What is a brand and how can having a brand voice help my business?

Whether or not you know it, your website has a brand – a look and feel as well as a promise to your visitors (and/or customers). Everything you do contributes to your brand – from marketing to sales to customer service and back again. This, although intimidating, is actually something that is quite beautiful.

What is a brand?
A brand is a living and ever-evolving thing, which is a comforting thought to small business owners who feel that marketing and branding must be perfect in order to be successful.

The truth is people make mistakes and are less than perfect, and small businesses are the same. Fortunately, the humanity that we show to our customers makes them want to keep coming back. The same goes for your website content and your blog. We call this a brand voice.

Brand voice helps you stay consistent with your message. Even though your brand may evolve as your business grows, you can still convey a consistent, higher-level message.

For example, Yola didn’t always start out as a way to help small businesses get online, but we did always want our product to make it easy for our customers to build pages and make them successful. Proctor and Gamble started out selling candles and soap to the US army and now has more than 80 brands, ranging from food items to deodorant. Their message, however, transcends: Touching lives, improving life.

How do I find my brand voice?
Make finding your brand voice a journey as opposed to a decision. Start writing what is important to you, and eventually you will begin to notice a theme and a tone. This will spark ideas as to how you develop your brand voice and transcend your branding across your website and business. Let your brand evolve as you grow.

What do I write about?
Make your content universal. For example, if you are a personal trainer, you can speak to the universal problem of not knowing where to begin. You can then take specific examples that all cater to the idea of “how to start.” Then make your content specific enough to target your audience, but address problems that are universal.

In essence, you can write about where to begin losing weight or getting healthy or eating better. Talk about your struggle of not knowing how to begin your journey as a personal trainer.

This type of content writing makes you human, makes your business more accessible to the every day user and will bring you a sense of fulfillment knowing that the people reading your content actual want to know what you have to say.