How to Create a Consistent Brand Voice That Connects with Your Customers

Ask someone to describe a well-known brand and their go-to response will probably be a description of the visual elements, like the logo and colours, followed by a couple of sentences about the products/services. Mention brand voice and you might get a few blank stares. It’s something that can often be overlooked but it is an essential element of any brand strategy. 

A well-crafted brand voice builds trust, aligns with the expectations customers have of your business, generates loyalty and encourages sustained engagement. Get it wrong (or don’t give it enough attention) and it could alienate your audience, devalue your brand, and seriously impact your bottom line.

To help you perfect your messaging, here’s our short guide on how to create a consistent brand voice that connects with your customers.

What does ‘brand voice’ mean? 

A simple way to think of your brand voice is as its ‘personality’. It’s the distinct communication style that sets your business apart. An effective brand voice will reflect your mission and values, capture your unique qualities in every message and deliver that message in a way that resonates with your target audience. 

It’s all about how you want to come across to your audience – and much of that will depend upon the type of business you have. For example, if you are a funeral director, you want your brand persona to project empathy, professionalism, and respect as it’s what customers would expect from that kind of service. Equally, if you run a drop-in for teens, your messaging will be wildly different. You need to get back to basics and lock down your core mission, values, and customers to decide which voice is right for you.

Authenticity matters – developing a brand voice that builds customer trust

The key to perfecting any brand voice is to be authentic. People can sniff out a phony in a heartbeat – messaging that doesn’t seem genuine will erode trust in your business. If the way you communicate sounds too ‘try-hard’ and inauthentic, your customers just won’t buy it. Plus, the more your real passion for your business comes through in your communications, the more people will connect with you. So, don’t try and fit into the box, think outside of it, and pave your own way.

A great example of keeping things authentic was the branding project we collaborated on with PACTO, a community transport charity here in Pembrokeshire. From designing a logo inspired by their own sketches to ensuring the people who mattered participated in crafting the brand voice, we created a persona that felt personal, authentic, and aligned with their values.

Crafting the right brand voice for your audience

Now that you know what you want your brand voice to convey, you can drill down into the details of how to make it happen.

Step 1: Research your audience 

We all change the way we speak depending on our audience and your brand voice is no different. You need to be clear about who your customers are, how they like to be communicated with and what they want to hear.

So, dig into your analytics, do a competitor analysis to see how successful rival brands communicate, send some surveys to your email list, or do some social listening to find out how your customers connect. 

Step 2: Create buyer personas

It’s helpful to create realistic personas, avatars, whatever you want to call them, to flesh out and segment your audience. It helps to personalise your messaging and create a ‘representative’ for each of your customer groups.

Ask questions based on the information you’ve gathered from your research to develop your personas. e.g.

• What’s their age, gender, location, job, education level?
• What digital platforms do they use?
• What are their interests and hobbies?
• What problems are they seeking solutions for?
• Which platforms do they use and what communication style suits them?

You can go pretty deep with this – it all depends how far you want/need to niche down – but it’s a critical step in making the right connection with your customers.

Step 3: Match your brand voice with customer expectation

Once you know who you’re talking to, you need to make sure your messaging meets their expectations. As in the examples mentioned in the introduction, your brand voice needs to align with the type of business you run and the way your customers like to communicate.

If you’re not sure what the right approach is for starters, run some A/B tests to see which styles work better than others. 

This is where the difference between brand voice and tone comes into play. The two are often conflated but essentially:

• Brand voice defines your core personality and values, remains consistent, and underpins the messaging across all your marketing channels 
• Tone describes the way in which your style may change depending upon the context. 

It’s probably easier to illustrate this with an insight into how this works across common marketing channels:

1. Your social media channels

Let’s say you’re promoting a product or service across your socials. Nothing about your posts deviates from your core persona but you adapt the tone of each message to suit the users on each platform. e.g.:

• LinkedIn: as it’s a more professional channel you might phrase things in a more expert and formal way
• Instagram: This usually has a more friendly, casual, conversational tone
• Facebook: This might be a hybrid of the LinkedIn and Insta approaches

2. Your website & blog

This is probably where your brand voice will dominate in its truest form as it’s the key digital hub for your business. 

However, your blog content might change in tone depending on the subject or the contributor, if you have several team members contributing. For example, a blog on the latest industry research may have a vastly different feel to a more lightweight and engaging conversational interview with event participants. 

3. Your email marketing

Again, you probably have several strands to your email marketing which will all drive home your core principles, but a polite and helpful customer support email will naturally differ from that of a more sales driven product launch or exciting news update.

4. Chatbots

AI chatbots are an increasingly common and highly effective feature on websites, but you need to ensure that they sound like a real person speaking in your brand voice.

Obviously, as well as interacting in a way that fits your brand persona, the tone for your chatbot scripts has to be solution-focussed, polite and helpful. 

Cohesive Conversations

It may be that in addition to multiple marketing channels, you also have numerous strands of your business that have been brought together under one umbrella brand. Again, your messaging for each branch of the brand may change in tone, but the core brand voice stays at the heart of communications, tying everything together in a cohesive way.

An illustration of this is the branding work we did with The Really Wild Emporium. By creating distinct but complementary branding elements that all spoke with the same brand voice, they stayed true to their core identity while tailoring communication to each customer segment.

How to keep your brand voice consistent

Just like any visual elements, guidelines for your brand voice need to be included in your branding kit. Marketing tasks are often delegated to agencies or an in-house team, so the best way to maintain a strong verbal identity is to ensure that people have the right training and guidelines to follow. These might include:

• Your brand mission statement and an outline of your core values 
• House style tips and examples of approved copy
• Specific language to use and avoid
• Tone descriptions for each marketing channel

If you use AI for ideas, outlines, or content, you may even want to create a custom GPT that ensures a certain level of uniformity across your team. 

When should you refresh your brand voice?

Like any other aspect of digital marketing, your brand voice may need to adapt in line with shifting consumer preferences, business growth etc. The key is to stay authentic, make any changes gradually and test as you go, so you know you’re not veering down the wrong path or losing your identity.

Need professional help to align your brand voice with customer expectations?If your brand voice could use some professional input, our Web Adept branding gurus are ready to help you bring your business’s personality to life. Get in touch today.

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