Branding & Tone of Voice

We’ve mentioned tone of voice in our blogs quite a bit so thought best to hone in on what that actually means and how to get it right!

Tone of voice is a large aspect of what makes a brand a brand. How you speak to your users or followers will determine how you are perceived by the wider audience.

It can be as simple as being formal and informal. If you are a writing for a teen magazine then emojis will be very successful… throw an emoji into a Tweet from a legal firm and it won’t be received so well. The way you speak reflects the way you work.

Did you see House of Fraser’s ‘#Emojinal’ campaign? We will leave it up to you to decide if this worked or not… read the story on The Drum here.

Go back to basics…

Break it all down and really think about your audience. Build a customer persona. Create an imaginary person and write down what their interests and priorities are. If you think your work covers a wide range, split it up and create the individual personas.

Optimise with segmentation…

From this you can develop your marketing messages for the whole audience. By separating out the personas, you can segment your audience and target each section with the correct tone of voice.

Imagine branding for major supermarkets, their audience is so broad it might seem impossible to get the right voice! However, the different marketing channels can be segmented to the different demographics in the audience to really optimise the messages and success.

Learn from your competitors…

Look at your competitors’ websites and social feeds. How are they speaking to their (…your) audience? From this you will be able to see what has been successful and what hasn’t. Learn from their experience and plan for what will work best.

Analyse the results…

Once you get started, it’s important to see which messages went far and which were left in the background. Analytics would be a great place to see what pages or posts were clicked the most as a mark of success. Refine and repeat.