How to Find Your Brand Voice

Brand Voice

The art of a consistent, appropriate, and cohesive brand voice is an important one that requires constant TLC. How to find your brand voice means truly looking at the personality, values, and style, and is based on target market research and interactions you have with clients, customers, and consumers, as well as with each other. This worksheet tool gives you a foundation to use so your brand’s communications are clear and consistent. Here’s an example:

My Brand Voice Profile

Mission Statement
Many believe this is the anchor of your business; the heart that beats, or should, in every employee at the company – it’s your core purpose. Here are some questions to consider when developing this: What do we do? Who is our audience? How do we serve our consumers? Why are we in this business? What do we want to be known for?

Tagline
This represents a brand’s unique value proposition. It should stand out from the competition, be notable, and embraced by everyone internally. Need a resource? Here are some companies that nailed it.

Values
Consumers care about what the companies they buy from are saying, representing, and advocating in the world. We are tending to take more pride in our purchases making statements about what we support. We experienced the green wave and now we’re into the cause wave (e.g. TOMs). See this extensive guide to shaping your company values.

Target Market Profile
This is the audience to whom all of your marketing efforts are geared and the group that you want engaging with your brand.

Keywords
What do people type into Google when they’re looking for your brand? Those are your keywords. These are important because they need to pop up in your Meta tags, content, website, and more in order to have your brand show up in search rankings. This is the intricate world of search engine optimization.

Language
A brand’s language is comprised of the words it uses and how those words affect its audience. Depending on the industry or personality of the brand, the language may be scientific, relatable, informative, friendly, stern, etc.

Tone
This is how you say something. I like to look at it as if your brand were a car, what car would they be? The answer will tell you a lot about your brand’s personality (e.g. a Fiat versus a Jeep) and can help steer the tone in which you write and say things (e.g. elegant versus edgy).

Approach
Now, pull together everything you’ve written and define your brand’s approach, comprised of the goals you have for your voice (e.g. conversation starter, consistent resource, factual, etc.).

These exercises may appear trite, but they are what differentiate bonded teams working towards one goal from disheveled teams moving in different directions. Your brand voice comes out a million times a day to an array of different people so make it count.

-Jamie