In a recent interview, I was asked about the bottom line of having a brand voice:

How does defining our voice make us money?

It’s a good question.

I’m a big believer that you shouldn’t be doing things in business just because somebody else says so. You shouldn’t be blogging if you don’t know why you’re blogging. You shouldn’t do an ideal customer/reader profile unless you understand how you’re going to use it. Just doing exercises for the sake of doing them is a waste of time.

So why should you spend the time and effort to define your voice?

1. Your market recognizes you by your voice.

In the revolutionary book (and yes, I mean revolutionary in its dictionary sense) The Cluetrain Manifesto, the authors tell us that markets are conversations:

Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice, whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments, or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, and uncontrived. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

This is true online as in the real world. For example, my sister and her husband went to Texas A&M University, and they can spot another Aggie from fifty paces — by their coveted graduation ring, by their bumper sticker, a tee-shirt they wear, and so on. (They practically even have a secret handshake!)

The same is true in slightly less obvious ways for your market. If I talk about BSchool or mention my Core Desired Feelings, you know that I follow Marie Forleo and Danielle LaPorte. You might recognize something familiar about me if you saw my Kate Spade iPhone case or a picture of my Passion Planner.

Likewise, the words I use and the ways I string them together are going to let you know whether or not we’re a good fit.

A few months into dating my future husband, he admitted that he’d been intimidated by the level of vocabulary I used in our emails back and forth when we were getting to know each other. At first I was a little dismayed — but then I realized, I wouldn’t want to date a guy who couldn’t hold a conversation at my level or who would let my language intimidate him. Luckily, my hubby got over it pretty quickly. 😉

The same is true for your potential customers. If you swear regularly when working with a client, then you don’t want clients who are put off by swearing, so it makes sense to include it in your copy. If you bring a very spiritual or religious point of view to your work, you don’t want clients who are going to be offended by that, so including it in your blog posts is going to let them self-select.

Your customers are going to recognize you by your voice.

2. Your voice humanizes you.

I know that most of my readers are micro-business owners, meaning it’s just you and maybe a small group of contractors and freelancers making the doughnuts every day.

But I’ve noticed that a lot of very small business owners think they need to act and sound like they’re a bigger business. (Hey, I just started calling my business an “agency” so I get it!)

The funny thing is that big huge corporations would love to sound like they are actual human beings. Why? Because people like to do business with those they know, like, and trust — and it’s a lot easier to trust a person than a faceless corporation.

What I’m saying is that your distinct voice is an advantage in a crowded marketplace. It humanizes you and gives you that know, like, and trust factor we must all cultivate.

Think about how your story affects your business, how your personality infuses your products, how your unmistakable viewpoint changes how you deliver your services. That’s your money maker.

3. Understanding your voice makes everything else easier.

If you’ve been with me for any length of time, you know that I’m also big on making things easier wherever possible. I’m not into work for work’s sake.

And understanding your brand voice is one of the fastest shortcuts I’ve found to make all your content creation easier.

When you know:

1. who you’re writing to
2. why they care
3. and what you hope to get out of it

it makes coming up with valuable content so. much. simpler. That’s basically what I teach in my Content Intelligence Academy course, but when you can take it one step further and distill down who you’re talking to and how you want them to feel about the interaction at every level of your brand, that is where you create a cohesive, compelling message.

As I work with clients on their Voice Identification Process I always try to distill the feel of their brand down into a few words and phrases.  I actually had two clients recently that wanted to highlight how they had strong opinions that might not be conventional or popular with other people in their industry. But the way we decided to brand them came out very different.

One woman’s voice style guide had the words: bold, unconventional, sarcastic, opinionated, modern.

The other’s had the words: chic, sophisticated, tough-love, fierce, challenging, and straightforward.

Two similar ideas conveyed in two very different ways.

But each of these business owners can take those words and apply them to every aspect of their brands: their website design, product names, blog posts, tweets, fonts, graphics, colors… and so on.

Finding that hook for your brand and your voice makes everything else fall into place.

An exercise worth the effort.

That’s why I believe taking the time to uncover and define your brand voice is worth it in the long run. It helps you make more money by humanizing you and helping your target market recognize you amid all the clutter, and it saves you time by making every aspect of your marketing easier and more coherent.

Photo Credit: luxuryluke via Compfight cc