What is a brand voice and why should you care? Defining your brand voice sets you apart from your competitors, and creates a personality for your business. It makes your business relatable and instantly recognizable. A unique and recognizable brand voice is especially important for small businesses to set them apart from big box stores and mega-corporations.
You won’t get a second chance to make a fabulous first impression on your potential customers. If your business doesn’t have clear branding, it can look disorganized, turning some customers away. Without clear branding, you won’t stand a chance against the competition.
Clear, professional-looking branding isn’t as hard as it looks. Let’s go over the steps to take to define a strong, clear, and unique brand voice.
Get a Professional Logo and Banners
Your logo and banners will be used on your Facebook page and other social media accounts. They need to be instantly recognizable, relatable, and accurately project your business image.
If you don’t already have a logo, freelancer sites like Upwork and Fiverr can connect you with affordable graphic designers. If you already have a logo, size it for the different social media platforms. For example, a Facebook cover image for a page needs to be 820×312 pixels., Instagram images need to be a different set of specific dimensions. A professional graphic designer can resize your logo images so they look great in all formats.
Create a Professional-Looking Facebook Page
Nearly 75% of Americans use Facebook, and more than half of those visit the site daily. Moreover, search engines such as Google often rank Facebook pages at the top. This is a good way to create a recognizable brand image on social media. A professional-looking Facebook page also reassures customers that you’re a trusted member of the community.
The information on your Facebook page should be keyword optimized. If your business is a hardware store in Small Town, CA, make sure you specify that somewhere on your page.
It should also include this information:
· Your services and products
· Contact information
· Business hours
· Your location
When your page is set up, don’t forget about it, post frequent updates. You can post sales, showcase your latest work, your newest products, holiday messages, and community events.
The idea is to showcase not only your services and products but also your business’ personality. If people like what you post, and it fosters trust, you’ll win over customers.
Understand Your Customers
Defining your target audience can help create a brand voice that resonates with potential customers. To do this, you must understand what motivates your potential customers. You need to know why they choose to follow certain brands, and what motivates them to buy.
Here are a few ways to gain insight into your target market:
· Seeing which posts they engage and interact with is the first step.
· Encourage people to leave feedback
· Post surveys and questionnaires
· Use analytical data to track your followers’ social media activity
Learning more about your target market can help you develop your strategy. By using data and feedback, you can align your brand voice with your target customers, according to this article from Digital Authority Partners. This can help you see to what types of posts your followers positively respond to.
Tailoring your posts to speak in your audience’s language helps build positive relationships. It’s also important for keeping your brand’s followers interested and engaged. The more they see your posts and click like, the more likely they are to convert to a paying customer.
While social media posts should be fun and informative, they also act as mini-ads for your brand.
Create a Consistent Brand Voice Across All Social Media Platforms
You can, and should, use every appropriate social media channel. However, all entries should be consistent. This is one reason why you need logos and banners optimized for each social media platform. While each platform is unique and has a different audience, your business voice needs to resonate with each, while remaining consistent.
If you have different employees or freelancers posting on different platforms, make sure they follow your company style for consistency. Make sure your team is aware of how important it is to project a consistent brand voice. You can even draw up a simple style guide for them to use.
The tone of your brand voice should be the same across all of your social media accounts, as well as emails, live chat, and instant messaging. Using the same voice reinforces your messaging, and prevents confusion. It also enhances your brand’s authenticity.
Core Values
Defining your company’s core values is important these days. Core values inform your customers of what you stand for, beyond selling products. Often, these values are defined in terms of social responsibility. However, while big, global corporations can seemingly “go woke, go broke”, it’s likely smaller companies will find boycotts harder to survive.
Research reveals that Gen Z and Boomers are the most influenced by core values. Gen Z is the most inflexible when it comes to core values. They want companies that they buy from to closely align with their political beliefs and values. Likewise, Boomers are most likely to boycott a company that goes against their political beliefs and values. The same is true of other populations. Take your likely customers into account.
Unless you feel you can survive a boycott or a cancel culture assault, it might be best to keep your core values to things that everyone can agree upon, such as honesty and integrity. You also want your employees to agree with the company’s core values, and going too far to the left or right can cause internal problems.
Conclusion
A strong, recognizable, and unique brand voice can help your company thrive on social media. Today, consumers not only want to learn about products and services, but they also want to interact and find out about a company’s core values.
Compelling social media marketing creates robust relationships and builds trust with consumers. It also allows businesses to easily learn more about their customers. Be sure that your brand voice is clear, authentic, and consistent. Over time, you will build a solid customer base who love your brand.
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