3 Quick Wins That’ll Improve Your Brand Voice

T’ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it, and that’s what gets results.

Ella Fitzgerald

It’s no secret that making sure your brand is consistent leads to positive customer experiences and long-term loyalty.

Think of those brands with legions of loyal customers:

Apple, Nike, Brewdog, The Body Coach, Oatly, Innocent, Patagonia… (the list goes on and on).

Everything they produce is consistently on-brand, and it means their customers always know what to expect from them, which in turn fosters trust.

And back before we spent most of our life online, having that level of control of your brand image was a piece of piss. Every ad you placed in the paper, on a billboard or on TV could be vetted to make sure it was 100% on-brand and on-message.

But now, things are different.

That granular level control just isn’t possible in the age of 24/7, always-on marketing. (Unless you’re not a fan of sleep or a social life…)

Consumers and customers are way savvier than they’ve ever been. Your brand can no longer list the benefits of your product, add a call to action and reap the rewards. Now, customers expect much more.

Not only do they have the ability to compare you to every competitor on the planet within seconds, but they can also stumble across your business in a metric shit tonne of different ways.

Maybe their first interaction is a tweet that appears in their timeline because a friend liked it.

Maybe it’s a targeted ad in their Facebook feed, Instagram or Twitter feed.

Maybe they’ve heard of you from a friend and decide to check you out.

Every one of those impressions counts, just like they’ve always done, but now they have to do more to have the same impact.

As Jennifer Havice says in Finding the Right Message: 

Your tweets, targeted ads, homepage — they all need to feel like they’re from the same brand in the words they use because the logo isn’t always going to be immediately obvious.

And they also need to make sure that the customer gets a sense of your brand’s personality and what makes your brand different straight away.

Most of all, they need to make an emotional connection with the reader in a way that makes them go ‘holy shit, this is the brand for me’.

Because with hundreds of other brands out there, people don’t want to settle for any other brand. They want to find a brand that feels like it’s just for them.

And no matter how slick your logo, how eye-catching your branding or how targeted your arsenal of ads, if your brand doesn’t allow its personality connect with like-minded customers through a distinctive brand voice, then you’re not going to see the results you want.

1. CLARIFY AND SIMPLIFY YOUR MESSAGE

Nobel Prize-winning behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman has a theory that he calls ‘fast and slow thinking’.

His research shows that our brain has two modes of thought: fast thinking and slow thinking. Fast thinking is fast, instinctive and emotional, while slow thinking is a much slower, more deliberate and logical way of processing information.

For example, if I asked you to solve 1+1, you’d likely say 2 before you’d even thought to work it out. That’s fast thinking in action.

On the other hand, if I asked you for the cube root of 1728, you’d either do some mental maths for a while, or you’re going to just give up. That’s slow thinking in action.

Because it looks it requires much more effort from the beginning, your brain is far less likely to even bother engaging with it. (And even if you do, you’re not going to have that same emotional, instinctive response to it.)

HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO YOUR BRAND VOICE?
Well, the same thing applies to the language your brand uses.

Look at the following bits of copy that explain what I do, for example:

Option 1: I help businesses develop customer-grabbing voices.

Option 2: Using a series of carefully designed frameworks, I research, develop and implement brand voices that help businesses attract more customers.

Which one looked like it required more effort to understand? Which one was more appealing? Which one just felt better?

By making your message clear for your readers, you’ll keep them engaged and create an emotional connection with them.

Why is this important? According to Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman,  95% of our purchase decisions take place unconsciously. As marketers, we like to rationalise everything with data and statistics, but consumers don’t think like this. They decide with emotion and justify with logic.

PUTTING THAT INTO PRACTICE:
Simplifying and clarifying your message is much easier said than done. And sometimes it’s hard to even tell whether you need to clarify it at all because you’re too close to the subject.

So, I developed two quick-and-easy exercises to help you sort the wood from the trees.

EXERCISE ONE: THE PARKLIFE TEST
Read every bit of copy you can lay your hands on and say “Parklife!” at the end of it. If you feel like you want to burst into your very best Damon Albarn, it needs probably needs rewriting.

 This is going to be stuck in your head all day now. Sorry.
EXERCISE TWO: THE TWO BEER CHALLENGE
Take all of the bits of copy that you weren’t happy with from The Parklife Test and paste them into a document.

Read them for a second (or third) time and then look open a fresh document.

Now picture yourself in this situation:

It’s a Friday afternoon in mid-July. It’s been a very hot day, but it’s cooling off. Your phone buzzes. It’s an old colleague who’s been in town for a meeting and wonders if you want to grab a drink and a bite to eat after work. (Of course you do.)

You meet up, find a nice pub garden and order some food and a few drinks. After an hour of reminiscing about old times and moaning about your old boss, they ask: ‘So, where are you working right now? What do they do?’

How would you tell them what your business does?

Odds are you wouldn’t say something like: ‘The Team at XYZ have been blue sky thinking and now we’re focused on developing a results-driven solutions for our customers…’

(Side note: if you are a person that talks like that in real life, please don’t ever invite me for a beer.)

Instead, you’d probably say: ‘Oh, me and a few colleagues got fed up with [problem] so have developed a way to fix it’ or something like that.

Now, this response is far from perfect. For starters, it’s a little vague, generic and positions your business as the hero of the story. (Your customer should always be the hero of the story.)

But I guarantee your hypothetical drinking companion is interested. (For a start, this new approach has a narrative. And narratives are a crucial for grabbing people’s attention and keeping them in Fast Thinking, emotional connection mode.)

Now you’ve imagined yourself in that situation, rewrite the copy as if you were talking to this friend.

Once you’ve got some copy down on paper, step away and let it stew for a while.

Now, when you revisit it your copy, read it aloud. Is it easy to understand? Does it still accurately describe what you do?

If so, start to use this new approach in everything you produce, from tweets to sales letters. This simplicity and clarity should now be one of the foundations of the way your brand speaks.

You’ll start to see the difference right away.

2. KEEP IT REAL
Did you know that 80% of people cite the authenticity as the deciding factor in whether they follow and like a brand?

That means that if people can tell that your brand is being disingenuous, they’ll go looking for another brand instead. (Often, this isn’t even a conscious choice, just that something doesn’t quite feel right.)

It’s ironic though, isn’t it? Marketing, almost by definition, is anything but authentic.

So what do customers mean by authentic? Do they just want brands to be honest?

Well, sort of. Honesty does play a big part in the perceived authenticity of brands, but consumers still expect more from brands than just not lying to them. (Who knew?!)

The Journal of Consumer Psychology defines brand authenticity as the extent to which consumers think your brand is faithful to itself, true to its customers and motivated by caring for their customers and their cause and able to help customers be true to themselves.

(That last part is particularly interesting. People want brands to be authentic to themselves and to also help them be true to themselves. That’s why it’s always a good idea to develop voices that sit in crossover zone between how your brand talks and how your customers talk.)

On top of that, a study in the same article discovered that brand authenticity is a key driver in brand choice.

Or, in other words, the more authentic your brand seems, the more they sell.

(Now you’re interested, right?)

But how on earth can you make your voice noticeably authentic, especially when brands attempting to be authentic can — ironically — come off as a little false and try-hard.

Short of developing a full-blown brand voice, there are a few things you can do to make your voice a little more authentic. (The Two Beer Challenge will help — talking like a normal person is inherently more authentic than talking like a marketing weirdo.)

Look at your brand values and incorporate them into the way that your brand speaks. If your brand likes to be cutting-edge, try and introduce dynamic language into the way you write. Likewise, if your brand prides itself on customer service, bring customer-focused, conversational language into your brand voice. That way, your brand voice always lines up with your overall messaging and feels much more authentic. 

Be transparent. A recent study revealed that nearly all consumers are more likely to be loyal to transparent brands, and a whopping 73% are willing to pay more for transparency. So be upfront with your customers. If a form is going to take a while to fill out, say so. If there’s an extra charge somewhere down the line, say so. And don’t try to be clever or ambiguous with your wording either, it just makes you seem shady. (Monzo, the online bank, smashes it when it comes to a transparent voice.)

Avoid using language that doesn’t suit your brand. While it can be tempting to crack a joke social media or jump on a hashtag, if that doesn’t match with the way you usually talk, it’s going to seem inauthentic. Likewise, if you’re usually a chatty, informal brand, using overly formal, stilted language, even when you’re talking about serious things. 

Most of all, avoid any jargon (unless absolutely unavoidable). When you use jargon, it feels like you sound like you know what you’re talking about and it sometimes sounds like you know what you’re talking about. But to an outsider, it has a distinct whiff of BS. (Go back to the copy I wrote about myself in the previous section, which one makes me seem more authentic and reliable? The one without jargon, right?)
3: WHATEVER YOU DO, BE CONSISTENT:
Getting an audience is hard. Sustaining an audience is hard. It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose, and of action over a long period of time.

Bruce Springsteen in Entertainment Weekly, 2003.

(I’ve quoted a Nobel Prize winner and a shit-tonne of stats from studies, so I thought it was time for a change of pace.)

And Bruce isn’t wrong. (The Boss is never wrong.)

There are reams and reams of studies that show that doing one thing consistently is much better than a scatter-gun, always-changing-on-the-fly approach.

Developing and using a brand voice consistently over time won’t just increase your revenue (brands that present themselves consistently see an average revenue increase of 23%) but it’ll also help you appear more authentic, too.

But beyond that, it just makes good, common sense. If your voice is all over the place, then you run the risk of a customer not recognising your brand, even if they’ve come across you before.

BUT BEING CONSISTENT DOESN’T MEAN ALWAYS SAYING THE SAME THING.
Take a look at Virgin, for instance. They’re absolute beasts of branding (and pioneers of brand voice, too), so it stands to reason that the Virgin brand voice is distinctive (customer-focused, witty, honest and enthusiastic).

And yet they use a variation of that voice to promote everything from flights to mobile networks.

The message changes. The tone changes. The voice even changes a little, but it still feels distinctly Virgin, and as such, carries with it all of the positive connotations and expectations customers have come to expect from the brand.

A consistent brand voice lets your customers to know what to expect. On top of just demonstrating authenticity, a consistent brand voice also breeds trust. (And, not to sound too much like Yoda, but trust leads to sales.)

That’s the power of a consistent brand voice.

(Oh, while we’re on the topic, this Virgin Mobile brand voice document is a fantastic example of how useful a well thought out tone of voice document can be. Check it out.)

Again, these three things alone probably aren’t going to be enough to fully develop a customer-grabbing voice, but they’re a pretty rock solid start. 

Pssst. If you’re really interested in developing a proper brand voice — but aren’t sure whether you want to invest any money in it yet — I’ve put together a FREE Bland Voice to Brand Voice course that runs you through a my signature process for developing 8-figure brand voices.

Sign up here! 👇