In the past, simply having a product in stock was enough to make sales. Nowadays, things have changed. Customers no longer just seek access to products; they now desire to engage with brands that invest in nurturing a strong relationship and creating an authentic connection with their audience.
Feeling welcomed and understood by brands has become such an important aspect for customers that it has influenced their decision-making. Here’s the evidence: 72% of individuals desire companies to know their interests and foster strong relationships, not merely during product sales.
To avoid losing customers (and sales), the key is to create effective communication! Imagine the following situation: you’re facing an issue with your home’s internet, and you’ve already followed all of the provider’s recommendations, yet the problem remains unresolved.
The solution, then, is to reach out to the provider to find a solution. But just the thought of it makes you feel uneasy, knowing that you’ll spend extended hours on the phone and that the customer service probably won’t be as good and welcoming as you’d like, causing even more stress, right?
Rather than fostering a connection, this experience triggers three feelings: dissatisfaction, frustration, and anger. This happens when a brand does not value the customer’s well-being during this process.
Knowing how to talk to your audience, understanding their pain, and providing assistance is, hence, essential. After all, besides the quality of the product or service, they expect to have a comfortable relationship with your brand.
But in order to create this connection and communicate in a simple, transparent, concise, creative, and empathetic manner with consumers, your brand must know the tone and voice to use to ensure positive experiences.
Tone and Voice: What Can They Do for My Business?
Before determining how to communicate with your audience, you need to understand what tone and voice are and why this combination holds such significance for your brand. Additionally, it’s important to bear in mind that tone and voice are quite distinct:
Tone
Tone represents the feeling and emotion that the brand conveys in its words, and it can change and adapt to different situations or communication channels.
Voice
Voice (referred to as ‘Brand Voice’ in Digital Marketing) expresses the brand’s personality, its values, and what it stands for.
This means that, unlike tone, which can be modified, the brand’s voice remains unique, consistently conveying the business’s individuality and its significance within the market.
Together, tone and voice assist the brand in communicating with its customers, establishing an online presence, and building market authority in the following ways:
- Establishing the brand as a benchmark in its operating segment;
- Shaping how customers perceive it;
- Assisting in customer loyalty;
- Contributing to generating more website traffic, audience engagement, and, of course, more sales.
Authority is crucial for the brand to delight, influence, and motivate users to make purchases, hire services, and engage with your business, knowing that it is a renowned, trustworthy, and recognized company, a reference for its audience.
Tone and voice create connection!
Here’s an example of how tone and voice can transform the customer relationship: Provi, a company that provides student financing, was facing the challenge of effectively communicating and positioning itself with its key audiences.
To overcome this challenge and reach a wider audience, the company teamed up with Ideatore to develop a 360º strategy. The concept was to enlist the help of a public figure capable of establishing a connection between the brand and its audience. Viny, a former Big Brother Brazil (BBB) participant, was the chosen celebrity for this role because his story aligns perfectly with Provi’s goal of providing easily accessible education. He was also someone who could communicate in a simple manner, using an empathetic language that resonates with those interested in investing in education but may need that extra push.
The campaign yielded good results! The connection between Provi and its audience was established! By knowing how to communicate with its audience, with Viny’s assistance to strengthen this relationship, the strategy reached almost 7 million people through online media and nearly 12 million through offline media. This resulted in over 100,000 new visitors to the company’s website (a 94% increase).
In other words, you need to align tone and voice with how your customer prefers to be approached when seeking solutions. Do they want a more relaxed dialogue? Humorous? Or do they prefer straightforward communication? What kind of language do they expect? Consider all scenarios to ensure effective communication, just like the following companies:
See three brands that know how to build strong relationships with the public by employing the appropriate tone and voice:
- Netflix: the most popular streaming platform on the internet was one of the pioneering brands to innovate in communication with its subscribers. The brand enjoys having laid-back dialogues, filled with references, memes, slang, and fun emojis with its audience to captivate them, fostering empathy and engagement through casual conversations.
- Duolingo: riding on the success of TikTok’s short videos, this language learning platform takes advantage of Duo, the app’s owl mascot, to interact and take part in viral trends, to reach a wider audience. The brand has been gaining online visibility thanks to its entertaining social media interactions.
- Itaú: going against the tide of amusement and informal conversations, the financial institution prefers to maintain a serious yet welcoming communication style, in line with the traditional image banks have carried for several years. In addition, it discusses financial matters with the public in a simple manner to ensure that anyone can understand the dialogue.
Apart from these brands, we can consider many others that know how to position themselves in the market and maintain a strong relationship with their customers. But what about your business? Is your communication resonating well with your audience?
To be sure of this, it is essential to establish certain key aspects.
To determine your business’s tone and voice, you need to:
Hire a communication agency to assist you in establishing a genuine connection with your audience.
The team’s expertise will help you define your brand’s values, align with the business’s primary objectives and goals, create a representation of the ideal customer (in Digital Marketing, we call this Persona), and analyze their behavior. Moreover, it involves conducting a series of tests to identify which strategies prove effective and which ones should be discarded.
After setting these criteria, your brand will go through a series of steps that will help your business achieve the expected outcome: effectively communicating with your audience in a simple, clear, and concise manner.
Part of this stage involves building a comprehensive tone and voice guide (and sharing it with your team), restructuring the communication of employees with customers, and aligning the tone and voice with marketing strategies, actions, and campaigns.
See an example showcasing how adept customer communication can lead to successful stories:
One of the biggest healthcare product distributors in Latin America, Roge, found itself facing a significant challenge: to establish a communication strategy capable of conveying the magnitude of the brand to an audience that did not yet have this perception and how much it has evolved and revolutionized the retail industry.
The strategy to overcome this challenge involved repositioning the brand and creating an institutional campaign aimed at fostering even stronger connections between Roge, its partners, and collaborators.
To address this need, the solution was to define the company’s personality, as well as the tone and voice, in order to promote more efficient and clear communication with its customers and partners.
The campaign, then, featured a simple language with a calm, serene, and friendly tone, easily understood by all audiences. This strategy helped the audience connect more with the brand.
Did you like the case and want to follow all the details? Come with us, and we’ll show you: 30 years • Roge • Ideatore (ideatoreamericas.com)
