According to Pew Research Center, 69% of adults use Facebook and 75% of people ages 18 to 24 use Instagram. If that’s where your potential customers are spending their time, you need to be there to communicate with them. Unfortunately, creating a Facebook, Instagram or Twitter account isn’t enough to effectively reach your customers — you need to create a strong brand voice and deliver valuable content.
Why is brand voice so important? Whether or not you’re consciously thinking about it, you’re using your brand voice every time you post, comment or respond to your customers. With each post, your voice becomes more developed. A good brand voice can help you stand out, create brand recognition and build a relationship with your customers. An undeveloped brand voice will get you a quick unfollow.
So, if you’re shaping your brand voice with each post, why not take the time to make sure it’s a strong one? By crafting an authentic voice, you’re able to humanize your brand and have honest and impactful communication with your customers — and all it takes is three steps.
Step 1: Look at your core values
To get started, you want to look at your brand as a whole. Look over your mission statement and core values. What makes you different? How do you hope others perceive your business? What are they actually saying?
You’ll also want to conduct customer research on social media to find out what your ideal patrons talk about. How are they communicating? What brands do they follow? By listening to your customers on social media, you can determine how the community speaks.
Finally, you may want to do a quick competitive analysis to see what other businesses are doing on their social accounts. Find brands you like and identify what resonates with you. You don’t want to copy what other venues are doing but start to figure out what works for you and what doesn’t.
Step 2: Create personas
Next, create personas for both your brand and your ideal customer. Pretend that your brand is a person. What are the top five adjectives that describe your brand? Are you comfortable and friendly or chic and exclusive? Are you funny, self-assured or down to earth? If your brand is a celebrity, who would it be? Try to create a picture of your brand persona so that as you write, you can emulate how that person would talk.
If you haven’t done so already, you also want to create one or two target personas. Are you trying to bring Dan — the 40-year-old looking for a place to have a beer and chat with other regulars — into your venue? Or are you trying to attract Kelly who’s looking for a fun night out at an Instagram-worthy bar with karaoke? The way you talk to each of these individuals will be very different.
From there, determine the relationship between your venue and your client persona. Are you their best friend, mentor or confidant? Write to that.
Step 3: Execute and refine
By now, you’ve hopefully landed on a tone and are ready to start posting. This is where many brands fail and wind up pushing marketing messages without putting much thought into how it’s done.
It’s important to remember why your customer is on social media. Your post will appear amid pictures of their sibling’s kids, funny memes and articles their friends found interesting. Any overly salesy post will be off-putting. To make sure your post sounds like it’s coming from a real person, write like you speak. Avoid jargon, clickbait or misleading information. Be honest and authentic to your brand.
From there, be sure to listen and respond to your followers. Remember that social media should be social, and the most successful brands are creating a dialogue — not a monologue — with their customers.
Accel Entertainment wants to be your partner for more than just your video gaming needs. We want to see you grow and succeed as a business, too. Check out our Social Media Marketing Starter Pack for more information and help with your social needs.
