Finding Your Brand Voice
While the process of designing a logo or creating a visual brand identity may feel interesting or energizing to many entrepreneurs, talking or writing about their work is often a more daunting task. In turn, some founders will postpone the creation of core messaging, hoping that great packaging or photography is enough to sell their story.
While we understand this temptation, avoiding the copywriting question often leads to business problems down the road. When you can’t clearly (and concisely!) articulate the what and why of your business, you leave your story open to interpretation, incorrect assumptions and even misrepresentation—whether in the media, your industry or even your local community. In an era of increasingly conscious consumerism, proactively disclosing the who and the how of your brand can also set customer expectations and protect your business from baseless criticism—and ideally, secure lasting brand loyalty.
Yet investing in your brand voice isn’t just about avoiding common pitfalls. More importantly, it’s an opportunity to attract your target audiences and underscore your unique value proposition. Once you’ve built the foundation, leveraging your brand voice can actually feel fun and empowering, reflecting the rich company culture that you’ve built through hard work and shared team values.
Typically, we start the brand voice process with a simple exercise that helps to define your brand’s personality. In the case of our recent clients at Over It Raft Covers, that exercise took the form of a simple chart:
Feels pretty clear, right? Short and sweet, this framework can now serve as a litmus test for company employees as they craft social media posts, emails and other day-to-day communications with clients.
After the client felt confident in the above, we prioritized the writing of a succinct, yet impactful brand intro statement—essentially, the brand’s “elevator pitch” or first impression.
While this statement is intentionally brief, it’s also dense with essential information. Do you immediately know what this company does? If you’re in their target audience? Do they sound accessible or intimidating? Independent or corporate? Assuming you own a raft, do you want to know more?
Once we’ve finalized a client’s brand voice and intro statement, we then have the tools we need to craft countless other copywriting deliverables. From founder bios and key sales points, to core values and product descriptions, we’ve written thousands upon thousands of words for our clients’ websites, email campaigns and printed marketing materials. Simply head to our creative portfolio for a look at some of these projects!
Yet the most interesting outcome we’ve seen from this verbal identity process is often an unexpected one. Several clients have told us that honing their brand’s written messaging has transformed their ability to speak clearly, confidently and consistently about their company. To us, that’s the ultimate compliment and measure of success—because when founders and their teams are able to own our messaging as if they wrote it themselves, we know it’s rooted in something real.