Brand Voice Development: Creating Consistency Across Your Content 

A consistent brand voice is crucial for businesses that are striving to build and grow their audience. It's the personality that shines through all your content, making your brand recognizable and relatable to your audience. Whether it's a tweet, a newsletter, or a product description, your brand's voice should resonate clearly and consistently, fostering a sense of familiarity and trust with your customers. Trust is the foundation of becoming an authority and thought leader in your industry. 

This guide will walk you through the process of understanding, defining, refining, and maintaining your brand's unique voice, ensuring it resonates in every piece of content you create.

What Is a Brand Voice? 

Developing a strong, cohesive brand voice isn't just about using the right words—it's about creating an experience that aligns with your company's values and resonates with your target audience across all platforms. The tone used to deliver your brand message is also important: sarcastic, helpful, masculine, feminine, professional, educational, lighthearted, etc. Three key components help form a brand’s voice. 

How to Create a Brand Voice: Understand the Components 

1. Language Choice - Language can demonstrate a lot about your brand. Brands that incorporate local slang - I’m looking at yinz in Pittsburgh—target local customers, like restaurants or small businesses. When industry jargon is a major part of messaging, the brand is often speaking from one industry professional to another, such as in B2B marketing.   
   
   
2. Emotional Tone - Brands that frequently attach excitement and happiness to messaging are most likely to attract women, mothers of children, or are in an entertainment business. Masculine targeted content might give off a feeling of efficiency or utility of a product or service. Fear tactics can convey urgency to an audience. Emotional tone is the most versatile component of brand voice. 
   
   
3. Your Audience - Your business could be for anyone of any age or background, but you would not tell a story the same way to a child as you would a structural engineer, or to a mid-aged father and a college-aged young man. Audience segments have different interests and priorities. Understanding your Hero and their desired outcomes influences your brand voice stronger than any other component. 

Put them all together correctly and you give your audience a trusted tour guide to their desired outcomes. 

Check how are your Brand Identity is doing! 

Developing a Brand Voice Strategy

As business owners or marketing professionals, we sometimes assume a voice based on who we are talking to without considering the point of view (POV) from which we convey the information. Most people assume their own personality in developing content, with little thought to the strategic development of a brand voice. But if you hire a  content writer, how will they know to write in your “voice?” Without a guide to delivering your messaging, your new hire must get to know you to match your brand voice, which could take much longer than simply providing them with a brand guide that includes the necessary information and examples. 

Assessing Your Current Voice 

The first step to creating and maintaining a consistent brand voice is to assess your current voice. Gather a sample of current marketing content, including a variety of long-form and short-form pieces, such as web copy, blog articles, and social media posts. Pull multiple, past samples of each type of content. If your brand is long-standing, pick content published after the last time you shifted content strategy.  

Reflect on: 

• Is the point of view consistent across platforms? Do you sometimes speak from the professional’s point of view and other times from the point of view of an existing customer? If so, are the POVs different because of the platform or because of the subject? 
  
  
• If the voice is consistent, from what point of view is your content written?
  • Are you assuming the voice of the business owner, a happy customer sharing their experience, or the marketing professional whose job it is to convey all the great things your business offers? 
    
    
  • Do you express the same core values and corporate messaging through long and short form content? 

• Is your narrator the subject matter expert, or do you quote your in-house SMEs in your content? Which would make a stronger impression? 

Review these areas over your past posts. Try editing some of your short form posts to match your chosen narrator. If you’re unsure which point of view, language, or emotional tone is most effective in your chosen platform and audience, conduct some A/B testing and establish goals, like raising engagement, to determine which voice resonates with your existing audience.  

Alignment with Brand Values 

Use your company’s mission, vision, and purpose statements, along with their core values, to create a filter for your narrator. These will tell you what language and emotional tone to consider when developing content, even down to your target keywords and phrases.

A business with a core value of “Making our customers laugh is the best medicine” will avoid somber tones in their content.  

US Army core values include “Personal Courage: Face fear, danger or adversity (physical and moral).” They consistently use images of bravery and language, promoting courage to attract new recruits. 

As you build your idea of a narrator, use your company’s foundational messages with their role in the Hero’s Journey to filter the message you want your hero to receive.  

Engaging Stakeholders

Bring in the most successful salespeople in your business. They don’t even have to be on the sales team. Is the owner a strong source of leads? Consider the receptionist who has a talent for quickly matching the need of a potential client with the best possible product. The king of up-selling existing clients would be a great resource to tap when developing content. Even with diverse perspectives, each can provide great insight into effective emotional tone and language to adapt to the right audience. 

Implementing Your Brand Voice Across Content

Holman’s House Repair, a family-owned business, would be most effective if a member of the Holman family delivered their message, especially if the bulk of their business came from neighbors and surrounding communities. The face of a business often has the least amount of time to dedicate to content strategy and development. Delegating these tasks while remaining consistent is easy when you clearly document and explain your brand’s voice. 

Outline your decided brand voice thoroughly based on the areas discussed above. Unlike a buyer persona or hero profile, your brand voice is the thought-leader narrating your hero’s journey from discovery to reaching their desired outcome. 

Training Your Team  

Do the best you can to explain to your team in your brand guide the angle they must take to deliver messaging. Articulate your chosen brand voice as the customer’s tour guide and why the persona is the best for delivering information. If the voice is not based around a physical person in the office, provide your content writers with where to go if they have questions.  

After they’ve reviewed the new brand guide, provide some exercises to practice developing content: 

• Gather the sample content you used to review your existing voice and have your team edit past content to match the brand voice you describe in your brand guide. 
  
  
• Conduct A/B testing. Before your team reviews the guide, have them create a piece of content as they normally would. After reading the guide, have them create a new, informed piece of content. Use these as A/B samples in your content strategy. 
  
  
• Build a mock marketing campaign and ask each team member to develop content using the newly outlined brand voice to demonstrate the cohesion of messaging. 

Using Content Types and Tone Adjustments to Build Your Brand Messaging 

Finally, try role playing amongst stakeholders and your marketing team. Stage a Q&A between your brand heroes and your brand’s voice. The person representing the brand voice may adapt their language and emotional tone slightly depending on the origin of the question (phone call, instant message from social media, or answering a frequently asked question in a blog post), who is asking (male or female, older or younger, business owner or their administrative assistant), and the nature of the product they are inquiring about (personal use or a corporate purchase, high-dollar item or a frequently purchased accessory). 

Monitoring and Maintaining Brand Voice Consistency 

After you implement your new brand voice, schedule regular audits to ensure your messaging is still consistent from day one. Conduct the same exercise used to assess current brand voice and decide if there are noticeable changes in message delivery, if the changed was maintained overtime, and how the shift affected the goals of your overall content strategy.

Conduct brand voice audits incrementally with special considerations at each stage: 

• Two weeks after implementation: Ensure messaging indeed changed and remains consistent across platforms. 
  
  
• Two Months: See if creators return to the previous brand voice after a short time of practicing the new. Review KPIs to determine if the new voice is effective in your content strategy. Make minor adjustments if needed. 
  
  
• Six Months: If by six months, there is no change to KPIs or your team is struggling to maintain a consistent message, consider retraining or re-evaluating the brand voice again. 

Allow Your Brand Voice to Evolve Over Time

Many elements of a business will exist in perpetuity, but marketing is an ever-evolving process, especially with the world on the threshold of machine learning capabilities. Technology will only become smarter. New advancements will also trigger the need to revisit the efficiency of your hero’s journey narrator. 

Societal changes also affect marketing messages. Think about phrases like “With an overabundance of caution…” and “Now more than ever…” This example might trigger strong memories of lockdown and isolation during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is a prime example of how brands shifted their voice in the face of change. 

Building a Strong Brand Voice Can Lead to Long Term Success

A well-defined brand voice… 

• Considers language, emotional tone, and audience at the developmental stage. 
  
  
• Is consistent across platforms with slight variations in emotional tone when audiences change. 
  
  
• Aligns with your business’s core values. 
  
  
• Should be evaluated regularly. 

Assuming a distinct brand voice builds trust from potential customers and is as easy as presuming a familiar role when developing content. Being strategic about the delivery is just as important as the message itself. This is why brand voice development is so critical. Developing a consistent narrator for your hero’s journey seamlessly grows into a trusted guide, providing insight and assistance to their desired outcome. 

PIC assists B2B and B2C businesses in developing strong and trustworthy brand voices. Let us share our decades of expertise by scheduling a free consultation today.