Branding Using Your Business’ Voice
In this blog post I’m going to be going over ways to brand your business through your online copy. When you think of branding, you usually think of logos and google ads, but there’s a lot more to it than that.
We’ll start out by addressing the biggest factor in your overall branding: your voice.
Your Voice
When I refer to your business’ “voice” I’m talking about the theme and style of your copy. To give you a better idea of what I’m talking about, let’s look at a company that advertises itself with a talking green fox.
Mint Mobile’s voice is a mix between laid-back and playful. If you’ve ever seen one of their commercials then you have an idea of how their fox mascot talks. All of their copy has the same attitude and speech pattern as that fox, whether it's in an email, advertisements, or their actual website.
When I got an email from them and started reading it my first thought was “Yep, this sounds like Mint Mobile.” Keeping a consistent voice in your copy helps your customers feel emotionally attached and invested in you or your products/services.
It’s kind of like when you and a close friend are having a conversation. You can kind of guess what they’re going to say because you’re familiar with the way they talk and their personality. When your customers feel that way about you they end up coming back again and again even if a slightly better offer from one of your competitors comes up somewhere down the road.
If you’re an one-man operation you business’ voice will usually be your own voice, so you’ll just have to write the way you would normally talk with one of your customers face-to-face.
Emails
Now that you understand the importance of using a consistent voice, it’s time to put that voice into your writing. Email copy is generally short and has a quick, strong call to action, so it might seem difficult to inject your brand’s voice in that small of a space.
Since one of the areas I specialize in is email copywriting, I can assure you that idea is false. You can do a lot with seventy-five words or less as long as you focus on one key idea and then express that idea using your brand's voice.
Here’s an example…
Let’s say you sell clothing and accessories targeted to young girls who are into “sparkly, pretty, valley girl” items. Your voice would probably be a mix of fun and energetic with several stereotypical words like “totally” and “like,ya”. I’ve never been a valley girl so if I didn’t get that quite right I apologize.
Now, your copy is going to be read by parents and other people who are buying your products for these young girls (unless some parent actually trusts their 5-9 year old to go shopping online unsupervised). Because of that you need to use this fun/energetic voice while talking about how much their kids will love your products.
Just make sure you don’t get TOO carried away with that valley girl accent.
Your Website
Your website is the capital of your business’ online activities. All of your social media accounts, your emails campaigns, online ads, all of it should be leading potential customers back to your website. Because a business’s website is so crucial, you need to make sure it’s using your company's voice on every page.
To keep things simple, let’s continue using the sparkly, valley girl company for an example in this section as well. We already know the tone that the copy needs to have, but is there anything else you should do?
The answer is, yes. Besides using fun/energetic language while writing (and using the right keywords) you need to decide what length of copy fits your brand’s voice.
Now before you laugh and say that length has nothing to do with brand voice, let me explain my reason for making this a point of concern. In my humble opinion as a professional copywriter, the length of your website’s pages can say a lot. For a fun/energetic website appealing to little girls and they’re parents, you’ll want to write a shorter homepage for two reasons
Reading through an entire page of content where you’ve gone into great detail about your clothes and why they’re the best is more on the side of professional/energetic instead of fun/energetic. Something short and peppy mixed with a few strong urges to check out some of your most popular items will be much more effective.
If by some chance a kid is visiting your website looking for something they want, they’re going to be looking for bright colorful pictures, not a long page of words.
Also, (I know this doesn't have anything to do with copywriting specifically) remember to use your company's main colors and pictures that fit your overall voice as well. I’m sure you already knew that, but I wanted to mention it anyway.
Your Blog
The last point I want to cover in this blog post is your website’s blog section. If your website doesn’t have a blog, that’s fine, you may not need one, though it can help search engines see your website in a better light, since you’ll be regularly adding new content. Search engines like websites that are updated or added to every now and then because that means the website hasn’t been abandoned.
Your blog posts will vary and you may even hire a ghostwriter to write posts and articles for your blog if you don’t have the time. However, all of that diversity doesn’t mean you can’t stay true to your brand’s voice.
Over half of my work comes from the online freelancing platforms I use, Fiverr being one of them. This basically means I’m a ghost writer, and let me tell you I’ve written with a lot of different voices ranging from beautiful/flexible to professional/scientific. The key to writing in your business’s voice is to think about how it sounds and what kind of words, phrases, and tone it has… then write.
Blog posts and articles sound the best when they’re written the way a person talks, so if you have trouble beginning your article or hit writer’s block along the way, start talking using your business’ voice and then write it down. Trust me, it sounds harder and more complicated than it actually is.
I didn’t cover every area of web copy when I wrote this post, but these are the main three. If you get a consistent voice in each of them, everything else should be fairly simple.