As an agency, it’s our job to help form and maintain relationships between our clients and their target audiences. A brand tells us what they need, we craft a campaign to be as visible to their target audience as possible, and through us, our client connects directly with their audience.
This is what marketing is all about. At the end of the day, it’s one group connecting with another, and how through our middle position, we help make that communication happen.
So, if marketing is about connecting with one another, then one of its most important components is tone. Marketing requires an understanding of people’s rational and emotional wants, and that includes how they’d like to be spoken to.
At Motion, consistency in the way we interact with our clients is important, but the ability to also be malleable with our speech is equally key. When it comes to brand tone of voice, we have to be ready to shift our speech as needed so our clients can most effectively communicate with their target audience. For some background on brand tone, we talked to our Associate Creative Director, Stefan Castellanos, on flexibility, the challenges of maintaining it, and building trust between clients and audiences.
How Core Traits Establish a Brand’s Voice
First, there’s a very important distinction that needs to be made: To understand brand tone, we need to understand how it differs from brand voice. “I hear the two used interchangeably a lot,” Stefan says, “and I think it’s important to make that distinction because one is a subset of the other.”
In the context of advertising, brand voice is a client’s base personality and the foundation of brand tone. To understand how to communicate with a target audience, first we need to understand what a client is interested in saying and why.
Stefan emphasizes the importance of “brand attributes,” or who you are as a brand, your values, and your traits. These components make up the personality of your brand voice, and through them we develop a tone to speak with. A focus on these traits is where we tend to start.
“A lot of the time, that’s what we do when we work with a new client. Sometimes it’s figuring out what those brand attributes are,” Stefan says. And once we have an understanding of the client’s voice, we can start to build up the most important aspect of client to audience communication: trust.
Trust and Tone: Altering Our Speech to Foster Understanding
Building brand voice is listening to a client, but building brand tone requires shifting our perspective. With tone, we have to focus on what the audience wants from the brand.
“A lot of it has to do with understanding what the goals and motivations of the audience are, and then figuring out what the company offers and how those two overlap,” Stefan explains. Brands want to be perceived as trustworthy by the people they need to reach, so through tone it’s our job to bridge that gap.
“A way to generate trust is to figure out what you can offer and how that overlaps with what the customer wants, then play out that advantage,” Stefan says.
Both voice and tone rely on an understanding of the client’s archetypal role as a brand. By identifying the goals of, for instance, a shoe company, we can then construct an appropriate and inviting tone based on the specifics of what they’re trying to sell. Does the company make heels, running shoes, sandals? Do they need to exude elegance, strength, relaxation? As we break down each layer of what a client is selling, we find more dimensions to what they need to say and gain a better sense of how to say it.
Audience Expectations and How Tone Varies
An important component of building trust through tone is relatability. An audience that can find honesty in a product is one that will trust it, so this is where we have to be flexible with our application of tone.
Dependent on the brand, audiences may want to engage with something that comes off as friendly, or knowledgeable, or confident. There are multiple factors when it comes to picking an appropriate tone, and it’s important to take them all into consideration when figuring out how to best help a client communicate with their audience.
This is where tone relies on an understanding of brand voice the most. When it comes to regulated brands especially—industries like healthcare, finance, and energy—building trust with the general public is crucial, considering how important they are to everyday life. How do we make these massive fields relatable?
When it comes to complex industries, listening to what their audiences want from them is a good way to refine tone. “It lets the audience know that we’re hearing what they’re saying,” Stefan says. For a healthcare brand, we may want to focus on how they can come off as more empathetic based on what their patients have to say about them. A finance company could be presented as a model of stability, or an energy brand could speak with authority to convince their audience of their importance.
Methods of connection beyond pulling directly from the brand voice are also a valid strategy for building tone. Stefan cites a campaign Motion’s creative team put together for the Saint Joseph Health brand where we used a hospital’s location—“They’ve been serving this community for over a hundred years”—as a way to build trust.
Finding a Voice: Our Role in Client-Audience Communication
Regardless of how they present, every brand wants to be seen as affable by their audience. Using their voice, skills and/or connections to form a trustworthy tone are all excellent approaches.
If marketing is one group connecting with another, then understanding how both sides communicate and listen to each other is what we do when it comes to building tone. Learning how to speak with a client’s voice may seem like a daunting task, but by breaking down and analyzing who they are, it becomes easier to help them communicate with those they want to talk to.
Building out your brand identity? The integrated team at Motion is here to help. Contact us today.
The post Your Brand, Your Voice: How Tone and Messaging Build Recognition appeared first on The Motion Agency.