4 Tips to Establish Your Brand Voice

So I’ve been in Asheville, NC for the past three days and damn has it lived up to the hype. Legit two hours into my trip I saw a black bear and its cub crossing the street, hiked twenty minutes to the most breathtaking waterfall, and even slid down a waterfall rock called Slide Rock. Documented the entire thing on my Instagram @chrismeade if you don’t follow me yet. 

As I take a look around the DTC industry I’m seeing more and more brands roll over and die or simply run out of cash. The ones that are still growing? They have an amazing brand voice and image. 

Establishing a brand voice is not an overnight process. Hell, look at this embarrassing photo from the CROSSNET archives in 2018. 

How To Establish A Brand Voice

When I started CROSSNET, I had no idea of the power of a brand’s voice. I thought it was just something extra, like adding extra guac to your Chipotle bowl, it’s nice but not needed. But similar to guac, it’s what separates the good, from the great. And having a strong brand voice and presence is what has allowed a made-up game like CROSSNET to stand out and exist for nearly five years. It’s added a ton of value to our business and is the reason why we’ve been able to disrupt a traditionally archaic and outdated industry. 

So how do you create a strong brand voice?

Here's the four most important steps that I've learned from our Head of Creative aka my future wife.

Step 1: Brain Dump Before Brainstorm

When you’re first trying to define your “why” and the reason you’re doing what you’re doing, your first step (and your co-founders or any involved parties) is to just write down EVERYTHING that comes to mind as to why you’re creating this product/business. It doesn’t need to be pretty, that’s why it’s in the dump. Write it all down, every word, feeling, phrase EVERYTHING. Sleep on it, then come back to it and cross off what doesn’t make sense and refine it. 

These can be things such as: 

• Why are you as a founder different and how is that conveyed into your business/product?

• What problems is your product/business solving?

• What’s the ideal target audience? (If there’s a bunch write them all down, you’ll define them later)

• Ideas for slogans- keywords that are powerful in capturing the essence of your product/business

• Emotions you personally feel about your product/business

• Emotions your ideal target audience should feel about your product/business

• Your vibe - how you want to come across to your audience & speak to your audience

• Why should people give a shit?

Step 2: A Productive Brainstorm

After you’ve slept on your list. It’s now time to refine it and go deeper. You can do this solo, or in a meeting with your fellow co-workers. Within your brain dump, you’re going to want to look for recurring patterns in how you’re describing your brand, these are what is going to help you deepen the responses to the series of questions in step 1. 

To deepen start with these big questions: 

1. Who is your ideal consumer?

2. What do they do for fun?

3. How & where do they shop? 

4. What age are they? 

5. Where do they live? 

6. Are they single or do they have families? 

7. What is important to them? 

8. How does the product/business make them feel? Why are they excited about it? 

9. What problem does your business/product solve for them? Why do they need it? 

With CROSSNET we have three main target audiences: parents, athletes, and young adults. Our character bios help us create unique content that speaks to them. Whether it’s an email sent to a specific audience, a social ad/post, a billboard, or a blurb on one of our boxes, we use certain phrases and words to speak to these carved-out demographics. Our segmentation is not perfect yet, but in an ideal world, parents receive content that is geared towards them (family fun, being a great parent, etc.), while the young adults get content tailored to them (get outside with your friends, get away from the office, feel like a kid again). It's important that at the end of the day all of these touch points result in a clear tone of voice as you build a cohesive brand. 

Graza Using Smartrr to Skyrocket Their Brand 

When I think of a brand that crushed steps 1 & 2, this new olive oil brand Graza legit does not leave my newsfeed. They've built an incredible brand that has separated them so far away from the traditional oils you find on your Whole Foods shelf. They've also built an impressive e-commerce store to match. 

After doing a bit of research. It looks like they are using Smartrr Subscriptions which I remembered my buddy Nik Sharma mentioning a couple weeks back. They've used it to quickly build a killer PDP page that allows them to bundle sets and create levels of subscription management that used to require tens of thousands of dollars of coding. If making their customers feel like they are at the Ritz Carlton when purchasing $30 olive oil online is their brand mission, they are 100% crushing it.

Smartrr just announced that they launched a newly re-designed account portal that's on track to set a new standard with built-in loyalty, referral, and rewards features… If Graza’s portal looks like this now.. the sky’s the limit for this post-purchase experience.

If you're in need of building out a subscription or improving your retention/post-purchase game you can get a glimpse of Smartrr's new product here. 

Don’t sleep on Smartrr Subscriptions.. OR Graza’s olive oil. 

Step 3: Personify your Brand

You want to create a persona for your brand as if it was its own person. So similar to the way we created character bios for our target audience, you’ll want to take your research from the brain dump, and create a bio of your brand. This is going to be how your brand talks, acts, and feels. Sure you may switch up your mannerisms a bit when speaking to an 85-year-old grandma, compared to your childhood best friend, but the true essence of who you are never changes.  The following questions will help determine that: 

• How is your brand perceived by the target audience? 

• How do they communicate with their audience (their friends)? 

• What is it’s personality like? 

• What makes it unique? 

• How do they act, what do they dress like (colors, fonts, style… that’s an entirely different email  😎)

• How do they sound? 

• Are they serious and straight to the point or are they lighthearted and silly? 

• Do they act like you & your founders? Do they act like someone else? 

• Who is likely to engage with this brand persona (think back to step 1)?

For CROSSNET we chose to personify our brand by giving it a voice that’s extremely similar to our own. We’ve personified all three of our personalities into one brand voice. CROSSNET “talks” just like how we as founders talk, it has similar interests to us, and it shares content we find hilarious and engages with it in a way we would as founders. We’re very laid back, fun-loving, and don’t take ourselves too seriously, and that is reflected in how we communicate with our audience. We sometimes speak out, like to add humor into almost everything we do, and are all about doing things unapologetically our own way.

Step 4: Start Communicating

Once you know how you’re going to talk and who your audience is, you’re ready to start adding your brand’s voice to all written materials. Your website, social posts, press releases– anything and everything about your brand. You can also now start creating your mission statement and slogan as you will now have a clear picture of who your audience is and what your brand is about. 

The cool thing about your brand voice is that it can shift slightly. As you start engaging with your audience you may find things you want to refine or deepen on. You’ll start to see what really resonates with your audience and what doesn’t. 

Having your voice established is also going to help tremendously if you want to hire outside agencies to do your email, social, or SMS communications. Our agencies hit the nail on the head 9.9 times out of 10 because we have a clear vision of our brand’s tone and voice. It also helps to have clear brand guidelines like ours here.

I always recommend starting your brand’s journey with the tone and voice before going to any of the visuals. Just like if you were going to buy clothes that fit your personal style, you need to know who you are and what you like before you can buy clothing to fit that! 

As I hit send on this I am officially going offline until Monday! I’m heading to Yosemite to white water raft with some of my best friends for my bachelor party. I’d love to return back online with tons of questions so I can do a Q&A for next week's send. What do you got for me?!

Catch you next week,

Chris