Balancing the Personable and the Professional in Your Brand Voice

With every caption you write for social media and every word you add to your website, you are creating a brand voice. 

Your brand voice is the way you talk to your customers and the way they perceive your brand. That’s why you want to make sure your brand voice is easy to recognize and can't be mistaken for anyone else's.

For better or for worse, every time you write or speak as your brand, you’re contributing to your overall voice. Think of each word as a vote that contributes to the overall perception of your brand. The more familiar or formal you are in each tweet, caption, or blog post, the more familiar or formal your brand will be perceived. 

Because your brand voice is so critical to developing a relationship with your customers, every word you choose matters!

Why brand voice matters now more than ever

Back when businesses were exclusively putting out commercials, print ads, and billboards, your marketing team had a lot more time to develop a brand voice that was consistent and recognizable. Nowadays, customers expect your brand to be active on social media and the internet— which means you’re responsible for creating a lot more content than ever before. 

In the sea of social media and blog posts, it can be hard to maintain a consistent brand personality — but it’s more important than ever. Customers have grown accustomed to interacting with brands directly in a two-way relationship—they don’t just want to consume content created by your brand. They expect you to respond to them. 

Social media has become an arena where all customer interactions take place, from sales to customer service: here, you’ll simultaneously be creating content that encourages your customers to purchase while also using the same channel to answer their questions and address their complaints. In all these interactions, your customers will respond best to a brand that presents consistency in its personality. Cultivating a clear and defined brand voice is the way to accomplish this.

How to develop your brand voice and tone

There are several different ways you can begin to intentionally develop your brand voice. Here are a few of our favorite strategies:

• Imagine your brand as a person: Customers don’t want to interact with a robot, they want to talk to a real person. Having a brand voice that establishes a sense of humanity and personality makes it feel like there are real people behind your company — people who can empathize with your customers’ problems. To get to this point, try envisioning your brand as a person. If they could talk, what would they say? How would they walk? What clothes would they wear? These types of questions can help you to visualize your brand in a human way, and then write and speak from that place.
  

• Make sure your voice translates across channels: You don’t want to sound like a totally different person on your Instagram than you do on your website. Of course, you’ll be shifting your tone depending on the platform and situation (i.e., you’ll use a different tone to respond to a customer concern than you would use in a blog post), but overall you’ll want to maintain consistency to establish credibility with your audience. To do this, you’ll need to create a brand guide so that your team can align with a single brand voice, even if content is written by multiple members of your team.
  

• Listen to the language your customers use: Not sure how your brand should talk? Take notes on the way your target audience speaks. What media are they consuming? Who else do they like to follow on social media? How do they interact with brands, and how do they interact with each other? It’s much easier to make your brand voice sound relatable and natural if you’re starting on level ground with your target audience. 

Balancing personality with professionalism

Once you’ve started to develop your brand voice, you’ll probably encounter situations where you want to switch up your tone to match an appropriate mood — opting for a more formal tone in a help center article, for example, and switching to a more familiar tone when answering questions in your Instagram comments.

This balance of personality and professionalism, and how far you lean in either direction, is the core of your brand. The tone of your overall business and product should be matched by your brand voice — so if you’re a law firm that covers wills and estate planning, you probably don’t want to use humor on any platform, even though it’s a more casual setting. 

But these aren’t hard and fast rules. Just because you have a relatively boring or technical product doesn’t mean you need to use formality in every context (take insurance companies for example — between Flo from Progressive, Mayhem from Allstate, and the Geico lizard, these brands have some of the most familiar and memorable marketing, despite their relatively boring product). 

Getting clarity on your brand voice

When you work closely with your business every day, it can be challenging to step back enough to be able to view your brand objectively. That’s why it’s critical to work with a professional who can help you to measure your current brand voice and become more intentional about the way you write and speak across all channels.

At Cre8tives.co, we work with companies to develop a brand voice that feels authentic to their mission and meshes with their target audience. We handle everything from content creation to posting, so all you have to do is enjoy the results.

Want to learn more about what we do? Send us an email and let’s chat!