Your Brand Voice Speaks to Your People

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, and I’m gonna say it today: Social media is a conversion powerhouse, when it’s done right. And part of doing it right, is making sure that your content is speaking to the right people! Well, saying it’s “part of it” is an understatement, it’s a HUGE component of having a successful social media presence for your business.

And speaking to the right people is all about your brand voice, and how it shows up in the content that you’re posting on a daily basis on the platforms you use for promotion. If you’re unfamiliar, or this is the first time you’re reading my business owner blog series, what I mean when I say “brand voice” is basically the curated tone you’ve selected for your business as an entity. It should be rooted in the values that sit underneath your business, supporting what you do and why you do it.

At its core, the “brand voice” you use can be thought of pretty simply. I like to think of it as a collection of the FEELINGS you want your clients/customers (and FUTURE clients/customers!) to have when they’re checking out your business!

Every Post is a Touchpoint

Every post you make on every social media platform – from Instagram to Linkedin – is an opportunity to leverage your brand voice for connection. Which is basically just a fancy way of saying “getting the attention of the right people.” Don’t get me wrong, attention from ANYone for your business is a good thing – but more than anything we want attention from people who line up with your values. People who want what you want. And ultimately… people who are ready to convert for your services or purchase your products.

But this gets important when it comes to making your social media content work FOR you. We all know that as business owners, managing social media platforms is a whole job. Especially if you’re not working with a team to take those tasks off your hands – it takes time. And if you’re going to invest that time, you want it to actually do cool things, right? Well, those cool things come (in part) from making sure your brand voice is integrated into the content you’re sharing. So today we’re going to talk about how exactly you can do that, in a variety of places on your social feeds!

Brand Voice in Your Captions

The idea of “brand voice” immediately sounds like something that you should be doing in written content, and it makes sense that you might think that. It plays a huge role in the visuals in your content too, but we’re going to start with the written stuff because honestly… it’s somewhat more straightforward.

Integrating your brand voice into your captions on social media – or the WRITTEN portion of your posts – is all about what I like to call “the three T’s”. Topic, tone, and text (word choice). Really, ALL of the brand voice stuff in your posts comes back to at least one of these three, but the actual copy (the written part) of your post uses all three!

Topic:

When you’re choosing the topic for your post, at its core, it should… make sense. I don’t like telling people to niche down too much, or telling them to not post things that they’re passionate about, but you really want to make sure that the topic is relevant to your brand. Like, if you have a line of clothing for babies, for example, posting about a new hot yoga studio local to you might not be the best plan ever. The topic doesn’t line up, ya know?

Now, there are always going to be exceptions to this rule! There are situations where it does definitely make sense to post things that aren’t DIRECTLY related to what you do, or situations where a post that SEEMS off topic can be brought BACK to something important and powerful for your brand. But to keep things closely tied to your brand voice, it’s super helpful to make sure that your post topics are tied to one of your brand pillars. Even if that pillar is “behind the scenes transparency”! For example, I make posts that are personal on Jessica Strobel Photography’s presence online, because one of my brand values is transparency, and my TOP value is connection. So those posts are an important way that I keep those values present in my brand voice!

Tone:

I talk about tone a lot, because tone has a HUGE role in the visual components of your brand communication, and I’m a photographer. I do the visuals, baby. But anyway, once you have the topic for your post pulled together (or if you’re bulking some post content, a BUNCH of topics!) it’s time to think about tone.

When it comes to the tone for your brand voice, you can really lean fairly hard into the feelings you want your people to have when they’re engaging with your content. Do you want them to feel uplifted? Energized? Calm? Powerful? Do you want them to feel that they trust your expertise?

All of these feelings call for differences in the way that you write the caption itself. Not just when it comes to word choice (which we’re about to talk about in a bit more detail) but also when it comes to the overall mood of the post. If you’re having trouble nailing what this one means, you can think of it like headlines in the newspaper. Every newspaper is going to have a different take on current events, sometimes to the level of the exact same events being covered as a negative in one paper, and as a positive in another.

Now, in your content you’re not necessarily taking a stance that way, but when you’re writing your posts, think about how you can tweak the tone of what you’re writing to get your selected “mood” across!

Text

Like I said, “text” is just the “T” I use for “word choice” in the “Three T’s of Brand Voice”. And it really is as simple as it sounds! It’s the actual specific words that you use when you’re writing things that are going to show off your brand to your clients. Now, if you’ve gone through a professional brand design process with a brand designer, you might actually have a list of buzz words that are selected especially to align with your branding, but if you haven’t, you might not have those tools yet.

Luckily, it’s really easy to pull those lists together, and you can do it yourself if you haven’t already outsourced that to a professional! Consider the values we’re always coming back to when we talk about branding – the ones at the core of your business. For me, one of those core values (that I talk about a lot) is connection. Did you catch that though? It’s a core value… that I talk about a lot. Which is to say: it’s one of those words for my brand! I want it to be common knowledge that I not only value connection but that it’s my inspiration – it’s what I capture. So I make a point of mentioning it.

And that’s all those terms are! Words and concepts you make a point of mentioning when you can, because they serve as important reminders about the core of your brand.

Clearly Defining Your Brand Voice Isn’t Just About Client Acquisition…

Defining your brand voice isn’t all about getting new clients, or growing on social media – it’s also about making YOUR life easier! With clear guidelines for how you create content for your social media presence, the time you spend actually doing it can cut in half – or even more!

And these kinds of guidelines ALSO make it a ton easier to pass your social media management on to a team of pros when the time comes, because they’ll have the groundwork in place from you to hit the ground running with. Speaking of social media pros… if it’s about that time for you, we should talk. Whether you have a defined brand voice you’re working into your captions right now or not, we can pair you with a social media management package that will get your social media platforms working FOR you, instead of taking up your time!

Bonus: Take a look at just a few results that my AMAZING team of collaborators and me have gotten for our social media management clients!