Defining your brand's persona and tone of voice is essential for creating a strong and consistent brand identity. It helps you connect with your target audience, differentiate from competitors and, ultimately, build brand loyalty. The goal is to create a position so strong that customers see no other satisfactory alternative. So, where to begin?
At Cryos, we launched our communication strategy project in order to streamline our fragmented approach. At the time, we were communicating differently to each target group. For example, for a B2C client, our tone would be softer; B2B customers would see a more formal communication, whilst donors were targeted with a more youthful language. This meant our communication was overly complex, impacting efficiency and reporting. In addition, when we took a critical look at our website, we found that it gave a confusing impression. We realized that customers, donors and clients were all browsing sections of our website that were written in a range of communication styles.
That needed to change.
Creating our brand persona was not easy. We started with a workshop for the executive management team, with a goal to decide what we want Cryos to represent.
- What kind of brand do we want the world to see?
- How will this brand cater to our 3 target groups?
Here, we also identified business objectives the communication strategy should support. The first workshop alone produced pages and pages of insights that all seemed relevant. It took some more work to cut them down to 4 core business goals (a combination of hard and soft goals, since not all communication can be measured in growth% and revenue).
Here’s a step by step process of how we arrived at the final conclusion:
Step 1: Understand your audience
To define your brand persona and tone of voice, you need to understand who your target audience is. Conduct research to determine their demographics, interests, behaviors and pain points. This will help you create messaging that resonates and speaks to your customer needs.
At Cryos, we have 3 main target groups: B2C, B2B and Donors. To get a better idea of who they are, we reviewed years’ worth of customer questionnaires, and collected more insights from conversations, emails and interactions with each group. We then created a persona for each target audience, mapping their customer journey and identifying their pains and gains throughout the process.
This not only led to a better understanding of our target groups but also demonstrated where, in their journeys, Cryos have an opportunity to bring value. As a side effect, those customer journeys aided further development of our digital solutions and content.
Step 2: Define your brand personality
Once you understand your audience, it's time to define your brand. Think about it as if it were a person. What are their values, beliefs, and traits? Are they serious or playful? Innovative or traditional? These characteristics should align with the target audience and the perception you want them to have of your brand.
Here’s how we approached it:
- Internal workshops with sales, customer care, marketing and lab teams to discuss how we see ourselves and what are our USPs.
- Competitor analysis on brand position. To no surprise, just like in many other industries, we discovered most of the key market players convey similar USPs. Our task was to really find the sweet spot and core values that separated us from our competitors.
- Remember, when you choose your core values, deselect other, secondary options. It’s difficult but necessary, otherwise you blend in and don’t stand out.
- External inspiration - seminars, blogs and competitive analysis. We collaborated with our PR & Communication agency that challenged our views and made us think outside the box. They also helped us realize that we had to choose 1 brand persona in order to streamline our communication strategy.
- Use the practical tool of Jung’s archetypes. It describes behavioral patterns that we can all relate to. It helped us a lot, and it’s not as difficult as it sounds.
Once we had gone through the above steps, it was quite clear to us who Cryos is as a person.
Step 3: Create a Tone-of-Voice
To ensure consistency, create a tone-of-voice guide that outlines your brand voice. This guideline should include the following elements:
- Brand personality: A summary of your brand's personality traits.
- Tone: The emotions or feelings your brand conveys, such as excitement, humour, or empathy.
- Language: The specific words, phrases, and style your brand uses in its messaging.
- Audience: The intended audience for each type of message, such as social media posts, email campaigns, or advertisements.
- Guidelines: Rules and guidelines for using your brand voice consistently across all channels.
- Description of core USP’s both corporate and for each target group.
When all this work is complete, go back to your communications goals.
Remember the business objectives which resulted from our initial executive management workshop? These will help to measure how well you’ve implemented the strategy.
The hard goals are easier to measure. It’s the soft goals that can be trickier when you want to demonstrate the impact the new strategy has made. We broke down the soft goals into smaller parts that could be quantified. Say, for instance, that you want to increase your brand equity in the next two years. You could break that into goals like: more quality press coverage in line with your new brand personality, a switch in your communication on SoMe, a qualitative change in your customer feedback, improvement of customer perception measured through online/offline surveys etc.
Make sure your strategy is based on a solid measurement framework. Only then you’ll be able to prove the value of your work!