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Brands use their social media posts to connect with a target audience and foster a relationship between brand and customer. While you may think that your brand knows all the ins and outs of social media marketing and has a strong marketing plan, one commonly overlooked factor in creating unique content is often missing: a distinctive brand voice.
Expressing your brand, or “branding”, includes creating a strong brand voice that stands out from your competitors on popular social media platforms. As your marketing team continues to develop a presence on social media platforms, it is essential that you simultaneously create a distinctive brand voice.
Your marketing strategy cannot succeed without a strong brand identity backing it. Understanding the importance of creating a brand voice is essential to your brand’s overall success in content marketing. Without a unique voice, your brand risks getting lost in the crowds. Therefore, you must begin learning how to create the right brand voice.
Keep reading about brand voice and how your brand can develop a voice of its own so you can reach the right group of people.
What is Brand Voice?
The concept of a brand voice is relatively simple to understand. Brand voice is the unique voice that a strong brand has, and it is the words left in your audience’s head after they first see your advertisement. Brand voice gives brands unique voices and tones to distinguish them from the competition.
Your brand voice is what people see on your social media sites, blog posts, and anywhere you share information about your company. With a unique and strong voice, brands stand out amongst the crowd.
A strong brand voice is critical to developing an overall brand identity. Your brand identity is composed of everything your audience will use to identify your brand. While this includes other essential marketing elements such as content marketing, copywriting, design, and visual marketing, creating a brand voice is necessary to truly make a long-lasting impression in your audience’s mind.
To completely understand brand voice and how to implement it in a marketing and branding strategy, you must understand the numerous kinds of brand voices. Doing this will allow your business to take another step in the right direction by impacting potential customers.
Friendly Brand Voice
Many brands benefit from approaching their content through a friendly, familiar voice. Your brand voice reflects your brand’s personality, and having a friendly brand voice ensures your target audience that your brand is helpful and supportive. A friendly brand voice helps you develop trust with your audience and makes people more likely to interact with your product or services.
Speaking of products and services, ensure that your brand voice is suited to what you are offering your audience. For example, if your brand’s product or services are aimed at helping people or making someone’s life a little brighter, then a friendly brand voice might be right up your alley.
Humorous and Sarcastic Brand Voice
Another popular variation of brand voices is a humorous or sarcastic brand voice. A distinctive and memorable voice is essential to successful brand messaging between customers and businesses. Therefore, if you want to keep things light and playful with your audience, a humorous brand voice may be just right.
While humorous and sarcastic brand voices may sound risky, they can help brands produce top-performing content. A well-executed humorous brand voice won’t be afraid to catch peoples’ eyes with its content, provoking a shocked reaction from viewers before provoking a laugh.
Inspiring Brand Voice
Using an inspiring brand voice in your content is a wise idea for brands looking to empower their customers. When executed correctly, an inspiring brand voice can perfectly connect to your brand’s mission statement, encouraging your customers to stand tall while also reminding them what your brand values.
Inspiring brands should use their brand voice to put a positive spin on whatever is being discussed in the content. Repeatedly using motivational, positive, loving words when you create content will make your audience feel loved and cared for. Many inspiring and motivating brand voices show off how their products can help customers be their best selves, encouraging audiences to reclaim their power.
Tough and Defiant Brand Voice
When creating a memorable brand identity, some brands choose to go with a tough, rebellious, defiant brand voice. Brands that use this voice encourage their audience to invest in a product or service because it will allow them to appear rugged and strong.
What Are Brand Archetypes?
Now that you understand the different types of brand voices, you are one step closer to creating a brand voice for your business. Regardless of how your brand creates content, having a brand archetype allows your marketing team to become fully immersed in the brand’s voice.
Brand archetypes are created when a brand understands the primary want or need that its audience is searching for. When a brand archetype is understood, brands can shift the style guide that they utilize in content creation to fit in with the archetype that will be presented.
Asking yourself the main goal of each customer will allow you to start developing your archetype. It is generally thought that there are 12 brand archetypes that every brand voice utilizes in some way. For example, say that the ultimate goal of customers seeking out your product is to feel happy and safe. In this case, your brand archetype would be the “innocent” person, someone happy, amicable, and moral.
Along with innocence, the remaining 11 brand archetypes that your brand should prioritize when discovering a brand voice include:
- The Hero: The hero archetype is often used for brands whose customers aim to improve the world and stand up for their beliefs.
- The Explorer: Brands often use the explorer archetype to target audiences looking to discover and experience new things in life.
- The Outlaw: The outlaw archetype targets rebellious audiences who are not afraid to stand for what they believe in or break the rules.
- The Lover: The lover is often used by brands that encourage their customers to feel better about themselves and follow their desires. The lover archetype is passionate and intimate.
- The Caregiver: This archetype is gentle, warm, and selfless and is often utilized by brands whose purpose is to help those in need.
- The Sage: This archetype depicts an individual who aims to spread their knowledge with others and is motivated to learn.
- The Jester: The jester aims to bring fun and joy into the lives of others. They are playful, positive people who live in the moment.
- The Magician: The magician is an archetype who wants to make magic happen and bring people into a bright future.
- The Everyman: The everyman is a kind, humble, ordinary person. The everyman archetype is often used to make customers feel reflected in the brand content.
- The Ruler: The ruler archetype is for audiences looking to take control and achieve great success. The ruler is responsible and admirable.
- The Creator: The creator is the daring and driven individual who sees opportunities in everything. This archetype is aimed at imaginative and visionary audiences.
Build a Strong Brand
Your marketing strategy must start with brand identity. This is even more important than how often you post on social media. Creating a brand voice that suits your business is essential to garnering attention from potential customers and making a name for yourself.
Start with vision statements and visual branding. Keyword research and analysis of popular social media content can also help you find distinctive brand assets. Once you have developed your brand voice, it can make your company more memorable to others and ensure that people come back to your business.
You’ll be able to leverage your voice to craft a winning logo design, find your target audience on social networks, for email marketing, and to guide your entire content creation process.
Discovering your brand voice can be a challenging process to navigate. Luckily, the experts at Markerly can help your brand find the perfect voice to match your brand’s values. Markerly is a platform created by experts to help businesses achieve everything possible in digital marketing.
With Markerly, your brand can begin to develop a strong, unique, and memorable identity. Contact the experts at Markerly today to learn more about your brand voice and how to stand out from the competition.
