Brand Voice is something a lot of business owners struggle with, especially in small businesses where the business owner is the face of the company. It’s not that they lack the communication skills or the confidence to say what they believe. To deliver a message with eloquence requires a certain artistry. But more than that, there’s a science to identifying the elements of your Brand Persona and formulating a Brand Voice that works across all the platforms of your business communication.

Developing a Brand Voice that’s meaningful, consistent, and effective takes a special blend of art and science. Before you start polishing your prose for aesthetic beauty, it’s essential to do your research. That means zeroing in on your audience, their specific hopes and fears, and your specific solutions to their needs. From there, you can craft a powerful Brand Persona that works in that well-defined relationship. Only after you’ve connected those dots can you devise a Brand Voice that will guide you and your team members in how you address and connect with your clients and prospective clients at every touchpoint.

Personality vs Persona in Brand Voice

Before we get into the ingredients of an effective Brand Voice, it’s important to clarify the distinction between the persona and the personality. Business owners take great pride in their work, what they do and what they have to say. And rightfully so. And in a small business especially, it’s easy for the owner to conflate his or her own personality with the personality of the brand.

As the sole proprietor of two small eco-boutiques over the course of a couple decades, I can understand this problem all too well. My shops were my own private microcosms. I created them as unique alternatives to mainstream retail, and in their uniqueness, they were like extensions of my own personality. As such, I was able to make valuable and authentic human connections with hundreds or thousands of customers over the years.

But connecting with a brand is not the same as connecting with a person. People are complex, multidimensional, and full of surprises. It can take a long time to get to know someone, and that’s a rewarding process. But when clients and prospective clients come in contact with your business, they don’t have months and years to explore the rich tapestry of your personality in order to forge a profound connection.

In this day and age, you have a matter of seconds to connect with your audience. If they don’t feel a certain chemistry and resonate with you immediately, then they’ll just keep scrolling along.

And that’s where your Brand Persona comes into play. This doesn’t mean denying your true identity or pretending to be something you’re not. It just means focussing on the key elements, the archetypal qualities, the essential characteristics that address their hopes and fears without their even having to think about it.

Researching and the Building Blocks of Brand Voice

It’s not unusual for us to hear from business owners who don’t want to spend the time, money, and energy on developing a whole Brand Strategy. They just want to work on one part of it. Maybe they only need a logo, or maybe they’re just trying to refine their Brand Voice.

The thing is, all these elements are connected. You can’t just go in and build the 7th and 8th floors of a tower without first laying a proper foundation and building the framework for the first six floors. But that’s what business owners are doing when they try to skip the processes of Audience Research, Competitive Analysis or Brand Persona, and just start developing a Brand Voice.

These are huge topics of their own, but let’s take a quick overview of these building blocks.

The Science and Psychology of Branding

Every Brand Strategy needs to begin with a thorough exploration of the target audience. That means not just understanding their age, gender, and income level, but more importantly, delving into their psychology. After all, most shopping decisions are made in the gut, at a subconscious level, rather than through a rational, systematic process.

Once you’ve performed the necessary and substantial research to get a handle on your audience, you should have a good idea of what they are looking for in life, what they are lacking or afraid of losing, and what specific pain points they are looking for you to resolve.

Then you need to study how your competitors manage or fail to solve those same problems. What are they doing right, and what are they doing wrong? Why do customers turn to them, or not? And what gap or niche can you fill in this competitive landscape?

One of the most powerful tools we have in Branding today is the system of Psychological Archetypes. This notion, most famously elaborated by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, describes universal, primal symbols that exist in the subconscious, or the collective unconscious. In Branding, we basically focus on 12 major archetypes, for example, the Hero (who will save the day), the Sage (who delivers words of wisdom), and the Jester (who keeps you smiling).

Consciously or unconsciously, storytellers have been using archetypes for thousands of years to depict characters, struggles, and triumphs that we can all recognize and instantly identify with. And that’s precisely the goal of effective Branding: instant recognition and identification.

As we said earlier, you don’t have months or even hours to let your audience discover who you are. They need subconscious cues that will click immediately without requiring their thoughtful, careful analysis. And that’s what archetypes do. So that’s another huge component of Brand Strategy.

The Science of Brand Voice

Now that you’ve conducted the exhaustive research of your audience and competitors, and identified the most relevant archetypes in the relationship between you and your clients, you begin to see what kind of Brand Voice you need to adopt.

Again, this doesn’t mean forfeiting your own personality. It’s just about pinpointing the key characteristics, the archetypal elements that are most relevant to highlighting what it is that you can offer your audience in this particular context. In reality, the individual is far more complex than an archetype. But the archetypal lens helps us to filter out the personal idiosyncrasies and focus on the core attributes and emotions.

Brand Vocabulary

Having identified the fundamental hopes, desires, fears, and pain points of your audience, and your unique solutions, you can start to build a small library of vocabulary that signals those key feelings and emotions. If you’re selling Viagra, for example, you’ll most likely include words like confidence, embarrassment, pride, strength, manhood, thrust, seize, satisfy.

Again, it’s a lengthy process. But ultimately, you want to study the standard words and phrases most commonly used in your industry. Then compare those with the words and phrases most associated with your Brand Archetypes and your Audience Archetypes. This library of words and phrases will help you stay on track in all your communications, whether you’re composing an email or posting on social media.

Tone of Voice

In addition to the keywords and phrases designed to trigger certain thoughts and emotions, it’s vital to maintain a certain tone of voice. Again, getting granular on your audience research and understanding your archetypes will help determine whether you speak with stern authority, seductive allure, warm empathy, or some other characteristic.

After you’ve applied the science of your diligent research, it’s time to lay on the art and compose a distinct voice that readers will find consistent, familiar, and memorable. Within a few words, they’ll know if they’re being invited to relax or challenged to take action, and they’ll feel the urge to respond.

Storytelling

Another huge component of Brand Strategy is storytelling. A lot of small businesses want to tell the story of how they got started and how passionate they are about their work. And yes, it’s something that deserves to be included on your website. But winning brands know how to make their customers play the lead role in the story.

Once you have a solid grasp of the customer’s story and its various chapters, you can also draw on different elements of that narrative when you talk with them. Keywords and signal phrases will indicate specific stages of the Customer Journey, and when done well, your clients will instantly recognize themselves in that story.

Closing Thoughts on Brand Voice

Before we wrap it up, there are just a couple more things to remember. Regardless of your Brand Persona and tone of voice, you always want to be wary of using industry jargon. Even if you’re a Sage, you want to convey your wisdom in the simplest terms that everyone will understand.

Finally, when you’ve got it all written out, read your message out loud. This is the ultimate test. Does your copy sound natural, or does it sound robotic? Does the voice have character, or does it sound computer generated? Does it roll off the tongue smoothly, or is it filled will big words that slow you down?

As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into crafting an effective, consistent Brand Voice. And the bottom line is that you can’t just cut out the rest of the work and research to create a stand-alone Brand Voice. There’s a whole body of science that goes into it, and this article really just scratches the tip of that mighty iceberg.

But like most things, a bit of extra work upfront can ultimately save you a ton of sweat and toil later on down the road. With a well-researched and well-defined Brand Voice and framework, your messaging will practically write itself. And best of all, it will resonate in the hearts and minds of your audience.