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Branding: Tone and Voice
Sep 14, 2012
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The core of a relationship to customers, clients, readers and audiences is always based on the way that we speak to them. It can’t be stated enough; creating an environment of trust and loyalty is based on the way you speak to your audience. Is your business creating a unique voice that your customers can identify with?
By taking stock of the current tone in your businesses marketing materials, site, newsletters, and contact with customers you can go a long way toward understanding how your customers clients and site visitors see you. Asking questions about what type of business you have and the type of customers you attract will greatly inform the type of writing that you do for your marketing, branding, and advertising campaigns.
Project What You Want To Receive
Customers and clients have a tendency to gravitate toward companies that they feel that they know. How do we create that feeling? By reminding them of who you are and what you're going to do for them. With the language we use we carefully establish our principles and create a comfortable environment for the type of business that we’d like to create.
Knowing our customers means that we know how they speak and how they behave. It’s best not mimic your customers but instead be true to your brand by creating marketing materials that you’re comfortable with. Customers, clients and users have a knack for the authentic and tend to value it more than insincerity. Consider companies with great reputations like IKEA, Apple, Amazon, all of which exemplify the power of staying on brand.
This leads us to adopt a tone that makes our interactions more comfortable on both sides and leads to positive feelings of engagement for entrepreneurs.
Always Have A Goal
Goals are very important when working with a business. When working with tone and voice and establishing a content strategy, it’s helpful to think about the emotions you’d like to provoke or create with your product or service, or within the materials you use to market it.
For example, here's a list of emotions we might want to illicit.
- Admiration
- Curiosity
- Trust
- Loyalty
- Pride
- Delight
- Surprise
If we take a moment to think about our favorite interactions with customers, clients, friends and family, they feature some of the emotions listed. These emotions trigger something deep within us all that allows us to feel complete when using a product or service, and this feeling leads to loyalty. By making these our goals we are planting the seeds toward creating better interactions between us and users. We align ourselves with the goals of our customers.
Always.
Tone and Voice is something to always keep at the forefront of your mind when thinking about social media and online customer communication. By creating an environment of comfort it's easier.
Defining and creating a tone for a business is very important. If we look at large corporations, we're aware that there's a marked difference between the way that Chase Banking defines their brand with tone and voice, and the way that Apple Incorporated defines themselves. Remember, when working in content strategy there isn’t better is defined by customer engagement.
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