How to Create a Brand Voice And Develop It?

Mastering the art of communication is not an easy task, regardless if it is for personal cases or business-related.

A lot of brands reap the benefits from having established a great tone of voice, but a lot of work had been put into it before they could ever have reached that stage.

Ultimately, you want to know how to create a brand voice?

Let us find out all about it together.

Readers Also Enjoy: A Guide to Winning at Client Communication – DevriX

What Is a Brand Voice?

A brand voice is the personality your company has when communicating across various channels, including blog posts, social media, newsletters, etc.

It should resonate with your audience, and align with your company values. Your brand voice is the main key to developing a successful communication strategy.

Readers Also Enjoy: Company Rebranding [Strategic Guide For 2022] – DevriX

How to Create a Brand Voice: 7 Steps

1. Define Your Company Values And Goals
2. Research Your Audience
3. Review Your Content
4. Picture Your Brand as a Person
5. Make a List
6. Establish Credibility
7. Be Consistent

1. Define Your Company Values And Goals

Before you start creating a brand tone of voice, it’s important to state what your company stands for. Establish your core values, your goals, and culture.

For instance, at DevriX, our core values are:

• Never Stop Learning
• Be a Community Citizen
• Own Accountability
• Evolve and Adapt
• Burn with Passion

Defining these values will make the process of finding your tone of voice, and establishing the personality of your brand, much easier.

2. Research Your Audience

Another crucial step towards creating a brand voice is researching and knowing who your audience is. Find out what expectations they have, do they support your values, and are they interested in your brand?

The goal is to capture the way your clients express themselves, using the words and phrases that they would use. For instance, a group of writers and editors would use a different language, compared to streamers or developers.

3. Review Your Content

In case you already have existing content, before establishing a tone of voice for your brand, it’s good to review yourself and your content. Look at how you’ve been presenting yourself, and think about things you would like to change going forward.

This could be helpful not only for future content, but also for instances where you update your old blog posts, for example. What’s more, reviewing older content can give you an idea of how customers respond to it, what was successful, and what didn’t work at all.

4. Picture Your Brand as a Person

In order to appeal to customers, try picturing your brand as a person. What type of person you are dictates your way of thinking, and communicating with others.

Are you a kind teacher, a savvy handyman, an adventurous spirit? Look around – your employees, yourself, your clients – what are the common traits that everyone has?

Finding the right answers to these questions will help you immensely to discover the best tone of voice for your brand.

Readers Also Enjoy: What Is a No-Brand Brand and Is It Profitable? – DevriX

5. Make a List

Another great practice is to make a list of dos and don’ts. How would you like your brand to sound, and how would you like it not to? For example, you can write down:

• Our brand should not sound pretentious.
• Our brand should not be arrogant.
• Our brand should be friendly.
• Our brand should be fun.

Whenever you have doubts on how your brand should sound, you can always check the list to remind yourself of what you’ve outlined.

6. Establish Credibility

What are the things that put your brand above the competition? Incorporate them into your voice, and emphasize the aspects of your brand that make you stand out from the crowd.

For example, you might be the only brand in the niche that strongly supports digital sustainability, or perhaps you donate a percentage of your profit to charity.

Whatever it is, make sure it fits in with your tone of voice, and above all, be yourself.

Readers Also Enjoy: Psychographics in Marketing: How to Wow Your Customers – DevriX

7. Be Consistent

There’s no point in establishing a tone of voice, if you are not going to consistently follow it across all channels. The voice you use on your website should be the same one you use on social media, and emails.

Otherwise, you will be sending mixed messages to your audience, and they will probably become frustrated, or be uncertain about doing business with you.

Again, consistency is not hard to do, especially if you are genuine, and can be yourself. Like the proverb states, no man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar, so keep things real.

Why Is Brand Voice Important?

Users don’t only care about products or prices. Customers want to shop from companies that share their values, and resonate with their lifestyle.

An inappropriate tone of voice can turn potential customers away from you, regardless if you’re offering the best products/services or not.

Furthermore, more than 80% of customers want to trust a brand before they make a purchase, and the tone of voice of your company is one of the main factors that can build that trust.

Readers Also Enjoy: Content that Creates Loyalty, Trust & Engagement – DevriX

Brand Voice Types

Let’s review some of the most common types of brand voices, along with examples.

Informal Tone

The informal tone of voice is widely used, especially in companies that want to present themselves as real, and human. Of course, this voice requires a balance, because if you’re too informal all the time you might appear unprofessional.

A great example is Slack. They always try to be friendly, and helpful to their users, using humor from time to time, while still being serious when the situation calls for it.

Serious Tone

It’s in the nature of some companies to be serious. This usually goes for nonprofit organizations, charities, and government agencies. Some topics, like domestic violence, for example, are no laughing matter, and a humorous tone will be inappropriate, to say the least.

Greenpeace, for instance, is an environmental nonprofit organization that aims to present itself as an expert. They often use an authoritative tone, and a matter of fact tone when speaking of worldwide issues.

Humorous Tone

A day without laughter is a day wasted. Some brands take that saying very seriously, and it really works. After all, humor evokes positive emotions, and makes people happy. And a happy customer is a paying customer, right?

Skype is one of the companies that loves to take humor seriously. Their communications are always respectful and enthusiastic, while adopting a more serious tone, should it be required. Still, this tone of voice suits them very well, since Skype is an app that is mainly used to connect friends and family.

Apart from the ones we’ve already mentioned above, there are numerous other brand voice types, including:

• Motivational
• Optimistic
• Sympathetic
• Bold
• Dry
• Professional
• Posh
• Assertive
• Passionate
• Informative
• Straight forward
• Conversational
• Heroic
• Free-spirited

In Conclusion

Still wondering how to create a brand voice? The main takeaway points are that you should first define what the values of your company are, then understand how your audience connects with them.

Afterward, review your existing content, imagine your brand is a real person, establish credibility, and always be consistent across all communication channels.

There you have it, that wasn’t so hard now, was it?