What’s your brand’s voice? Is it loud and boisterous? Is it subtle and sleek? Or even worse, is it muted? All entrepreneurs and business owners must know the answer to this vital marketing question.
There’s a lot that goes into defining a brand’s voice online, especially when a business is starting from scratch. It’s one of the most important and perhaps most daunting steps of creating a business. After all, your brand’s voice is what guides your organization’s marketing and your audience’s perception. If you don’t nail your voice, you’re going to have problems. But how do you define and develop your voice? Content marketing.
Content marketing allows your business to broadcast its voice the same way an individual would do so online: through compelling words and enticing visuals. Every piece of content you broadcast via your blog, Facebook, Twitter, or an email blast further solidifies your voice and strengthens your strategy.
But how do you form something out of nothing? It’s a question we get all the time. Before you even compose your first social media update or design your first image, you need to ask yourself these three fundamental questions. Not only will these answers help you define your voice through content, but your answers will also sharpen your approach in other aspects of your business.
What Is My Mission?
By now, you should have figured out your mission. Is it to deliver healthy and natural products to the world? Perhaps it’s to help people lose weight through healthy means? Whatever it is, you need to keep your mission in mind with everything writing and designing.
Who Is My Audience?
The people who use your brand define your brand. If your audience is health-conscious, your content should be centered around achieving a better quality of health and wellness. If they’re more focused on cost, you can position your brand’s voice to exemplify quality at a great price. Here’s the thing — every brand has a target audience. If you say your desired audience is “anyone,” you’re setting yourself up to fail.
When asking yourself who your audience is keep in mind the following:
– Age
– Gender
– Income
– Location
– Values
What Is My Tone?
Once you’ve established your audience, you’ll have a better idea of the tone you need to exhibit. Is your product and service marketed with a fun tone that promotes an active lifestyle? Or is it a more serious tone focused on the function of the product and how it improves the quality of life? Your tone is contingent upon the people that will buy your product.
For example, let’s take the energy drink Red Bull. Their tone is action-packed and youth-centered, focusing on how their product will help you feel amazing and stay physically active. In a nutshell, Red Bull makes you awesome. This is, of course, because their audience is 18-35 years old. If they were focused on an older audience, they could have shifted their tone to the likes of Folgers or Maxwell House, emphasizing that Red Bull helps you start the day off right and keeps you feeling good throughout the day. Obviously these two brands are aimed towards an older audience and their marketing reflects that.
Your voice is what will deliver success to your brand. As you create your content marketing strategy, the first thing to determine is your brand’s voice. The worst thing is to have muted voice, but a mismatched voice and tone are almost as bad.
Did you know we’ve helped business owners just like yourself create a fantastic content marketing strategy that led them to success? We want to work with you too. At StartUp TakeOff, we understand the value of a strong team. We also know that finding the right people can be nerve-wracking and time-consuming, so we made it easy for our Clients. Choosing the wrong partners can be a costly misstep for any entrepreneur, which is why StartUp TakeOff’s founder, Stefani Thionnet, has assembled a diverse group of marketing experts from across the industry who will provide you with solutions that save you time and money. Our team of marketing industry veterans will get to know you and your brand so that we can provide solutions perfectly tailored to your needs. The best people often strike out on their own, but we’ve brought them together to get results you will love.
