Your Unique Company Voice

Very few businesses take the time to document a company voice, even though it's one of the key elements in brand identity. Make no mistake, branding isn't just for big companies; even the smallest operation needs to actively manage its brand.

Repeat customers come back because of the story your brand is telling, and it's also why curious visitors decide to bring your company into their lives by making a purchase. To steal an anthropology term, they choose to make you a part of the material culture of their lives because of that story. That's why company voice is huge—it governs whether your potential customers like you and connect with your content.

Vegan and sustainability-driven businesses particularly benefit from defining their voices. A lot of people have preconceived ideas about veganism and environmental issues, and they're hard to overcome if you don't take control of your own narrative with a clear voice and brand identity. If you give people a blank canvas, they will paint their own pictures, and they're not always going to be favorable.

Company voice is how you turn ambivalence into "Wow, I always thought vegans were a giant buzzkill, but those guys are fun!" or "I've never felt like I understood climate change before, but that post made it really easy and accessible."

When you change minds, you not only further your cause, you also create more potential customers.  

What Comprises a Company Voice?

Content strategy is about what you say; company voice is how you say it. Are you serious or playful? Formal or casual? Do you use humor to make your point? Do you create a sense of urgency to encourage people to act, or do you focus on informing them?

Developing a company voice helps your communications feel consistent and familiar across all platforms, from your tweets to your 404 page. 

Think about the recognizable visual elements of your favorite brand: colors, typography, the kind of photography or illustration they use, and even how much empty space they use on their website and in their imagery. Just as these aesthetic elements make a statement about your company, so do word choice, sentence structure, choice of metaphors, and sense of humor. That statement is your company voice.

How to Create Your Company Voice

Creating a functional company voice (i.e. one that increases traffic, engagement, leads, and customers) is really a matter of presenting who you are as a company through the filter of what your audience will be drawn to.

Knowing your buyer persona well is an important part of this, because what people like and judge to be trustworthy is influenced by such factors as:

·         age

·         location

·         how much they know about your niche

·         income and how they like to spend it

·         favorite social platforms

·         where they get news and information

Of course, there are innumerable other factors you can look at, but you get the picture. Will your potential customer respond better to funny, direct, snappy copy that embraces industry and pop jargon, or accessible, warm, informative wording that makes it easy to learn about your topic without feeling like an outsider?

But it's not only about your customers; a well-crafted company voice is powerful because it reflects the brand's authentic "self" as well. No matter how well-intentioned it is, a voice that rings hollow won't sell like your real one. 

When I'm working with clients to define their company's voice, I often ask them to give me 3-5 words that describe how they want people to see their company. I also ask how they want people to feel after reading their content, how comfortable they are with humor and what kind they like, and how much they think their ideal customers are willing to read before they'll get bored.

To define your company voice, use those questions to descibe the tone you're going for, and then write down how you'll use the linguistic tools we talked about above (vocabulary, sentence structure, jargon, etc.) to accomplish it. 

Turn these things into a statement of voice you can return to again and again, whether that's a document, screensaver, inspirational poster, tattoo, or spreadsheet. And it's never final (unless it's a tattoo); be prepared to tweak it as you learn more about what's successful and what isn't.

How to Use Your Company Voice

This part is pretty simple—it really just comes down to keeping your company voice handy and being disciplined about revisiting it when you're writing. Drop it into a document, change it to a cool font, and post in the wall by your desk. You can even make notes on this page as you experiment and learn what people respond to.

Your company voice can also be a tool for overcoming writer's block; if you need to write about a topic but don't have any ideas, read through your statement of voice and think about what kind of approach with meet those criteria.

There's no piece of content too small to promote your brand identity; even the placeholder email addresses in your forms can reflect your voice (you may have noticed that on my website). Now's a great time to revisit your website pages, Facebook page information, Twitter bio, and any other piece of content that's been around for a while. If anything doesn't sound like you, kick it to the curb and use your official statement of voice to rewrite it!

This post was originally published at emilywinsauer.com.

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