To discover your brand voice, you first need to review what your company stands for and whom you want to reach with your messaging. By revisiting those key essentials, you can better personify your brand personality in design and content. Let’s dive in:
Evaluate Your Internal Mission & Vision Statements
Your brand voice should be strewn throughout your mission and vision statements. By doing so, it will lay a foundation for both your team and target audience. If the entirety of your marketing efforts is a house, your mission and vision statements are the concrete slab that they sit on.
It’s imperative that your brand voice is woven into these statements to ensure your products and services find marketing success.
Review your current mission and vision statements to ensure your brand voice is accurately reflected in these statements. From there, you can determine your marketing course.
A friendly reminder – a mission statement and a vision statement are two distinct statements with vastly different purposes. Together, they complement and enable the other to succeed. Take a look at the purpose of each statement:
A mission statement explains why your company exists. It tells the reader your purpose, overall intention, and how you differ from your competition. Most importantly, your mission statement shapes your company’s culture. It cultivates purpose among team members which drives them to perform their best, seek results, and deliver quality work. It unites them and gives them a sense of belonging.
A vision statement explains your aspirations for the future. This is incredibly important because without a vision for growth, your company will be stagnant. Additionally, your vision statement provides purpose and direction to your employees to reach a common goal.
Assess Your Current Marketing Campaigns
Write down every single channel that your company is currently using to communicate to customers. Here are several channels to consider:
- Blog articles
- Digital material
- eNewsletter
- Print material
- Social media channels
- Website content
Now it’s time to audit these channels. Ask yourself, “is this channel accurately representing my brand voice?” If not, it must change. If a consumer receives inconsistent messaging and hears different brand voices from one company, it produces uncertainty within the customer. If you provide consistent messaging and use the same brand voice with all your marketing endeavors, it produces trust within the customer.
Get to Know Your Target Audience
Before creating your brand voice (part three of this series), you must know who your target audience is. When you know who you are speaking to, you can adjust your brand voice to fit their personality!
For example, if you are a trendy coffeeshop owner located in Downtown Macon, your target audience is likely young college kids who are hip and modern. If your brand voice is serious, platonic, and authoritative, you probably won’t communicate very well with your audience.
If you are unsure who your target audience is, we encourage you to create a buyer persona. Check out these resources for detailed ways to create a buyer persona:
- Part 1: What is a Buyer Persona?
- Part 2: Why You Need to Identify a Buyer Persona
- Part 3: 5 Ways Buying Insights Help Make Decisions
- Part 4: Six Steps for Creating Your Buyer Persona
- Part 5: Establishing Your Buyer Persona
There is a lot of information you need to know about a brand voice. So, stay tuned for more blog articles in this series:
- Part 1: What Is Brand Voice, and Why Is It Essential?
- Part 3: How to Bring Your Brand Voice to Life
- Part 4: How to Enforce Consistency Across Multiple Platforms
How M&R Marketing Can Help
Our team of copywriters, account managers, graphic designers, and web developers are passionate about helping your business thrive! From creating your logo to strengthening your brand via social media, we want to be your partner for success. Are you ready to get started? Shoot us an email at hey@mandr-group.com!