Building a Brand Personality: How to Create a Unique and Authentic Brand Voice.

"Your brand is the single most important investment you can make in your business" - Steve Forbes

And one of the most important parts of your brand?

How you communicate your message. (That’s your brand voice.)

Your brand voice is one of the key things that sets you apart from your competition.

It helps make you memorable.

It helps you build trust and loyalty.

It helps make you recognizable.

It helps you do all the important things you need to gather, build and retain an audience.

And they’re important, for sure. Over 80% of consumers need to trust a brand to consider buying. And over 75% of consumers prefer shopping with brands they follow on social media.

So, making sure everything is nailed down shouldn’t be something you have on the back burner.

Anyways, back to the brand voice. So, now you know why it’s so important, let’s get to building one that’s amazing.

First of all, understand what it needs to be.

Before you get to researching your audience and going over your offer and studying your competition and doing all those things, understand what a brand voice should be.

So, on the surface of it, it’s your company’s distinct personality. It’s how your company expresses itself and communicates its mission, vision, core values, etc.

For it to stand out, it needs to be not just something unique but engaging and memorable as well.

A good brand evokes emotion. That helps you connect with your audience, helping you differentiate from everyone else and build your crowd.

However, it also communicates a promise. You have an offer you want to tell people about, that’s relevant for them and that could change things for them for the better.

You have a claim you want them to believe in, or an argument you want them to support you on.

For that, your brand voice should be coherent, memorable, easy to understand, and aligned with your audience.

It needs to be relevant to them yet not too complicated that they forget about what’s going on.

You want them to remember you. To understand you. To connect with you.

That’s what a brand voice should be. Those are the qualities and features your brand voice should have. Those are the results it should aim to achieve.

It’s important to understand these BEFORE you get to developing your brand voice. You need to understand WHY you’re doing this and what it should aim to achieve.

It’s not just another piece of content or aspect of your brand you’re working on. It’s the essential part of being able to connect with the people you want to sell your offer to or believe your claim.

Whatever it is, you want your audience to side with you. To nod their head “Yes. I’m with them.”.

You want to stand out amongst all of the other brands in your industry and niche, trying to do the same thing. Going for the same people.

Otherwise, you can have a seemingly-amazing and compelling brand voice and accordingly optimize all of your marketing content. However, if it doesn’t drive results, it’s just another waste of time.

Okay, now, that you know the what, let's get into the how.

Like all good things, creating a successful brand voice starts with research and putting things together.

Let’s say we start from scratch and build our brand voice, right now.

What’s the first thing our business needs? A mission statement, right?

What do we want to achieve overall? What’s the story we want to sell to our audience? What’s our bigger goal?

Let’s look at some examples.

For Alibaba, it’s “To make it easy to do business anywhere.”

For Paypal, it’s “To build the web’s most convenient, secure, cost-effective payment solution.”

For Kickstarter, it’s “To help bring creative projects to life.”

For Philips, it’s “Improving people’s lives through meaningful innovation.”

For TripAdvisor, it’s “to help people around the world plan and have the perfect trip.”

Now, across multiple types, from Alibaba, which is a multinational tech company, to TripAdvisor, which helps with travel information and booking, there’s a common theme.

That is to help someone get something done.

A convenient and secure payment solution that’s cost-effective? Covers most of the things you’d want from a payment solution provider.

Want to do business but worry about what your location is? Alibaba aims to help you do just that, but with ease.

So, it’s about figuring out your goal. Your story.

Let’s say you have a dashboard, developed specifically for people managing multiple online commerce accounts, from wholesale on Amazon to individual listings on eBay. Your dashboard puts all of those accounts, regardless of account type (Wholesale, FBA, FBM), in one place along with analytics.

This helps them control, manage and see everything in one place without having to switch between different tabs.

What would your mission statement be?

Well, you want people to save time. You want them to do their business with ease and comfort. You want them to be able to keep track of everything important. You want them to be able to do it all from one place.

Let’s assume you also have top-notch industry-level security, along with pay-as-you-add account payment plans, along with all the good things you’d expect.

It could be something like “Easily manage your e-commerce business accounts from one convenient and secure place. Built-in analytics. Industry-grade security. No learning curve.”

Or “ The only pay-as-add e-commerce dashboard solution with built-in analytics and industry-grade security”

The second one could be valid if the feature mentioned is unique to your product.

Still, that makes it easy to see what you’re aiming to do, in one glance.

Using power words like easy, convenient, and secure conveys what you’re going to do for them.

If they might be automatically thinking “Aah, this is going to be hard to get used to” you’ve already addressed the problem by telling them it has “no learning curve”.

It is quite some work.

However, just like how writing a proper headline or title before getting started with the content helps figure out what you’re going to do, finding your mission statement will not just make it clear what you’re offering but it will also help you when you’re doing modifications to the product, from changing the pricing to adding or removing features.

Once that’s decided, let’s go over some existing content, as well as some research

So, let’s say that was done beforehand.

We’ll assume things have been going well, posts have been going out and there have been good conversions and sales.

Now, when you decide “Hmm, okay. I’ll revisit my branding and see how I’ve figured out my brand voice” it’s a good thing to start going over the content that performed well.

From ads and emails to blog posts and social media content, go through the things that brought in good results, such as conversions, engagement, replies to emails, etc.

That will help you see what type of content your audience most resonated with.

Was it the length of the posts? An unfiltered, genuine, “I wrote this in a hurry” email newsletter? Was it the variation in topics?

What was it that people liked the most?

You can then use this to help guide and craft future content.

For research…

You’d be better off studying your audience. It’s all about figuring out the right questions and then finding the answers to those questions.

What is the niche they’re most interested in? Is it the type of products and services that you have that they like? Or do they more resonate with your style and format of communication?

Do they all have something similar? Or are they all different, coming together for a specific purpose, need, or reason?

Asking these types of questions COMBINED with your content review means you’ll be able to better target them in a more relevant fashion.

Suppose your users include everyone from the student running a side hustle on Etsy selling handmade leather coasters to businesses running dozens of e-commerce accounts across Amazon and eBay.

Maybe they’re here because you’re genuine.

You respond well. You have top-notch customer support. You communicate things well. You stay in touch with your community one level above what everyone does.

You don’t differentiate between how much revenue they bring in when it comes to helping them resolve issues from account syncing to exporting their analytics reports.

Knowing why your audience might and is choosing you will help you better help them.

Those answers will also help you further make your offer more relevant and more valuable for them.

If they’re usually in a tight spot financially in the beginning, having a trust-based “Use now. Start paying when you can” offer might cause a spike in sign-ups and, if they’re profitable, you’ll potentially get paid too.

And, if you’d like to make things easy for yourself…

You should consider making a brand voice chart.

“Matt, this is, like, useless. All they want to do is say hi, buy, and bye. Research, content review, and analysis. Why do all of this stuff? Won’t they just buy what they want, regardless of what I do?”

Well, that’s not exactly true. People aren’t just purpose-driven. They might like to believe they are. But that’s not the case.

The reality is, as humans, our decision-making is affected by so many things. From our emotions to our familiarity with someone to how we can relate to them.

Using all of these things to your advantage and crafting a better everything, from brand design and brand voice to customized offers and relevant website layout will not just help you make more conversions but enable you to help more of your audience solve their problems.

So, back to the brand voice chart.

After doing all of the research, reviewing a lot of your high-performing content, reviewing things, finding answers, and asking many questions, you'll have some characteristics.

For example, if you decide that you’re going to want to adopt an approachable and helpful tone, those will be your characteristics. From there, you only need a description and a “Do & Don't” column for each.

This way, you have a general guideline that can be followed for everything from your ads to your tweets to your social media posts.

Having pre-decided all of the vibes you want to give off and the emotions and feelings you want to work on won’t just reduce time and take out the guesswork. It’ll help you make more effective and targeted content.

And if you get confused trying to do all this, just remember…

Just like everything else, this too is a dynamic process. It’s the conversation you have with your customers, your prospects, and your audience.

Just like speaking, your tone and flow and words change over time.

The more people you meet and come across, the more you realize what they expect from you and the better you can fulfill their needs.

It’s the same here. No one’s perfect and that’s the thing about humanizing your brand.

As you develop more meaningful connections, you better realize what they want.

Maybe you know something they don’t know.

Maybe they’re looking for the wrong solution to the problem they have.

Maybe they’re simply getting by, instead of dealing with things.

The more you know, the better you can target them and show you understand them.

The better you can do that? The more they can relate with you.

You want them to think “Wow. This person really KNOWS how I feel. They’re up to something.”

This should be more than enough to get you started. Figuring out your brand voice is one of the top things you should do, whether it’s a revamp or you’re just starting out.

If you still feel stuck or have problems with anything from doing research to figuring out your mission statement, you’re more than welcome to reach out . I’d be glad to help you out.

Otherwise, you’ve got this.

Until next time, keep building,

Matt.