Quick and dirty brand voice
Hi, I’m a brand strategist.
Oh cool, can you design me a logo?
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve had that exchange, let’s just say my fridge would ALWAYS be stocked with a selection of fancy cheeses.
But I can’t blame people for asking. Because everyone understands visual branding, but things get more hazy when it comes to verbal branding.
Think of it like this.
Brand strategy is the underlying strategy created by combining research with creativity and insight. Your brand strategy is then expressed through your visual and verbal brand identities.
Visual branding is the stuff everyone knows. Your colours, logos, fonts, etc. Verbal branding is your brand voice and messaging strategy. Your visual and verbal branding should be cohesive– because they’re expressing the same thing through different mediums.
Verbal branding is the defined manner in which your brand communicates so that your brand personality is consistent and connects with your target audience.
Your brand voice is important because it creates:
Consistency
Trust
Distinctiveness
But here’s something not many people talk about: the difference between finding and creating your brand voice.
Finding vs creating your brand voice
There are a few ways to end up with a great brand voice, and different methods work better for different types of businesses. Here’s how I like to break it down.
Finding your brand voice works best if your brand personality is based on ‘you’, the founder. This method makes most sense for smaller businesses, solopreneurs, creators, and businesses based on a personal brand. This is often the method that business owners intuitively adopt, which is usually fine– until it isn’t.
Creating your brand voice is heavier on the customer research and lighter on the individual expression. This method makes more sense for larger organisations with multiple people working across communications.
Quick note: both methods can work for smaller and larger businesses. Most will start with ‘finding’ and grow into ‘creating’. Either way, the important thing is to DOCUMENT it.
How to find your brand voice
Want to find your brand voice? Here’s the quickest and dirtiest way to get there. Your brand voice should be a mixture of what you want and what you’ve got.
Step 1. Get clear on what you want
This step is all about who you’re talking to and how you want to come across to them.
Who is your audience? Creatives? CEOs? Mums?
What kind of relationship do you want with them? Are you their friend, their mentor, their trusted expert?
Choose 3-5 tone words that feel good to you, and write them down. (I’ve got a giant list of them you can choose from right here.)
Step 2. Analyse what you’ve got
‘What you’ve got’ refers to your natural style of communication.
Collect a bunch of materials you’ve produced that you like. This could be blog posts, emails, youtube videos, podcast interviews, even text messages. If you’re completely brand new, you can collect things that other people have created that you’d like to emulate– as long as you still give it your personal flavour.
Get your materials and run them through some analyser tools. You can definitely use AI to make this easier, or just Google ‘tone analyser’ and find one you like, then write down the top 3-5 tone words that come up.
I would also recommend using something like this, and writing down your average sentence length, common words and phrases, and readability level.
Add all this info to a document. Does it make sense with what you wrote down from step 1? If not, tweak accordingly.
Now that you have your dirty brand voice, keep it handy and refer to it when you’re writing for your business. You can also run anything new you write through the analyser tools again to check they match the stats you wrote down.
Quick? Yes.
Dirty? Yes..
Done? Yes.
The best brand voice is the one that works for you
So the thing about brand voice is that the best way to do it is… the way that works for you.
I’ve been working with brand voice for a while. I’ve worked on brand voice projects with agencies, multinational corporations, and more solo entrepreneurs than I can count.
And here’s what I’ve realised.
People learn differently. People engage with information differently.
For some people, it’s best to define their brand voice in ‘vibes’. As in:
Comparing their brand to a celebrity or fictional character
Explaining their brand voice using stories and analogies
Worked examples showing what it looks like
For others, they like a mathematical breakdown. As in:
The average number of commas to use in sentences
Tone analysis
Readability scores
At the end of the day, the result should be a brand voice that is consistent, distinct, and effective. But how you define it is up to you. And if the standard ‘done’ way doesn’t work for you, you’re allowed to change it.
When I work one on one with clients, this is a large part of what I do.
I assess their learning styles and personalities, observe how they communicate with me, and adjust how I present their brand documentation accordingly. If you want to see more about how I work with business owners, you can check out my services page.
