Building a Consistent Brand Voice Across Your Omnichannel Messaging Strategy
A strong, consistent brand voice isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s the key to building deep customer connections and powering an effective omnichannel messaging strategy.
It makes your brand instantly recognizable, helping you build real connections with shoppers. When customers know you and what you stand for, it’s easier for them to trust you – and strong brand trust helps drive sales. Eighty-one percent of shoppers need to trust a brand to buy from them.
Here’s how your business can prioritize a unified brand voice as a key part of your ecommerce growth strategy.
The High Stakes of Omnichannel Marketing
Omnichannel marketing is a comprehensive marketing technique that ensures seamless messaging across all audience touchpoints: retail media, social media, email, websites, physical stores, search engines, ads, apps, SMS, and other digital spaces.
Why Unified Messaging Matters
Today’s shopper journey is not the linear journey of yesterday. Thanks to omnichannel marketing, it is now a complex web of multiple touchpoints. It’s more important than ever to keep messaging consistent, ensuring shoppers receive the same messaging in the same voice across every channel where they are active.
The facts:
- More than 50% of shoppers interact with three to five channels before they make a purchase.
- Thirty-two percent of brands saw revenues spike by 20% with consistent messaging.
Inconsistent messaging can confuse shoppers, reduce engagement, and lead to missed opportunities. A bold, clear, and unified brand voice ensures that every channel tells the same compelling story.
Create Your Brand’s Personality: Brand Voice and Tone
Your brand’s personality is communicated through your voice and tone. To get these elements right, you need to know exactly who your brand is at every touchpoint.
Brand Personality
Brand personality gives your business human qualities, making it relatable, memorable, and trustworthy for customers.
Example: Nike assumes the persona of an empowering coach who is always bold, determined, and ready to win.
Brand Voice
Brand voice is what you say. It includes specific words and phrases that you use to speak to your audience and is also an outward reflection of your unique perspective, values, and mission. Your brand voice should be consistent and packed with purpose.
Example: With its famous tagline “Just Do It,” and its statement that it sees everyone as an athlete, Nike’s voice is motivational, action-oriented, and all-inclusive.
Brand Tone
If brand voice is what you say, brand tone is how you say it. It adapts to the moment, shifting based on context, emotion, and purpose.
Example: Nike might be energetic, fun, and encouraging when speaking to kids. However, when talking about its new pump-compatible sports bra, the brand’s tone is supportive and empowering.
Define Your Brand Voice
How do you go from just another company to a fan-favorite brand? Here’s how to define your brand voice so it is a standout part of your ecommerce growth strategy:
- Review your brand’s core values and mission. The first step toward building an authentic brand voice is identifying who you are and what you believe in.
- Decide how you want to embody these core beliefs. If your brand were a human, would it be the life of the party, a plainspoken colleague, or an encouraging best friend?
- Understand your target audiences. What will resonate with them? How can you forge deep connections? Are they looking for a friend, a mentor, or a personal consultant?
- Involve all key stakeholders. Your brand voice will be used across all channels. Ensure all teams—from media buying to brand marketing—are aligned and buy into the brand voice.
- Sum it up. If you need help, look at some well-known brands. Apple is savvy and sophisticated, while Land Rover is tough and dependable. Title Nine is powerful, direct, and female-oriented – check out their mission statement below:
Create a Unified Messaging Playbook
Once you know your brand voice, you need to ensure that all employees understand it. The best way to do this is by creating a style guide.
Your guide will succinctly define your brand personality, voice, and tone with guidelines for specific messaging, style, and channel-specific nuances. It should also clearly define who your brand isn’t and what not to do.
In other words, it tells your employees how to be consistent.
Check out these robust style guides from leading brands for inspiration:
Measuring Success and Refining Your Approach
To determine if you have a consistent brand voice backing your ecommerce growth strategy, we recommend measuring the following key performance indicators:
Social Listening
Track brand mentions across different channels to catch broader trends and gauge customer sentiment in real-time.
Are others describing your brand in the same way you do? Great! That’s a sign of a clear, consistent brand voice. Does your website see high engagement, but your Instagram posts struggle to get the same attention? This could be a sign of inconsistent messaging.
Tools to Try: Media Monitoring by Semrush, Sprout Social, Brandwatch
Customer Feedback
The old adage “the customer knows best” still rings true. Since brand consistency boosts trust, check in with customers and see what they’re sharing about your brand in comments and reviews. While there is some overlap with social listening, customer feedback helps you understand customer sentiment at a granular level, usually related to a specific product, location, or service.
Tools to Try: Mopinion, Hubspot, Appbot
Engagement Rate
Engagement rate is a metric that measures users’ interactions with a piece of content. Because a consistent brand voice builds recognition and trust, it can also help to boost engagement rates.
Benchmarks:
- Average social media engagement rates in the ecommerce and retail industries are between 2-4%.
- Email performance metrics
- Ecommerce: 38.58% open rate and 2.08% click rate
- Retail: 41.24% open rate and 2.65% click rate
Tools to Try: Hotjar, Keyhole
Audience Growth Rate
A consistent brand voice can improve brand recognition and increase audience growth. Shoppers are more likely to engage with a recognizable and reliable brand, and over half of businesses agree that brand consistency substantially contributes to business growth.
An average audience growth rate for ecommerce ranges from 5-10% monthly.
Tool to Try: Google Analytics
Conclusion
A consistent brand voice is a growth multiplier. Take action now and adjust your ecommerce growth strategy to amplify and unify your omnichannel messaging approach.
Ready to resonate? Fluent is a leader in commerce media solutions that reach audiences at key touchpoints across the omnichannel customer journey. Connect with us now to get started.
Check out more resources to get fluent in:
Target Audience | Net Promoter Score | Non-Endemic Advertising
Fluent, Inc. is a leader in performance marketing, offering data-driven customer acquisition and partner monetization solutions that exceed client expectations. We connect brands with consumers at the most optimal moment, unlock additional revenue streams for partners, and empower advertisers to acquire their most valuable customers at scale. Connect with us now to level up your business: https://fluentco.com/contact/