by McKenzie Stalkenburg
Image Credit: Unsplash
Marketing is necessary for all businesses as it is the best way to ensure that people can find you, are tempted by your offering and then convert into customers. You could have the best website in the world, but without proper marketing practices, the simple truth is that no-one would ever find it among the billions of others on the internet.
But it’s likely that none of this is news to you. Digital marketing has rapidly increased in popularity over the last 10 years and now most successful companies are making use of social media, emails, SEO practices and other methods to boost their profile. Whether you are using a digital marketing agency or you are managing your marketing progress yourself, these are the most successful methods for the vast majority of businesses.
And what is the main thing that underpins all of these different aspects of marketing? Tone of voice. The way that you communicate with your audience is vital and your tone of voice will say a lot about your business. Being able to manipulate your voice to ensure that you reach the audience you are targeting is crucial if you hope to grow and develop over the years. And you certainly want to integrate your business into your customer’s lives over a long term.
Be Consistent
The most important thing to remember when it comes to your business branding, it is that your target audience requires consistency. This means that whether they are looking at a picture on a screen or a flyer delivered to their door, they should know immediately who it is from. But consistency must also be observed in language.
Everything from the language you use to the colors you choose makes a difference to how your audience perceives you. This is important to note because when you understand the mechanics of perception, you should be able to subtly manipulate your own image in order to comply with your audience’ expectation. You want your audience to relate to you and this is what your tone of voice can achieve in an instant.
Tone of voice should be consistent throughout all your marketing materials. If you are a solo entrepreneur, it is a wise decision to make the voice of the company a professional version of your own voice so that whether a customer reading a blog or talking to you in person, the brand is recognizable. This technique has the added benefit of bringing a sense of authenticity.
The key to consistency is often the creation of several words and phrases you can use over and again. You can use these phrases as anchors of sorts that root your writing to a particular tone of voice.
Know Your Audience
If you want to connect with someone, it is likely that you will adjust your voice naturally when speaking. Part of the reason for this is that we want to get on well with others; we change how we talk as a kind of empathy. There is one small difference when it comes to voice in marketing: you aren’t talking to just anyone, you are talking to someone you want to target specifically.
There is one main advantage to this state of affairs: you can tailor the tone of your voice to your audience and experiment with slightly different ways of communicating (think of split testing ads) to ensure that your tone of voice is the best it can be.
The more you know about your audience, the easier it will be to create a tone of voice that will suit. Innocent Smoothies is especially good at this as the tone of voice used doesn’t just suit the business but also manages to communicate lots of important information in a simple and accessible manner. Though you certainly shouldn’t mimic the tone of voice, you should definitely look at the linguistic mechanisms at play for your own ideas.
Be Creative and Adapt
Language is not a set thing and even grammar can be considered a fashion. This is why it is so important for businesses to be able to communicate creatively and adapt to particular situations and across a range of communication types. For example, though you would ideally keep the same tone of voice in an email offering a new deal as a manual explaining how to put a product together, the reality is that the two different forms and purposes require something slightly different.
Time also has an impact on the way language is used. While one tone of voice might work well for a fledgling company that is mostly operating on a small scale, another tone of voice may become necessary when that same company hits the big time.
There are two reasons for this; first, your company identity has changed somewhat, and, just as it would be weird to hear an adult speaking like a toddler, it would be weird for a large company to communicate as though it is a startup (and vice versa). The second reason is that you will naturally want to be able to share the voice with all the relevant people. Though a solo entrepreneur can use their own voice quite naturally, a group managing marketing and media will need more structured guidelines - even if they have to evolve too.
Adaptivity is even more important when it comes to speaking with a customer in real time, either on the phone, in person or via social media or messaging. While having a bank of phrases will help, appearing too scripted could be a disaster. Finding the balance between the two is often a case of training and practice and should be a priority for every company where more than one person is responsible for the voice of the business.
Tone of voice is the one thing that will hold together every aspect of your business, from speaking directly to customers to writing to inform them about a product or service. The more research you do, the easier it will be to form a natural business tone but don’t ever get fooled into thinking that this process will reach a conclusion. Just like us, businesses need to be able to adapt their tone of voice.