Anyone running a business or involved in marketing and public relations should know what a brand voice is. In today’s world, consumers no longer identify companies just by the quality of their products or services. A company’s brand voice identifies how customers, as well as non-customers, really view the company.
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What is Brand Voice?
A brand voice serves as a style of communication that combines the values of a company with the company’s image. Brand voices will vary from company to company and no brand voice should match another. Just like every person has their own personality, every company has its own brand voice.
You may want to know how to create your own brand voice. You will likely want to look at a few things:
- The values of your company
- The needs and wants of your target customer base
- And, the image you want to put in the minds of customers
How is Brand Voice Related to Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness describes how receptive consumers are to a company’s brand. Top brands like Apple and Nike have excellent brand awareness. Many consumers can identify Apple advertisements before the logo even appears. Due to the unique brand voice, Apple boasts massive international brand awareness.
Spreading brand awareness is an important part of marketing and should be a goal within most marketing campaigns. A strong and consistent brand voice will always help your brand improve brand awareness. In order to determine the effectiveness of your branding, you must know how to measure brand awareness. Once you measure your brand awareness, you can determine where you need to take your brand voice to continue improving your overall brand awareness.
How is Brand Voice Related to Brand Tone?
While brand voice describes the values a brand aims to share, brand tone explains how to deliver the values. Creating a brand’s tone involves deciding between delivering a message through a serious tone, comedic tone, or provide any other type of emphasis.
Different Brand Tones Within Brand Voice
Different situations and marketing campaigns call for different tones. For example, when the COVID-19 pandemic arose, many brands chose to cancel comedic marketing campaigns due to the serious circumstances created by a global pandemic. Most brands created new marketing campaigns or adapted their campaigns to a serious tone in order to address the concerns of consumers.
In the case of State Farm during the pandemic, the company had to cancel advertisements planned to run during sporting events. Instead, State Farm used its brand voice to settle concerns of consumers through a “New Normal” campaign.
Different Brand Tones Within Different Contexts
Different marketing channels provide different spaces for various tones. Oftentimes, businesses will share their brand voice on Twitter through short and to-the-point tweets. Wendy’s is known for adding a comedic tone to its brand through Twitter, but other brands may use the platform for quick news updates. At the same time, brands often use Instagram to share lighthearted updates and information.
With native advertising, brands sneak advertisements into content by matching the tone and function of the content. A brand can use product placement as a form of native advertising to bring its brand front and center. By covertly placing a product in a film such as a movie or television show, the brand gains recognition without blatantly advertising its product.
No matter the form of advertising, brand voice, and brand tone plays an important role in marketing efforts.
Social Media Brand Voice Defined
Just like overall brand voice, social media brand voice makes up your company’s style of communication, but on social media. Social media brand voice includes all forms of communication on social media from simple details like brand colors and font styles to large concepts like a brand logo or consistent use of language.
Companies can use social media to expand the reach of their brand voice to new audiences. Social media pages for your business will enable your brand voice to reach customers in their own territory. Rather than customers searching for your brand, you will show up directly in their feed to spread your message through your brand voice. Appearing in the right place is one aspect that makes social media so important to attract customers.
Social Media Campaigns
A social media campaign consists of an integrated approach between multiple social media platforms to spread a message using your brand voice and tone. The brand voice should remain consistent throughout each of your social media campaigns. While you can conduct your social media campaign in a variety of different ways, here are eight steps you can follow to create an effective campaign:
#1: Define a Goal for the Campaign
Work with your team to define the goals of your campaign. Decide what actions you want your viewers to take after viewing your content. Without goals in mind, the time you spend on your content may not result in a positive ROI. Make sure to your goals align with your brand voice to avoid brand confusion.
#2: Choose How to Use Your Various Social Media Platforms
Choose the type of content you intend on publishing for each social media platform you will use. Certain types of posts on social media platforms perform better on specific platforms. For example, longer videos may perform better on Facebook than on Instagram. Do not forget to keep your brand voice relevant in the content you produce.
#3: Draft a Content Calendar for Upcoming Posts
A content calendar will help keep your campaign organized and make sure you do not miss a post. By choosing the dates and times of your posts ahead of time, you can better organize your content. Posts on different platforms made around the same time can complement each other. Additionally, you do not want to blow up your followers’ feeds with post after post. Planning is an important step of a social media campaign that you should not miss.
#4: Design Your Content
Believe it or not, making your actual content is not the first step of a social media campaign. After organizing your campaign, you get to create a range of content including graphics, videos, text, or whatever you see fit. Make sure your content stays consistent with your brand voice. Your brand tone may change between content, depending on the platforms you publish to.
#5: Schedule Your Content to Post
With your campaign organized and your content created, you are now ready to schedule your content. You may choose to schedule your content manually, but many social media scheduling tools exist for your convenience. Use tools like Hootsuite to schedule your posts ahead of time.
#6: Monitor and Engage with Your Posts
Do not just schedule your posts and forget about them, the job is not done yet! Keep an eye on your posts and make sure to reply to comments. Preferably you will reply to all comments if possible. Keeping up with your engagement provides you even more opportunities to connect with your customers.
#7: Create Follow-Up Content
Depending on the social media campaign you run, you may want to create follow-up content to post after your scheduled content. Follow-up content can include a reflection on the campaign, images or videos from an event, and possibly even the launch of a new product or service. Just like the original content within the campaign, keep your brand voice in mind with all new content you publish.
#8: Analyze Your Results
Finally, your social media campaign has ended and you are ready to analyze your results. By analyzing your results, you gain the opportunity to reflect, see what worked, what did not work, and what might work better in the future. You might discover the best time to post on Facebook is in the afternoon, or that you really held tight to your brand voice within your content. In the end, if you do not analyze your results, you miss out on an excellent learning opportunity.
You can make the most of social media campaigns by reading up on specific skills like how to use Instagram Insights to improve brand marketing. Most social media platforms contain in-app features to help you analyze your insights. Additionally, countless other third-party applications exist to improve your social media marketing.
When to Use Social Media Co-Branding
Sometimes your brand voice and overall branding might be on point, but the followers just are not there. You might feel prepared to step up your social media game but do not know how to spread your brand voice to a large audience. Social media co-branding could resolve your problem.
Social media co-branding allows you to spread your message by combining your brand voice with other social media content creators. You can choose to work with a social media influencer to reach a wider audience. Additionally, you can work with a brand that has similar values in order to reach a smaller but more relevant audience.
FAQs:
- What is a brand voice example?
- What are the different brand voices?
- How do I know my brand voice?
- What is social media co-branding?
- What is brand tone?
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