In a world where content is coming at customers from left, right and center, marketing professionals need to remember the importance of brand voice—it is essentially the personality of the brand. Brands get held to account by customers and are judged by their actions, and this has become more prevalent since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Customers online activities have increased and therefore, they are paying more attention to brands’ messaging and have a higher-level understanding of brands’ tone, personality and actions.
There are three ways for marketers to leverage brand voice and personalization to improve sales, and it’s all through being authentic and consistent with your messaging:
- At the core is authenticity. Brands can be honest about their need to run a successful business and can still genuinely strive to solve problems for their customers. It’s the combination of these two goals that create a sincere and legitimate voice. To run a successful business, companies must work to solve a very real problem. Too much on the side of “just making a profit” comes across as greedy. But, too much on the side of “just helping” appears sycophantic and insincere. This is why learning as much about your customers as possible to gauge how you can best communicate to them is vital.
- However, authenticity cannot come across as marketing hype. Everything a brand says and does is translated by prospects and customers as the brand’s personality and what it stands for. Customers are less forgiving these days when it comes to disingenuous communication and marketing, which is why outbound as a strategy, is dead, and personalization is the go-to approach. Companies can no longer buy a list, take a cookie-cutter approach and provide information that is semi-relevant to their customers. Brands need to take a personalized approach towards marketing and really learn about their customers’ interest with the product and/or services as well as their current and future needs. Authentic relationships now play a huge part of brand voice and personalization is the future of marketing.
- Lastly, it is important that brand voice be consistent across all channels. This is probably one of the most mismanaged areas with brands today but also one of the hardest things for brands to accomplish. Everyone is multi-channel; they flip from social to email to web to television in seconds. If a brand appears everywhere, it needs to be consistent everywhere. Otherwise, people will simply be confused.
Authenticity and consistency are at the helm of brand voice and sales success. To achieve authentic brand voice, marketing professionals need to know exactly who their customers are, be smart about approach and timing, and hyper-personalize—this will lead to greater customer engagement, loyalty and drive top-line growth.