Recently at TrackMaven, we are revamping some things that have required a clear definition of our voice and as we’ve identified some of the pain points, we realized some of the things we’ve been doing haven’t included it. We were going through some type of identity crisis; however, knowing what our voice is helped reign in the problems for us to easily figure out a solution.
Admittedly, we didn’t have to trek through a difficult path to hone in how we wanted to speak to folks, who we wanted to talk to, or morphing our tone into something that really exemplified TrackMaven. Yet, we did have some clear steps and goals to bring us to where we are currently.
A voice of a brand provides the foundation for consistency through your content, design, culture and your overall marketing. It also gives your overall brand identifiable recognition, so if or example there was a blind sound test and your voice came up; everyone could identify who it is. It’s essential to define this because if you have more than one voice it can easily turn into an identity crisis and confuse everyone trying to figure out who you are.
3 Steps to Clearly Identify Your Brand Voice
1. Who is your audience?
What are your buyer personas? Who are your customers? Who are you trying to reach? Who is your target audience?
All of those a relevant questions to your marketing plan and business strategies; but they are also relevant questions involving your brand’s voice. Speaking to your audience in the right tone and then hopefully attracting people to the content you share with that voice will propel your marketing forward. If you don’t keep your desired audience in mind when determining your voice, you could be speaking in the wrong tone with your content and attracting a different set of people who wouldn’t be your customers.
For example, if your audience is filled with children from the ages of 5-10 years old, you wouldn’t speak to the them the same way that you would speak to a 25 year old. Having a firm grasp on your buyer personas, who your current customers are and who you are trying to reach are all factors in identifying your audience, but set the standard in how your voice should take shape in order to reach them.
2. Culture
Looking at Mailchimp’s, Hubspot’s and even Buffer’s culture make me think “Wow, it must be great to work there.” (This of course isn’t implying I hate working at TrackMaven, it’s quite frankly the complete opposite. :D) They have identifiable cultures that are worked seamlessly into the voice that they share with the world in their marketing.
The culture component is a little hard to determine in a matter of minutes and also involves the people who started the company; nevertheless, identifying the pillars of your company and the things that reign as the most important are elements that should be included into strategizing about your voice.
With Buffer, they are huge advocates of transparency and that’s something that I place high value on. They actively blog about what is happening within Buffer and not with just the outward facing things. And then they also transport this transparency into their everyday voice and content. On their about page they’ve listed out their values and also have an active ticker identifying how many users they have on Buffer and how many posts are scheduled as well.
Figuring out who you are as a company and what you stand for is incredibly vital, which also goes into your voice as well because both have to align.
3. Adjective Breakdown
During my first week working at TrackMaven, Allen told me to figure out a list of adjectives to identify who we were, who is the type of person (or corgi) marketers would want to talk to and what our marketing would look like.
In elementary school, I remember having to come up with a list of adjectives and then doing an acrostic with my name from those adjectives. It was probably my favorite assignment and I immediately thought about this when I was coming up with a list of adjectives.
To start I had about 20 adjectives, then I cut out similar synonyms which narrowed the list down to about 7. Then we those 7, my goal was to then narrow down to 3 main adjectives. It was easier for me to narrow down to 3 after I answer who our targeted audience is and also what TrackMaven’s culture is. It provided actual context to how we talk, approach topics and fit with how we want to engage with customers, prospects, leads etc.
Strategizing About Your Voice Breakdown
- Create a running list of adjectives, all of the ones that come to mind.
- Eliminate adjectives that are similar to each other, identifying the one out of the synonyms that you cannot live without.
- Answer the two questions below — “Who is my audience?” & “What is our Company Culture?”
- Then connect the top three adjectives to the two questions.
- Boom. You have a contextual outline of your voice.
How did you mold your company’s voice? Is it a little different from this? Leave us a comment below or tweet at us (@TrackMaven)!