DOES YOUR BRAND HAVE A VOICE?
A brand voice is the tone, language, and personality a business uses everywhere it talks to customers: website copy, social captions, ads, sales calls. It gives people a way to recognize you from three sentences with your name blacked out. The businesses that make it work best keep saying the same simple thing, the same way, every time.
I’m sure you’re already thinking, “But what does that even mean?”
Having a brand voice is simple. It’s the tone, the message, the language that your brand speaks.
It’s how you speak to your customers.
It’s how your customers see you and understand you.
Just like having a conversation, it’s the impression you leave on someone. What will they think of when they remember you?
Slogans, tag lines, colors, fonts, music lines/tones can help to set your brand voice.
Your brand voice is what your customers think when you come to mind.
Is it a high quality product? Is it that you’re expensive? Is it great customer service? Is it that you wasted their money? Is it that your product is hard to understand?
Truthfully, most young businesses haven’t even thought of this… the message they are sending and the tone in which they are heard by their customers.
Let’s test this brand voice idea out for a second…
I'll give you a company or brand, then let’s see if we can agree with the same word that defines them as a result. I’ll even include their brand slogan. Here we go:
Chick-fil-A…………….. service. “Eat Mor Chikin.” Or perhaps you’re thinking “My pleasure!”
Walmart…………………. affordability. “Save money, live better.”
Toyota………………………. longevity. “Let’s go places.”
McDonalds…………… cheap and fast. “bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, I’m loving it!”
Subway………………. fast and fresh. “Eat fresh.”
The bottom line. A simple message is a great message. Why?
Simple Message = Understanding = Trust = Customer Buy In
HOW TO DEVELOP A VOICE FOR YOUR BRAND.
What your brand says matters. Whether that’s in your website, your social media, video, or ads.
Whether you’re a startup or a small company that’s been in business for 30 years, it’s never too late to develop a voice for your brand.
Just by taking a few minutes to intentionally think through your brand messaging, you can drastically change the direction of your brand and the message you’re sending to the world.
Clear messaging makes all the difference when it comes to ROI on marketing, ad spend, and campaigns.
Here’s how to develop a clear and concise brand voice:
1. List in one sentence your mission. What problem(s) do you solve for your customers? What pain are you alleviating for them? Who is the “bad guy” you’re defeating?
2. Next, list in one sentence how you complete this mission. What services (or product) do you provide to your customers to help solve their problem? How are you guiding your customers to complete their mission?
3. Finally, list in one sentence what your customer experiences after they hired your services or bought your product? How did you make their life better? What separates you from your competition? What is life like after you’ve helped the customer defeat their bad guy?
If you need more practice, gather your executive team or your management team into a room and focus on these three sentences. If anything, develop a message and mission that can be easily memorized and repeated. A tag line that people will remember.
If customers can remember that you can help them when they need it most, your message has done its job.
A few more questions to help you finetune this:
- Who is your ideal customer? List out their attributes and then think of how they want to be talked to.
- What key words should you use to attract your clients? What language will they use?
- What pains or problems will trigger your customers to want to buy into your services or product?
- How will your business appear different than your competition?
- What will motivate your customer to take action to buy your product or service?
- Why should your customers trust you? What are THEY looking for?
Here’s a real example of this:
At Heirloom Furniture, our mission is to build sustainable, boutique and affordable furniture that will last generations because most furniture today is cheaply made.
We build quality furniture by using solid wood, assembled and built by hand, using only the finest woods that we handpick from the mill to ensure structural integrity.
After purchasing our product, you will be able to trust that the life and durability of your furniture will last for generations. Welcome to Heirloom Furniture.
TO HAVE A STRONG BRAND VOICE YOU HAVE TO HAVE A SIMPLE MESSAGE.
The strongest voices often have the clearest and most understood message.
Simple messages work because they build trust.
Simple messages are powerful messages because they lead people to take action.
Simple messages are what you can and should build your business around.
There’s no way around it. If your brand is too complicated to understand, your potential customers will lose trust and eventually this will cost you business.
Trust is gained when your message is understood and your message is most understood when it is simple. A brand that is easily understood will make waves in the market.
YOUR BRAND VOICE HAS A SECOND AUDIENCE: AI
AI answer engines pull directly from your website copy to describe your brand before a person ever clicks through. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overview are today’s examples of this shift, and whichever tools lead it a year from now will work the same way: they read your own words and quote them back when someone asks about your industry. A voice that’s consistent and simple gives an AI model less room to guess — it can pull your exact language for an accurate answer. The clearer your message is for a human, the easier it is for a machine to repeat it correctly.
PUT IT IN WRITING BEFORE YOUR TEAM GROWS
Once you’ve settled on your mission, your method, and your outcome sentence, write them down somewhere every person creating content can find them: a one-page brand voice guide. Give it three or four words your brand always sounds like, and three or four it never does, plus a couple of real example sentences. That single page is what keeps a new hire, a freelance copywriter, or an AI drafting tool from quietly drifting off-message six months from now.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT BRAND VOICE
WHAT IS A BRAND VOICE?
A brand voice is the consistent tone and language a business uses everywhere it talks to customers: on the website, in social posts, in ads, even in how staff answer the phone. Customers should recognize that voice without seeing your logo.
HOW DO I FIND MY BRAND’S VOICE IF I DON’T HAVE ONE YET?
Start with three sentences: the problem you solve, how you solve it, and what changes for the customer afterward. Read them out loud, cut anything that sounds like every competitor could say the same thing, and you’ll have the raw material for a voice.
DOES A BRAND VOICE NEED TO CHANGE OVER TIME?
The tone can evolve as your business grows, but the core message usually shouldn’t. Companies that rewrite their story every year train customers to stop paying attention to it.
