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Ever wonder if your audience truly “gets” your brand, even without seeing your logo? Or if every piece of content you put out—from a quick social media post to a detailed article—speaks with the same consistent message? 

If you’re an entrepreneur striving to build a strong foundation for your business, you know the power of connection. And that powerful connection starts with your brand voice.

Your brand voice is the tone and language you use to communicate with your audience. It’s what shapes your organization’s unique personality in the marketplace. 

Think about it: when your brand voice is consistent across all communications, it builds trust and helps your audience know exactly what to expect from you. This isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s an essential feature of branding that allows you to successfully position yourself in the market. 

A truly unique brand voice doesn’t just appear by accident; it requires careful definition and consistent implementation. If you fail to define and manage your brand voice, there won’t be any consistency, and your branding efforts could fail completely.

So, how do you express a meaningful voice for your brand? It all starts with understanding your audience and aligning your communication with their expectations.

Attune to Your Audience’s Expectations

The absolute foundation for creating a meaningful brand voice is understanding your audience. You need to learn how they expect you to speak. It’s about knowing what resonates with them and, crucially, what doesn’t.

Imagine you offer high-ticket investment opportunities. Would you use internet slang like “lol”? Absolutely not – that would be incredibly off-putting. 

On the flip side, if you’re selling extreme sports gear, talking like a college professor just won’t land with your audience.

Your industry or niche largely determines the tone that works best. For instance, brands selling coffee, quirky food products, unique clothing designs, or high-tech business solutions might thrive with a light, whimsical tone that uses humor and irony. Their audience expects a brand like yours to speak to them almost like a friend. 

However, this approach would be “fatal” if you’re in fields like insurance, healthcare, IT security, or investment opportunities. In these sensitive areas, a humorous or quirky voice might sound untrustworthy. Here, you’ll need to adopt a more professional, formal, informational, reassuring, and credible tone.

The key? Avoid assumptions about your customers. Instead, base these important decisions on solid, objective data. This means digging deep and researching your audience’s:

• Demographics: Geographic location, gender, age range, income, education, job, and more.
• Biggest challenges, fears, and desires: What keeps them up at night? What do they truly want to achieve?.
• Brands they gravitate towards: What kind of communication style do those brands use?.
• How they expect a business like yours to speak to them.

Do the research, and you’ll know precisely how to speak to them. This is how you create connection from the start.

Connect Through Shared Values

After attuning your language to your audience’s expectations and understanding their communication style, the next layer of connection is to ensure what shared principles your message embodies truly resonates.

Think about the brands you genuinely love. Often, a powerful reason for that connection is that you share the same core values. To create the perfect brand voice, you need to understand your audience’s values and speak directly to them.

For example, an e-commerce site selling organic products should appeal to its audience’s social consciousness. A company offering elderly health care might appeal to values like family, respect for the elderly, and security. Clothing brands aimed at young people frequently appeal to the value of individual expression.

Just like audience expectations, you should discover these values through research and objective data. You might find a wide range of values in your audience. If that’s the case, don’t get overwhelmed! Focus on one specific value that is highly relevant to your products or services and especially important to your audience. For instance, with elderly care, you might highlight an atmosphere that’s truly “friendly to visitors”.

The goal is to find a “sweet spot” that’s both specific enough to deeply resonate with an individual target customer (creating an instant strong connection!) and universal enough to appeal to a wider range of people. You can use data to initially craft this, but truly honing your message to speak to your audience’s values often requires trial and error and carefully monitoring your results. This is how you build genuine relationships.

Establish Your Brand as an Expert

For your brand to truly connect with your audience, they need to trust your ability to deliver solutions. This is why voicing your expertise is paramount, establishing you as a reliable authority.

In most cases, your brand voice should convey expertise and specialization.

Why? Because this builds trust and drives your message straight to the heart of your customer’s needs. Especially with your online content, remember: your primary goal isn’t to sell. Instead, use your brand voice to share what you know that can genuinely help your customers solve their problems. 

This is about providing value first. Your voice doesn’t have to be overly authoritative to establish you as an expert. A trusted friend can absolutely be a specialist, as long as they have valuable information to impart. This is a critical mindset shift for entrepreneurs.

To focus your efforts, gain a clear understanding of what specialized knowledge you possess that is truly useful to your audience. You’ll uncover this through both your customer research and by carefully examining how you provide unique value to your ideal customer.

Then, really think about the voice and tone you’ll use to convey that knowledge. What words will resonate most with your customers and engender their trust? What phrases will make them most receptive to your recommendations?. This is about being both clear and authentic.

A brand’s unique voice is not a matter of chance; it is carefully formulated, defined, and meticulously implemented. By diligently understanding your audience’s expectations through objective data and connecting with them via shared values, you lay a strong foundation for communication. Moreover, by strategically establishing your brand as a helpful expert who provides solutions, building essential trust, you solidify your presence. These combined methods ensure your brand voice is consistent and powerful, enabling you to wield significant power in your market and achieve the recognition and trust that defines successful brands. 

What have you done to understand how your brand is seen by your target audience?  We would love to hear from you what has worked and perhaps, a time or two when you were not as clear on your audience.