What Advice Can a Marketing Manager Give for Maintaining a Consistent Brand Voice?
Marketer Magazine
What Advice Can a Marketing Manager Give for Maintaining a Consistent Brand Voice?
In the dynamic world of digital marketing, maintaining a consistent brand voice is crucial. We've gathered insights from Marketing Content Strategists to CEOs, distilling their expertise into 14 key pieces of advice. From embracing core values to adapting content to platform characteristics, discover how to unify your brand's message across various digital channels.
- Embrace Core Values Across Channels
- Develop and Train on Brand Style Guide
- Create a Comprehensive Brand Voice Bible
- Keep Branding Simple and Consistent
- Understand Your Ideal Client's Identity
- Define Core Values and Messaging Guidelines
- Prioritize Brand Positioning Over Engagement
- Designate a Brand Voice Overseer
- Maintain Consistency Using CMS and Social Media Tools
- Regularly Review and Update Brand Voice Guides
- Involve All Team Members in the Branding Process
- Adopt a Persona-Driven Communication Approach
- Adapt Content to Platform Characteristics
Embrace Core Values Across Channels
At Destify, we're committed to creating meaningful memories for every couple we serve. As our marketing content strategist, I advise embracing our core values of authenticity, empathy, and celebration across all digital channels. By infusing our brand voice with these values, we not only maintain consistency but also reinforce our mission of crafting unforgettable experiences.
To uphold our commitment to creating meaningful memories, we developed brand guidelines that embody our values and align with our slogan. These guidelines will serve as a roadmap for crafting content that resonates with our audience and reflects the essence of Destify. From the language we use to the visuals we share, every aspect of our digital presence should evoke the emotions and sentiments behind "We create meaningful memories."
By consistently infusing our brand voice with authenticity, empathy, and celebration, we can connect with couples on a deeper level, and inspire them to trust us with their special day. Through ongoing training, feedback loops, detailed brand messaging, brand style guides, and data analysis, we regularly refine our approach to ensure that every interaction leaves a lasting impression.
Develop and Train on Brand Style Guide
A brand style guide is a must-have for maintaining a consistent brand voice across multiple digital channels. This document outlines your brand personality, key messaging, and specific writing guidelines.
It should include things like brand adjectives (Is your brand voice informative, friendly, witty, or authoritative?), dos and don'ts (Are there certain phrases or slang to avoid?), and tone preferences (Do you prefer a conversational or formal tone?)
Once you have this guide, train your team on its contents. This ensures everyone creating content for your brand, from social media managers to email marketers, understands the voice you want to project.
Create a Comprehensive Brand Voice Bible
Advice: Create a "Brand Voice Bible." A document or presentation that outlines the following:
- Common language used
- Words to NOT use
- What defines the brand voice
- Point of view of writing
- Frequently asked questions
- Examples of top posts
- Examples of bad posts
Share this document with everyone involved in content creation and social management. For new hires, test them on creating content before anything is published. Return to the Brand Bible monthly with the team to keep it updated, and make sure everyone is on the same page.
Any time I start a new business or take on a new client, building a "Brand Bible" is one of the first steps so that we can remain consistent across all content channels. A must!
Keep Branding Simple and Consistent
The same thing I recommend when it comes to most aspects of marketing: keeping it simple. If you have a look at the Yarooms site and marketing efforts, you'll notice that we're keeping things very clean and simple. This isn't just because that's the current aesthetic du jour; it is because that means fewer branding issues can crop up because we're trying to do too much with the same basic brand in numerous formats. By keeping just one or two things in the toolbox, I've found it is much more effective, because people are consistently going to be seeing the same thing over and over.
This does, however, mean that you had best be very confident that that one thing is the right thing for them to be seeing. Stroer is a good example, if you're looking for something to reference that's a bit more public.
Understand Your Ideal Client's Identity
To remain consistent in your voice, you must have absolute clarity on the identity of your ideal client, and the problem they face that you help them to solve. This helps you to plan content properly, maintain focus on the point of your content, and repurpose effortlessly. With this locked in, you can also delegate more effectively, and build a community around a specific product or service.
Define Core Values and Messaging Guidelines
Maintaining a consistent brand voice across channels is essential. I learned this early on in my career as a reputation manager.
I believe in kick-starting the process by defining my brand's core values, personality, and messaging guidelines. This forms the bedrock of all my communication efforts. I want to create a style guide that details my preferred language, tone, and visual features to ensure uniformity across platforms. It's important to regularly review my channels to guarantee alignment with these guidelines.
Leveraging tools like social media management platforms and content calendars can help with planning posts and monitoring engagement. I prioritize responding promptly and consistently to comments, messages, and inquiries from my audience. This interaction reinforces my brand's voice and demonstrates authenticity. Continuously evaluating and adapting my communication strategies is important to remain relevant in the ever-growing scene.
Prioritize Brand Positioning Over Engagement
In the pursuit of higher engagement numbers, brands often prioritize this metric above all others. In their quest to capture attention, they may compromise their brand positioning, aiming to create content that is easily shareable across various digital platforms. This can lead to a dilution of their brand identity as they prioritize content that is designed solely to generate shares and likes, rather than staying true to their unique positioning and values.
Additionally, the practice of repurposing the same content across multiple digital channels can further contribute to the dilution of brand messaging. Rather, they should choose to speak the language of the platform and adapt their content accordingly, while staying true to their brand attributes.
Designate a Brand Voice Overseer
Maintaining a consistent brand voice across platforms is important for brand recognition and establishing a clear identity for consumers. From my experience as a business owner, I believe it's best to designate a dedicated person to oversee this consistency. Consistency is important when it comes to branding. When you have someone who knows your brand well managing this aspect, it helps maintain a unified message across all platforms. This individual is responsible for upholding your brand's personality, tone, and style, preserving its integrity and connection with the audience.
By entrusting this part to one person, you develop a deep understanding of your brand's values, enabling more authentic communication with your audience. Consistent branding nurtures trust and familiarity, strengthening your brand's presence. While input from other team members is valuable, having a leader to guide your brand voice will ensure coherence and unity, improving brand relevance and audience engagement.
Maintain Consistency Using CMS and Social Media Tools
One key piece of advice for maintaining a consistent brand voice across multiple digital channels is to develop comprehensive brand guidelines that outline tone, language style, fonts, brand colors, and key messaging points. These guidelines should be accessible to all team members involved in content creation and marketing efforts, ensuring everyone understands and adheres to the established brand voice.
Additionally, leveraging technology such as content management systems and social media management tools can help centralize content creation and distribution, allowing for a consistent messaging cadence across platforms.
Regularly Review and Update Brand Voice Guides
The key to maintaining brand voice is having a comprehensive brand-voice guide. This master document can include information on tone of voice, language, style, and overall marketing message. If you ensure that your brand-voice guide covers all bases, you will ensure that all communication from your brand is consistent and high quality.
Moreover, you can distribute this document among all team members, ensuring that all departments have the required information to ensure consistency.
Regularly reviewing and updating the guide is also essential for ensuring it's relevant and reflective of your brand's image as it shifts over time.
Involve All Team Members in the Branding Process
One essential piece of advice for maintaining a consistent brand voice across multiple digital channels is to create and rigorously adhere to a detailed brand style guide. From my experience, we crafted a brand style guide that spans tone, terminology, and visual elements across all forms of digital content, from our website to social media platforms. This guide ensures that every piece of content, whether it's about paint protection or car customization services, is uniformly branded.
For example, when discussing our services such as XPEL paint protection films or bespoke detailing, we consistently use terms that reflect our brand's focus on quality and expertise. Each piece of content explicitly reinforces our commitment to excellence, whether in blogs, social media posts, or newsletters. By keeping these messages uniform, we guarantee that our brand voice is clear and identifiable to our audience, no matter where they engage with us.
It's also strategic to involve all team members in the branding process. Regular training and updates about our brand voice and guiding principles help ensure that everyone—from the social media managers to customer service representatives—understands and effectively communicates our core values.
We hold quarterly reviews where we evaluate our digital content's effectiveness and adherence to our brand style guide. Such ongoing evaluations help us adjust as needed while maintaining a consistent brand voice across all platforms.
Adopt a Persona-Driven Communication Approach
In maintaining a consistent brand voice across digital channels, we've found success by prioritizing a persona-driven approach. This means we focus on conveying the voice of our target audience, rather than adapting our voice to each individual platform. We have a clear understanding of our ideal student's characteristics and preferences.
We keep this persona in mind when crafting content, be it a social media post or a video. We ensure a consistent personality is delivered across all channels. The key is understanding your audience and letting that guide your communication strategy.
Adapt Content to Platform Characteristics
One of the most important issues is that each platform has its own unique character. For example, people's expectations and shares on Instagram and TikTok are very different from each other. If we are creating content that will represent a brand on more than one platform, we must understand the spirit of the platforms correctly, and find the best method by taking inspiration from the content of similar brands and trying their strategies on our own brand.
When the same content is published on two different platforms, presenting the same content in different ways according to the habits of the platforms will become more exciting for the followers.