This is how you build a consistent brand voice

As a brand you want to be strong. very strong. Visible and recognizable. With such a clear signature that everyone knows exactly what you stand for. That a single word is enough to know it’s about you. Condition for all that beauty? For starters, a consistent brand voice. However, getting them can be quite difficult if you want to use colleagues as brand ambassadors. How do you create one clear and powerful voice with so many voices?

Back to that visibility and recognizability. Originally, that was really something for consumer brands. But with the increasing complexity and quantity of products and services, they play an increasingly important role in the business world. After all, transparency is declining, and competition is increasing.

Take the market for software tools for marketers. Just under three years ago, at least 5,000 tools were available, also known as the Martech 5000. Last year, 2,000 tools were added. And another 1,000 this current year. It is like an accelerated expansion of the universe and as a marketer you no longer see the tools because of the tools.

The rise of employee advocacy

Visibility, recognizability and distinctiveness are more important than ever. And harder than ever to box together. We B-to-B marketers usually don’t have mega budgets for expensive advertising agencies and campaigns. We are do-it-yourselfers: we create our own content and try to bring it to the attention via social media and as organically as possible.

In doing so, a new member of the B-to-B marketing branch has emerged: ’employee advocacy’. A real new discipline in which you deploy employees to convey the message of your brand in an authentic way, preferably on social media.

Smart, every employee has a few hundred connections and a message delivered by a famous person is simply more credible and reliable than an advertising message or message from an organization itself.

Consistency requires control

Yet, with a large group of employees whose primary role is not to be a brand ambassador, speaking with one strong and clear brand voice can be a particularly challenging one. It’s a bit like a coachman driving dozens of horses.

You will have to get control. And on the following matters:

• Regardless of who speaks, there is one clear message: that of your organization.
• Tone of voice. Style, verb, word length, sentence length, tempo, use of jargon, humor, length… it is unmistakably the voice of your organization.
• You have nothing to do with colleagues who have indicated in advance that they want to help and then do not or hardly want to share your content. You need the assurance that everyone who said A also says B.
• The connections of your sales colleagues form a different group than those of marketing or research. You want to be able to tailor your message to different target groups.
• If everyone shares, but one does today, the other next week and the last one in a month, then your reach is so spread out that little of that desired visibility is achieved. If you want to be visible, you will have to reach many people with that one message in a short time. In media terms: you have to be able to burst.
• Channel selection. The same happens if one shares via Twitter and the other via LinkedIn. Using multiple channels can be very useful, but for visibility and recognizability, it is important to concentrate.
• Recognition also requires repetition and regularity. And therefore, a well-filled and tight content calendar.

In fact, you want to be able to do whatever you can with an ad campaign. But without the disadvantages of advertising and with the advantages of employee advocacy. Of all the 8,000 marketing tools that you can choose from as a marketer, there is one tool that can do that: PostSpeaker.

And it works this way:

• Message & tone of voice. You create your own social media posts and determine the tone of voice yourself.
• You ask colleagues if they are willing to share your content. If they are willing, you invite them to become ambassadors. If they accept the invitation, they link their social media accounts and allow you to automatically post to their accounts. Sharing will then happen automatically. That convenience ensures that you get more people on board and have maximum certainty that content is shared.
• You create a separate group of ambassadors for each target group. For example, for a message aimed at sales connections, select the accounts of your sales colleagues.
• You determine the exact moment at which a message is posted. If you want to spread out, you determine the days on which your message should be spread.
• Channel selection. You decide on which social media channels the message will be published.
• If you want, you can schedule messages for the whole year at the same time.

Build your consistent brand voice with PostSpeaker. Start your trial today and sign up here.