Forgotten customer experience strategies: why you shouldn’t neglect brand voice
What is it you want people to think when they interact with your brand?
What is it you want people to feel when they interact with your brand?
The role of marketing is to influence what your future customers think when they hear about you. It’s important to note that modern marketing also considers how people feel about your brand.
What people think about your brand will determine whether they engage with you. And without engagement, your business is going to be left in the dust trail of everyone else.
How they feel about you will determine whether they recommend your brand to others. And word of mouth referrals are the cheapest marketing tactic (because you’ve got invested brand advocates spreading the word on your behalf, but you don’t have to spend a penny).
So the solution? You make sure you and your team are crystal clear what you want your future customers to think and feel about you.
Conversion copywriting looks at (1) how you convey the true value of what you do, motivating your future customers to act — and therefore become paying customers — and (2) the way you say things, the style of writing, the tone of voice you use.
It’s this type of copywriting that can help you connect with your reader on a more intimate level, reflecting their feelings back to them. By using terminology that is common with that type of consumer/business/individual, you’re able to get inside their head. So as they read, they are thinking:
> ‘Errghhhh yes. This is it. This is what I’ve been feeling, but before I wasn't able to articulate it before.’
> ‘I don’t know how but they’ve just made sense of all these conflicting feelings I’m having.’
> ‘Wowzers, they’ve hit the nail on the head.’
And they’re feeling relieved/excited/motivated/empowered/eager/calmer/more grounded. Take your pick.
But things can go a bit awry . . .
There is so much focus in our weird and wonderful marketing world on trying to be different. We want to provide a different feeling than everyone else. But we want to do bigger and better, to be the obvious choice in a crowded market.
Yet, this can mean we lose sight of being consistent.
In the wise words of Mike Reed of Reed Words, when it comes to brand voice:
“Worry less of ‘how do we not sound like everyone else’ and think more about ‘how can we sound like ourselves all the time’.”
Inconsistencies in your brand voice turn people off to you. And as a result, they slip through the net. Just as clashing colours, inconsistent fonts, an Instagram feed that looks TOTALLY different to their website make you suspicious and a bit taken aback.
There’s an interruption in what you see. The aesthetic isn’t consistent. You’re getting confused. You start to feel this brand/individual/company is a bit all over the place.
This is a logical reaction that you can put words to, because their brand isn’t ‘visually coherent’.
People consciously recognise this discordance in brand aesthetics. However, noticing the discord in a brand’s voice is subconscious.
It ‘feels’ wrong. It’s a gut reaction. We might not be able to put into words why this brand doesn’t feel quite right.
But the discord and suspicious reaction is there nonetheless. It’s more of a bodily reaction to something being amiss. And if someone’s body is telling them that this isn’t a brand to invest in, they’re highly unlikely to go against this physical response.
For those people who experience this discord, who feel hesitant to trust you because of some kind of inconsistency (whether it be something visual, in the language, or just something they feel), you’re losing customers. People are slipping through the cracks.
So consistency in your brand’s voice is key to retaining the attention of your future customers, the people browsing, weighing up their options, open to give a new brand a chance.
And it’s key to getting return customers too.
Whether it’s a blog post, a social media caption, a newsletter, a ‘thank you for buying’ email, an autoresponder, a web page or a e-book, your words impact every stage of the buying process. What you say and how you say it impacts every interaction with your clients.
So what doyou want people to think and feel when they read your website?
This free mini-course (it’s only 4x 5 minute videos) will help you lay out what you intend your copy to do, how you intend on impacting your readers + give you the direction to get there.
Because not having these goals on paper, and front-of-mind, when you’re tinkering on your website / writing a page for your new service / adding that new case study will mean there are future customers slipping through the cracks.
Clear intentions and goals when creating website content will help you plug those gaps. These are goals we define before I start writing or designing for any of my clients.
Having clear goals makes sure that more people feel and think what you want them to. And that means more people are motivated to click that button/sign up for that thing/book that call/buy your best product.
