Creating Voice & Tone in Digital Marketing
The first step for small business owners when creating marketing strategies is ALWAYS to identify your goals and objectives. This is important because having a clear idea of where you are and where you would like to end up makes the journey from point A (setting a goal) to point B (achieving that goal) more direct – especially when starting up a social media strategy.
The next step in creating a social strategy is to establish your brand’s voice and tone. Your brand’s voice is essentially the implementation of personality into your brand’s message. This helps in creating an intimate connection with your target audience or audiences. Your brand’s tone is the mood that radiates off the words of your message when it is recited to your audience (i.e., social media followers).
Define Your Audiences
Identify Your Current Audience
You can identify your current audience by using follower insights on platforms like Facebook to see what content gets the most engagement, basic demographic information and best times or days for engagement. These are useful tools because they can show your current position and reputation in the marketplace, with users who have already shown some loyalty and interest in your brand.
Identify your Target Audience
Your target audience is the new users or followers who you want to move into your marketing flywheel – your potential customers. Whether or not you’re paying to advertise to them, a way to identify your new audience (AKA future customers or top-of-funnel sales prospects) is by checking the insights on your social media for meaningful fluctuations. Advertising tools also give you the opportunity to target new users by demographics like location and interests.
Not only is this super helpful in your Social Media Marketing strategy but be sure to also apply this to your posts and stories.
You might not know what your target audience is, but you can test variations in audiences to find the type of user that is most likely to convert.
Make sure you’re using your unique voice to speak to your targets
Your voice & tone depends on the industry your business is in. If you are in a formal industry (like finance or law) then speaking with knowledge and authority would be ideal. If you are in a less formal industry (like retail or outdoor recreation), then you could let your personality shine through. Just remember to use the right tone with the right customer. It okay to have different tones for different messages as well – just ensure it’s targeting the right audience at the right time.
Matching your Goals & Objectives
Social media is just one piece of your big-picture marketing strategy and the goal is to have your profiles & engagement contribute to your overall goals & objectives. It’s important to break down each step of your strategy and tactics to backtrack to one of your overall goals.
Measurement is also important. Make sure every social media tactic has a measurable KPI to help you calculate the overall return on investment (ROI).
Matching Goals to Strategies to Tone
This is the point where you write it out. Just like any other marketing campaign, build a plan and schedule. Use this doc to help. There are some really helpful tools in this doc as well, so make a copy for your biz!
CONSISTENCY IS KEY
No matter the type of content, your followers deserve consistency. This is across platforms, personal communication, or site content. Your customers are looking for a voice they can connect with, and once that connection is built, they’ll start to expect to hear from you regularly.
Again, different tones can be used for different messaging or even across different platforms, but the key is to be purposeful in what you say, how you say it and ultimately, the messaging you’re sending directly to your audiences.
Interested in reading more about this topic? Check out our blog post on 10 Tips for Social Media and Branding.
The Buhv Design team understands the difficulties small businesses can have creating sound social media strategies, that’s why we’re here to help guide you through the process with tips from our team of creative in-house professionals.
