5 Signs You’ve Stifled Your Brand Voice and Why that Matters (Part 1)
If your marketing sounds stilted, formal and generally so dull that even the most interested reader can’t get through it all, your brand voice may have gotten a bit, well, stifled along the way. It may be that you’ve never considered that your brand should have a voice. It may be that you learned somewhere along the way that all business communications should be formal and impersonal, or it doesn’t count as business. Whatever the real reason, it’s time to make some changes.
Put simply, a brand voice expresses your brand’s personality. The words you write or use in videos and images tell a prospect about who you are and whether they want to do business with you.
This matters a lot, even if you’re marketing to other businesses. Why? Because business buyers are real people. Business buyers are influenced as much by emotion as any other consumer. We also know that for business buyers, appealing to personal value drives nearly twice the commercial outcomes as appealing to business value (Gartner/CEB/Motista). We know that most prospects consume 3 or more pieces of content before they even let us know they’re interested in us (Demand Gen Report). One very powerful way to engage your possible buyers is to use your brand voice to connect with them emotionally in all of your marketing efforts.
Sometimes, it pays to stand out in a field.
Here are five signs your brand voice needs help, whether it shows up in writing, in video or somewhere else:
1. You write and talk (and speak) in the third person.
If one wished to be distant and seem unapproachable, one would do well never to address anyone directly. In fact, the third person voice is ideally suited for just this purpose.
On the other hand, if you want to really get someone’s attention and make them feel seen and heard, you can do no better than to address them directly, as if they are in the room and maybe even a good friend.
2. You lack action verbs!
Challenge yourself to get rid of as much passive voice as you can.
Tip: If you lack motivation to do this, turn it into a game. When you complete a draft, run a readability analysis on it (in Microsoft Word, you can xyz). Note the percentage of passive voice. Now, edit out as much as you can and re-run the analysis. Were you able to beat your previous score? Great! Now keep going until you can get it to 10% or less.
3. You use long words and long sentences.
When you use long words and sentences, you risk confusing your reader. And confusion can lead to abandoned pages and no conversions! And, as a reminder, in the U.S., the average adult reads at the 6th grade level!
Tip: Fix this by checking the grade level of your writing. You can do with directly inside Microsoft Word, with HemmingwayApp and many more similar tools. There’s just no excuse for not doing this regularly, with everything you write.
4. You use lots of jargon.
This is one of the biggest challenges in B2B marketing. The best way to combat jargon is to read things out loud. If it doesn’t sound like you’d talk to a friend, if it’s full of words or acronyms that have to be explained, it probably has too much jargon in it. Cut the fluff and cut the jargon so your real brand voice can see the light of day.
5. You sound like everyone else.
Tip: Copy and paste the copy from a marketing asset you recently published into a blank Word document. Find a comparable piece on your competitor’s site and do the same. Could a random person on the street tell that your piece was from your company? Is there anything in your marketing that really distinguishes your unique value and personality?
Interestingly, these are all areas you should focus on if you just generally want to make your writing more engaging and therefore more capable of converting interest into action.
If you’ve spent a bit of time reviewing your marketing and have decided that your brand voice has gone missing, find out what to do to find it in Part 2.