Our voice is one of the most unique and powerful things we have as humans. Not only can it tell people who you are but it can showcase how you feel and what you believe. Without our voice, we can struggle to truly connect with others around us and can become ineffective when it comes to accomplishing anything.
Just like you, your business and brand needs a voice. One that not only personifies what your company believes in but also one that helps it best connect with the audience it wants to accomplish something with. A company’s voice and messaging is one of the most important elements when it comes to a fully formed, successful marketing campaign yet is one that many tend to overlook. Why is that?
Why do brands’ voice & messaging go unheard?
Often times, when a brand is established or a new campaign is started, there are so many different elements to put together that a unique voice and messaging is never truly considered. While of course, any company is going to have a voice and some sort of messaging, not near as many have taken the time to build out strategy regarding what and why their voice and messaging is what it is. It is because of this oversite that a number of brands online today wallow in anonymity, creating content that blends into the crowd and fails to connect with its target audience.
How can brands improve their voice & messaging?
Fortunately for these brands, voice and messaging is something that while potentially time-consuming to implement, is easily created. In order to do so, all a company must do is follow these steps:
- Establish personas
- As with anything and everything connected to inbound marketing, the first step to understanding what your brand’s voice and messaging should be is to first understand who your target market is. Not only knowing what industry and type of company or consumer to target but who you will be interacting with on both the marketing and sales side helps you better understand how best to connect with their goals and challenges through your content and overall tone.
- Establish Need & Opportunity
- Every persona has needs within their role which can be seen as an opportunity by your brand. Spend time listing out each persona’s needs within their roles and explain how they can be opportunities for your brand’s products or services. Be sure to clearly understand the emotions and backstory connected to these needs as this will be good to know as you move closer to finalizing your voice and messaging.
- Answer the Question: “Who are we?”
- Categorizing yourself, both in your eyes and from the eyes of your target market, is a great way to better understand how you are currently seen in the market.
- Answer the Question: “What benefits do we provide?”
- What kind of benefits does your brand’s products or services provide your personas in relation to their overall needs?
- Compare Yourself to Your Competition
- How are you unlike your direct competitors? Your indirect competitors? Maintaining the status quo? Understand what the major differences are between you and everyone else so that you can better describe this moving forward.
- Wrap It All Together
- Use all of the information collected in the above steps to create these sentences: “Our company targets these BLANK personas who have these BLANK needs which are seen as these BLANK opportunities. We are a BLANK company that provides these BLANK benefits, unlike these competitors who instead do BLANK.”
When all is said and done
While the above exercise is a great way to flush out different elements, a brand’s voice and messaging should really just be able to easily explain who they are, what they believe in, who they target and how they interact with them. There’s no one right or wrong way for a brand to come to establish its own voice and messaging, it just needs some extra time and thought put into it before other elements of a marketing campaign are targeted. Interested in updating or creating your brand's voice? Contact us today to start the process!
