How Do You Ensure Your Brand's Voice Remains Authentic?
In the ever-evolving landscape of marketing and branding, maintaining an authentic and relatable brand voice is crucial. We've gathered insights from four marketing and branding professionals, including Marketing Content Strategists and Brand Managers. They share tactics from embracing audience desires to maintaining consistency in brand voice, with real-world examples to guide you.
- Embrace Audience Desires and Real Stories
- Communicate Client's Brand Tone Clearly
- Engage with Storytelling and Personal Touch
- Maintain Consistency in Brand Voice
Embrace Audience Desires and Real Stories
As a leading destination wedding company, Destify prioritizes authenticity and relatability in its marketing efforts to connect with couples seeking the perfect wedding experience. Understanding the desires and aspirations of its audience, the marketing team tailors messaging to resonate authentically, emphasizing personalized experiences and real stories. Through every communication channel, whether it's social media posts, blog articles, or personalized consultations, the brand speaks with a tone that is both inviting and knowledgeable. It embraces the excitement and anticipation surrounding weddings while also offering a reassuring presence, assuring couples that their visions are understood and valued.
In addition, Destify provides valuable content through personalized consultations and blog series, offering insights into the planning process and showcasing the company's commitment to understanding each couple's unique needs. By engaging authentically on social media platforms and sharing real-life experiences, the company positions itself as a trusted advisor in the wedding planning journey, inspiring couples with creative ideas and possibilities while building trust and credibility in the industry.
Communicate Client's Brand Tone Clearly
Effective communication with the client is the key to maintaining an authentic brand voice. They know their brand best and can guide you in the best direction regarding tone and voice.
In some cases, brands will have a brand guide that is fully equipped with guidelines on messaging, tone, and voice. If they don't, communicating with the brand to get clarification on those items is extremely important.
Our client, Americana Motor Hotel, adheres to specific brand messaging, and we've worked very closely with their team, utilizing their brand guide, website copy, and resources from leadership to nail down the tone of their messaging.
They are a retro-futuristic motor hotel located in Flagstaff, and they like to keep the tone of their messaging very conversational and not too "hotel-like." Instead of using words like "amenities" in their copy, we swapped it out for "everything you need."
Engage with Storytelling and Personal Touch
The brand persona is an organization's greatest tool for standing out in a saturated market. In order to have an authentic voice, the brand itself has to stand strong in who it is and what it represents. To have a relatable voice, the brand needs to have a deep understanding of who their audience is and how they communicate. Demographics can help in this area, but you must truly understand your audience's motivations and psychometrics to reach them in their common parlance. One strategy to do this is to remember that there is a real person on the other side of the screen. Especially if they are long-time or repeat customers, your audience wants to be engaged on a personal level. Consider an element of storytelling. How can you create an inside joke with them, or draw upon a memory or experience that is unique to your company's interaction with them? Your brand can have strong convictions and an authoritative tone, but it can also be human, warm, and compassionate. Building an indirect relationship with your audience through subtle storytelling fosters loyalty. Why? Because it makes your audience feel like people, not just customers. The customer lifecycle, like any relationship in life, is a constant game of give and take. You have to nurture this communication over time to get the results you want.
Recently, my company created an email nurture series for a segment of our audience that had RSVP'd 'Yes' to an event but had not yet registered. This group had attended the event last year, so there was some established history to evoke. In the emails, I wrote the standard 'It was so great seeing you at last year's event...' but followed up with an anecdote unique to their experience. 'Remember when we lost power during the morning lecture? We have no outages on the schedule this year.' Our brand is very informative and staunch, but a little self-deprecation keeps us relatable to our audience. We are imperfectly perfect, just like they are, and it keeps us connected.
Maintain Consistency in Brand Voice
One key to a brand voice that feels authentic and relatable is consistency. As a startup in a crowded market with plenty of technical 'Your Money Your Life' content, we have to strike a balance between a fun personality that stands out, an informative voice our users can trust, and a product that's simple to understand but powerful to use. To make sure our brand voice remains consistent (and therefore authentic and relatable), we are intentional about inserting our personality on every page of our website and in every marketing piece we have. For our brand, that means our mascot, a pun about dogs, or simply approachable language like 'I' and 'we' will make an appearance on everything we do. However, we're careful not to overdo this, especially in instances where we need to be clear and informative above all else.
