Crafting clarity – elevating brand voice

In an AI-cluttered world, how does your brand voice resonate across key communication channels? Can your brand champions, influencers – and most importantly – your customers easily grasp a consistent brand tone, content, and style? Is it time to refresh your brand voice?

Far from being an abstraction, brand voice represents the dynamic core personality – the attributes people remember – of your product, service, or organization that reflect and boost your unique values and perspective. If competitive forces or market clutter mutes your brand voice, driving it into a wispy corner, that will impact conversion, sales, and more.

Brand voice – the active and vibrant foundation of how customers, stakeholders and influencers perceive and embrace who and what you are – deserves careful attention. Brand voice springs from experience, how people become aware of and interact with your product, service or company.

In fact, research from Salesforce and others shows that the experiences that brands provide – real or perceived — count as the singularly most essential element of a company. While you can dynamically sculpt your brand voice through messaging, platform tactics, and delivery options, the market and your customers will ultimately gauge the experiences that result. What strategies are in place in your go-to-market outreach to address this? Here are some thought-starters.

Strengthening brand voice

A company or product brand voice will evolve, whether it is positively directed or not. Many marketing and public relations efforts hold aspirational ideals for their brand perceptions and voice but may lack the definition and research needed to elevate authenticity and impact. Actively listening to prospects, influencers, stakeholders and customers are key to understanding and improving critical authenticity of a brand voice.

A strong brand voice that is congruent with company and consumer alike helps accelerate purchasing decisions and message adoption. A consistent brand voice also builds trust, a quality often sorely lacking in today’s marketplace.

Many brand messages become diluted with jargon. Speaking directly to consumers in language they prefer and understand helps build authenticity, a strategic companion to trust.

The power and importance of brand voice becomes amplified in digital engagement. While a sales team – which left alone can too often become a siloed, offline effort – can foster direct contact with prospects and customers, the digital online element can strategically extend the brand experience and voice through interactive and intelligent engagement.

Effective online engagement – whether through social media, online webinars, content hubs, personalized email, seamless ordering and sampling, or other digital assets – can reward customer interaction, creating high degrees of believability and “wow” moments that support other communication channels. Digital engagement also helps provide the automated capacity for critical assembling, collection and analysis of customer data, a bedrock requirement.

Develop brand champions

Giving satisfied customers a digital megaphone contributes directly to elevated trust, authenticity, and believability of product claims. Tactical application of star ratings, online evaluations and testimonials helps a brand voice break through clutter.

Peer recommendations remain singularly powerful among conversion strategies. A relevant recommendation can move a potential prospect or influencer deeper into a funnel strategy. Creating digital touch points with paid social media and display ads can help marketing efforts to stay in touch with potential and actual customers, reinforcing positive brand voice.

Many once-complicated pathways to magnify brand voice are being potentially simplified by AI-powered applications. While traditional marketing still holds critical positions, AI-fueled digital marketing is expected to help accelerate customer preferences for personalized and efficient experiences. The AI world is still unfolding, but an initiative-taking approach to build AI knowledge will open opportunities for practical applications as more options become available, including message refinement and brand voice development.

It’s important to remember that brand voice extends across all channels, whether traditional or digital. Deploying key fundamentals of brand attribute research, message formation and testing, customer preferences research, brand audits, and other marketing-related blocking and tackling techniques will help safeguard and elevate brand voice, even in turbulent markets.

Building and sustaining brand voice is a multi-faceted effort with several moving parts. Want more information? Contact MEK today!

By Michael Snyder, Managing Principal