Your brand voice shows up in all sorts of places. It’s everywhere that you are. Wherever you have content or communications with your customers, whether online or off, you’re using this unique voice.
This includes everything from social media comments to your website’s About page to one-on-one interactions with your customers.
The key to successful branding is for your brand voice to be consistent across all channels.
This is important because lapses in your brand voice can cause a disconnect in the minds of your customers.
One way to monitor your brand voice, especially if yours is a medium to large-scale enterprise, is to designate a team member responsible for monitoring your content on a regular basis.
For offline print materials, have this person sign off on materials before they’re published. It’s harder to control online content because it can be published in numerous places and it could be content used by affiliates or other business partners on your behalf.
Like your offline content, you can have your monitor sign off on all online content. You can also ask them to regularly monitor third-party and affiliate content that mentions your brand online. This can be done through a simple Google search but an even better way is to sign up for Google Alerts to get notifications delivered directly to your inbox.
To set up the notifications, enter your brand name and choose a regular roundup. There’s no need to be notified every time something new is posted.
For example, you can sign up for weekly updates with your monitor checking each week when the update comes through.
Another advantage of updates is that you can also keep an eye on what customers are saying about your organization online.
Your monitor might notice someone complaining about bad customer service or something else that doesn’t quite fit with the brand voice you’re trying to create.
Whenever there is a brand voice problem, your monitor or another designated person should contact the author of the piece and bring to their attention the relevant guidelines.
Monitoring your brand voice is an ongoing task but it’s well worth the resources you spend on it. It’s absolutely essential that you keep tabs on your communications.
