What are the best methods for researching your brand's tone and voice?

When you think of brands like Coca-Cola, Apple, Mercedes, Google, what comes to your mind? These are some of the biggest brand in the world. They each have great attributes that make their business stand out. How do you go ahead to decide which attribute that will make your brand stand out from the crowd? I think it is obvious, you always need to have your target audience in mind and what solutions you are offering to them. Now you have to attract their attention somehow using combination of attributes like name, logo, slogan, mission statement and so on. Combine these with brand personality to give a particular perception about your brand. But how do you decide what attributes your brand should display that will draw your customers in.

Leverage AI-driven tools to analyze customer interactions and social media engagement. These tools can help identify patterns in language and sentiment, providing insights into an effective tone for your audience.

Discussing a brand attribute could be a wide topic. So I will recommend focusing on 3 main things that I see, require much attention: 1. Understand Your Brand Identity: Clearly outline your brand's mission, vision, and values. These elements will serve as the foundation for your brand attributes. 2. Identify Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP): Determine what sets your brand apart from others in your industry. This could be a unique product feature, exceptional customer service, or a specific brand personality. 3. Know Your Target Audience: Understand your target audience's preferences, values, and needs. Your brand attributes should resonate with and appeal to your audience.

The most important way to be able to select the suitable tone and voice to a brand is having a clear and accurate idea about its attributes, and to master that skill there are 3 steps to do it: 1- Understand the brand identity: This will be by understanding the main guideline that descripes and identifies the brand. 2- Understanding the Target Aduience: This is a hard one since slecting your target audience is not understanding them. To understand them you need to know their personalities and the way they like to be treated. 3- Identifying the unique selling points: After understanding the audience you need to understand your brand itself, mainly what makes it different from the rest.

There is a great need to understand what appeals to your target audience. This will act as a guide to building the right brand tone and voice. We can use social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn to connect with our target audience to find out what appeals to them the most, what they really need, what is the problem they need solutions to and so on. For example, Canva's target audience is made up of mostly designers or content creators, teachers or social marketers that need a platform where they can freely make a simple graphic design.

In analyzing the target audience it's not new that it is a critical aspect of any branding strategy. I would recommend focusing on: 1. Persona Development to further understand who are the clients' target audience and next to that is the 2. Behavioral Analysis through historical data, purchase patterns, and feedback. 3. Cultural Background that includes psychographics and demographics that would allow me to understand the patterns needed in order to be attractive to the audience.

You must Know Your Target Audience: As I said understanding your target audience's preferences, values, needs, mainly what their is personality and the way they like to be treated, is one of the most important things you have to do. As it will affect how they interact with you and wheter or not they will follow your CTA.

Studying the competitor is like studying yourself as well. You need to learn their: 1. Product and Service offerings 2. Brand identity 3. Pricing Strategies 4. Marketing and Advertising Strategies 5. How they adapt to Innovation and Tech 6. How they craft customer experience 7. What is their Market share 8. SWOT Analysis

Studying your competitors is actually as important as studying your own brand as it will help you understand the audience and how to deal with them. That will prevent you from doing the same mistakes they did before which will lead to a faster growth for your brand recognition in the mind of the clients.

In most industries there is a sea of same when it comes to tone of voice, and often visual assets too. By researching what competitors are saying and how you can create a distinctive voice in your category that will make you infinitely more memorable. Look for things like tone, use of jargon, overused words and the balance between you (the customer) and we (the company) to find a white space to stand out.

It's important to note that testing shouldn't only involve your audience's response to your tone of voice. It's also really important to road test your tone of voice guidelines with the people who will be using it most. How confident do they feel using the guide? What is the output like? This will help you tweak and adjust the guidelines to make them as helpful as possible.

Keeping track of the tone and voice you are using in each stage of your brand lifetime is actually one of the most helpful things you can do as it will be a good refrence to measure your brand growth and maturing.

Your audience evolves over time and as a brand you have to continuously keep up with their changes. That is why you will need to keep updating your tone and voice to match their personalities and keep up with them.

Starbucks offers an exemplary approach, conducting customer surveys, social media sentiment analysis, & focus groups to understand customer perceptions & preferences. By listening to customer feedback & observing interactions, Starbucks fine-tuned its friendly and welcoming tone. The brand's voice resonates through its messaging, striking a balance between warmth, informality, & professionalism. This comprehensive approach to researching customer sentiments & aligning them with the brand's identity enables Starbucks to maintain a consistent & engaging tone that connects with its audience, contributing to its global brand loyalty & success.

Implementation training is an important step of brand voice creation that often gets overlooked. It can be hard for a team to put an abstract TOV document into practice without this practical guidance. Training workshops can also be useful opportunities to refine/tweak guidelines, ask questions and add additional helpful content.