective of the defined voice to realign to it. If possible, provide the team with a laminated or card-stock copy of the brand voice chart to keep at their desk for reference. Ensure an electronic version also is available.

Revisit the voice strategy.

This isn’t a one and done strategy. Instead, as the company grows and evolves, so should the voice. With this in mind, revisit the voice at least quarterly to get feedback, make adjustments, and find out what’s been working and what isn’t. Be sure to cover do’s and don’ts of the voice strategy to ensure alignment with all content writers.

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