How do you create and maintain a consistent brand voice across all platforms?

The application of a company Brand Guide will support this achievement. It should be paired with graphic resources for visuals and templates that are prepared to download. The Brand Guide should offer guidance, such as: - tone/style - don't and size - how to reflext the company writing technique and best practices - application of visuals, especially the company logo, slogan Once this is available to use, another best practice is to have orientation learnings that new/all employees can adopt. Since this is a repeatable, scalable type of exercise, I would suggest that it be asynchronous recordings to watch at their available time. For those whose job is highly dependent on communicating, there could be an advanced course to meet together.

One fun exercise is to envision your brand as a person. What do they look like? How do they dress (color, style, accessories)? Who are their friends? What are they known for? What would they never do? What core values were they raised with? And any other questions that are helpful in building your brand into an actual person. Personifying your brand can help you and employees when making brand decisions. Along with looking at the brand guidelines, they can ask “would this person do this?”

To align with your audience you must first get to know who they are and what they like. Find brands that have captured the target audience (or similar) you’re looking to capture. Take a look at the social presence of these brands and read through comments to see how the audience communicates. Also review which topics and post styles the audience interacts with most. This will help you in defining what to focus on (in your brand’s voice) when speaking to this audience in your marketing efforts.

For B2B marketing where thought leadership is a major part of your content strategy, having a chorus of unique voices can help advance the brand. It's not so much about enforcing a dress code so everything appears uniform as it is about empowering people to represent the brand in a coherent way. As with anything dictated by "standards," there's gotta be some critical thinking applied. Does the brand voice need to be dialed up or down based on the topic or channel? Should your whitepaper sound different than your social feed? You need to know the rules so you can break them strategically.

There are many opportunities for individual staff and teams to apply brand voice and identity consistently. In rapidly growing organizations with new staff and teams, cross-team training on brand, voice, identity, and audience-specific messaging is really important. Every touch point is an opportunity to strengthen the brand *if* those new staff and teams are fully supported to do so. The communications staff has a tremendous opportunity to build brand cohesion by building cross-team relationships, brand understanding, shared assets, easy business processes to get support, and adopting a posture of being the "in-house agency" for anyone who touches brand voice and identity in any way.

A brand voice checklist could include, for example: tone (friendly, playful, sarcastic, serious, combative, etc), word choice (is there a list of specific words that your brand commonly uses?) , message length (concise, short and quippy, or long and detailed?), punctuation (does your brand ask questions, make provocative statements, or make bold proclamations?).

If your organization has multiple diverse products, services, or programs it is likely you have just as many if not more audiences. It may seem impossible to stay consistent with the brand voice and tone. It’s not. This is where really strong customer personas help you. By crafting strong personas you can tailor the same message with the same voice and tone but focused for that audience. Another option is leveraging sub-branding. Each sub-brand can align with the core brand’s voice and tone while having its own flourish and identity.