Ensuring Brand Consistency: 6 Tips for Aligning Identity with Voice and Tone
There are numerous ways to use marketing campaigns — both online and offline — to grow your business. However, unless your target audience likes and relates to your brand identity, you won't achieve the results you're after.
After all, people are very picky regarding what brands they buy from. They need to trust the brand behind a solution. They require evidence of a positive customer experience. Plus, their loyalty is hard to earn and easy to lose. So, if you want to outperform your competitors and convert new customers, you need to pay close attention to how you develop (and follow through with) your branding strategy and, more importantly, your brand's voice and tone.
Consistency is an element of branding that gets commonly overlooked. Yet, it's essential — especially if you intend to project a well-defined, recognizable, likable, relatable, and unified brand voice.
Do you need help ensuring brand consistency? Here are the best tips for aligning identity with voice and tone across your marketing channels.
Define Your Brand's Core Identity
One of the first steps toward achieving and maintaining branding consistency is defining your brand's core identity.
Firstly, focus on characteristics and branding elements such as your business's mission and values.
Consumer research shows that people want brands to understand their needs. Furthermore, 82% of people require brand values to align with their own.
So, ask yourself the following questions:
What does your business do? How does that matter to your target audience?
What pain points can you remove for your prospects? Why are your solutions better than the alternatives?
What separates your brand from its competitors?
How far will you go to demonstrate your dedication to customer satisfaction?
Once you have the answers to these questions, you can pinpoint a communication style that aligns with your brand's identity.
For example, if your business aims to solve minor user needs in a fun, casual, and enjoyable way, your voice and tone must reflect this.
Check out how Liquid Death does this. To match its edgy and humorous brand personality, the brand's voice is over-the-top, memorable, and completely different from anything in its industry. For instance, instead of inviting customers to join a loyalty club, the brand encourages them to sell their souls, presenting them with a Faustian "binding" contract that's fully on-brand.
Develop and Adhere to a Style Guide
The only way to achieve cohesion with your brand's voice and tone is to always know what you're doing.
That's why you'll want to create a branding style guide and stick to it. Include elements such as:
Language preferences.
Brand and industry-specific terminology.
Tone guidelines for different contexts.
Visual branding elements to incorporate into brand messaging.
Preferred communication channels.
By taking the time to create this document, you'll avoid unnecessary inconsistencies. You'll minimize the risk of straying from your brand's recognizable communication style. Plus, you'll make it far easier to train new team members and maintain uniformity throughout your company's departments, including your marketing, sales, and customer service teams.
If you regularly publish guest posts on your company blog, create a guest blogging checklist, to make it super easy for authors to produce resources that align with your branding direction.
Don't Hesitate to Adjust Your Tone Based on Context
Consistency is crucial for establishing your brand's identity, ensuring memorability, earning your prospects' trust, and encouraging their loyalty.
But the thing is, there are situations where you might need to be slightly more formal than usual — especially if your brand's voice reflects a fun, laid-back, or edgy personality.
With this in mind, don't hesitate to adjust your tone according to the context of your communication.
For example, a business like CapitalPad may be focused on enabling simplified investing processes and attractive returns. Nonetheless, it still needs to provide its audience with sufficient information (which includes technical data, in most cases). That's why its primary Invest landing page aims to strike a balance between comprehensible, approachable, industry-specific, and goal-oriented language.
On the other hand, a brand like Vidpros offers a complex service in on demand video editing. Yet, because it's targeting a general audience, it's essential that it can make its offer comprehensible to non-experts. The FAQ section of its homepage does an excellent job with this task, perfectly explaining the concept of fractional video editing services to regular people without leaving out any of the key selling points that make this solution stand out from alternative options.
Prioritize Being Human (But Don't Rule Out AI Tools)
Humanity is a core element of a likable and approachable brand voice.
People want to interact with and support relatable businesses. Plus, most consumers want to be treated individually throughout their shopping journey.
With this in mind, it's essential that your brand's projected identity reflects the real people running your business. In fact, one excellent way to use your voice and tone is to do it in a way that prioritizes trust, transparency, and meaningful human interaction.
However, this can be challenging in today's competitive business setting. If you consider consumer expectations and content consumption habits, you'll quickly discover it's quite difficult to generate enough content to meet demand — at least if you do everything by hand.
Fortunately, AI can help in this regard. By allowing you to generate original, high-quality content that targets your ideal customer's pain points, gen-AI can be an exceptionally valuable tool in your arsenal.
Nonetheless, if you decide to use it, prioritize authenticity. Something as simple as employing the Humanize AI Text Tool can be more than enough to maintain a consistent (authentic) voice and tone while still producing enough content to keep your audience engaged.
Maintain Consistency Across All Digital Channels
One of the easiest traps to fall into when targeting brand consistency is forgetting to adhere to the same communication style throughout your digital channels — especially when you have several members on your team.
The fact is, you can't allow your website to establish one brand identity and your social media or email newsletter to use a completely different communication style. That won't just come off as strange to your target audience. But, it may harm your business's reputation, making it impossible to earn consumer trust and acquire new customers.
For this reason, it's essential that you pay close attention to your digital channels, content calendar, and customer communications and do your best to make them as cohesive as possible.
Furthermore, understand that you don't need to use every single communication method out there. Instead, opt for channels that are genuinely relevant and interesting to your target audience, whether that means focusing your marketing activities on social media or using more traditional channels such as reliable two-way texting solutions.
One great trick you can use is to take messaging from your primary platform — your website — and adapt it to different contexts.
For example, Pipcorn's brand identity is that of a friendly and wholesome business focused on sustainability.
However, as these characteristics don't always invite follower engagement, Pipcorn adds a conversational twist to its Facebook and Instagram messaging. Here, the brand regularly uses CTA captions like "It's snack o'clock," encourages conversations, and even posts relatable memes that resonate with a younger audience.
Monitor Brand Mentions, Track Customer Feedback, and Audit Brand Communication
Finally, if you want to guarantee branding consistency and ensure your brand's tone and voice resonates with your audience, you'll need to track performance.
Tracking will uncover areas where you need to improve your communication style. It will also open your eyes to important data, which you can use to make informed decisions regarding your future marketing strategy.
In this regard, pay attention to brand mentions on social media, as it will help you identify relevant conversations about your business and help determine consumer sentiment toward your business.
Track your customers' feedback to identify potential trends regarding what your prospects like or dislike about the CX you offer. For example, you might find that your buyers need more clarity during the ordering/shipping process or additional hands-on materials to aid product understanding.
Finally, don't hesitate to audit brand communication. Doing so may seem excessive. However, it could help you catch any inconsistencies, identify positive communication practices, or allow you to perform controlled trials to test potential changes to your voice and track your audience's reaction to said changes.
Final Thoughts
Ensuring brand consistency is crucial for building strong audience connections. Even more, it's the key to standing out in competitive markets.
Fortunately, establishing your brand identity and aligning your voice and tone with your prospects' expectations can be a great way to stand out. The branding strategies we've covered here can help you build a memorable brand and be an exceptional way to develop a rapport with your future and existing buyers.
Doing all of this requires a tactical approach, a willingness to be flexible in certain situations, and a full dedication to consistency. Incorporating these approaches into your branding strategy will create a unified online and offline presence. It will also make it easy to ensure your value propositions resonate with your audience, earn their trust, and encourage engagement and conversions, resulting in business success.