How to Maintain Your Brand Voice in Influencer Marketing

in Influencer Marketing

Your voice expresses your brand’s personality. This is the case whether you’re holding a conversation or you’re sharing content online. With 86 percent of marketers integrating content marketing into their ongoing outreach strategies, it’s essential that a business like yours craft a voice for your work that’s recognizable and captivating.

There’s more to voice than its initial crafting, though. As you bring influencers into your marketing strategy, you need to maintain that voice. How, then, do you go about creating a tone for your work that remains consistent across several hyper-individual platforms?

Identify Your Message and Tone

You can’t create transparent, unique content without understanding your business’s ambitions and beliefs. As you start brainstorming what kind of voice you want to adopt while creating content online, you need to assess those goals and prescribe a voice to them.

Ask yourself:

How should your target audience interact with the business’s content? Should they laugh, grow thoughtful, or find authoritative commentary on an industry trend?
What kind of tone of voice does your company motto utilize? Is it ambitious, quirky, sincere, care-oriented, etc.?
What kind of tone did your predecessors use in their content?
Alternatively, what tones do your immediate competitors use, and how can you differentiate your business from theirs while maintaining a successful content marketing campaign?

Get your team members involved in the process and then use your answers to create a brand voice style guide.

Create a Story

If you’re struggling to find a unique brand voice for your content strategy, even with the aforementioned questions answered, then approach your marketing campaign from another angle. You’re not crafting marketing material. You’re telling a story.

Creating a storyboard for your voice allows you to build a character for your business. This character or personification of your work embodies the entire operation’s goals. When you prescribe those goals to a character, you can build a script around them that reads naturally and develops in its complexity.

Utilize Your Voice Everywhere

With your voice more readily defined, you can begin utilizing it across all of your social media platforms. Note that we haven’t touched on influencers yet – before you familiarize your outreach staff with your voice, you need it firmly established in your audience’s sphere.

You’ll be able to make use of your consistent brand voice across all available social media platforms. The most important places to highlight your new company tone include:

Replies – public replies to interested consumers or online fads allow your consumer audience to more readily see how your brand interacts with others in real-time. Replies give you the opportunity to integrate humor or authority into your brand messaging and public reputation, depending on what content you respond to and how you craft your reply. Wendy’s does a really fun job of this on Twitter.
Calls to Action – CTAs drive consumer action. Don’t fall into the trap of a generic CTA when crafting your content marketing campaign. Instead, try to have your CTAs reflect the aforementioned goals of your company. Use one to three words to drive your audience forward, and you’ll not only maintain your tone – you’ll generate consistent sales.
Image Captions – whether you’re on Instagram or another platform, you’ll need to ensure that your captions a) reflect the nature of the image, and b) embody your brand’s voice. Use emojis to direct your audience’s attention, but keep captions information-rich, as well. As you grow more comfortable with your adopted voice, you’ll be able to integrate inside jokes or previous CTAs into the visual content you share.
Direct Messages – the vast majority of engaged consumers interact with brands on social media because they want a direct response to their concerns. If a consumer messages you directly, you need to resist the urge to put on a customer service voice. Stick to your brand voice in direct messages, even though it’s unlikely that they’ll be shared publicly. That way, you’ll generate a reputation for consistency that’ll encourage trust among your audience.
Social Media Bios – social media bios are long-lasting variations on short-form content that enable you to make the most of your brand voice. Make sure that your bios are informative, but feel free to interweave a sense of authority or humor with your choice in dictions (or, if need be, emojis).
Images, Graphics, and Videos – voice is not reserved for text-based content. As your marketing team creates videos or graphics, you should maintain a consistent aesthetic and tone. While breaks in tone can lend themselves to hilarity, keep these breaks minimal, and only use them after you’ve built a reputation for your work.

(Make sure to use the same brand identity and personality in your social media posts, tagline, email marketing, tweets, and other marketing efforts.)

Tone Consistency and Influencer Marketing

You know how to build your tone – how do you encourage influencers to keep it consistent?

Keep the Information Flowing – the most effective way to build consistency across multiple platforms is to keep your influencers in the loop. If you can, bring them in early on in the brainstorming process so they can better understand the motives behind a particular campaign’s tone.
Establish Guidelines – you can also direct your influencers to hit certain key elements in all of their brand-related posts. If you establish guidelines early on – emoji specificities, keywords, statistics, and so on – you’ll still allow for their creative energy to thrive while keeping to your brand’s core values and sharing essential information with your audience.
Share Statistics – while differentiating your influencer rewards based on their compliance is a big no-no, you can actively share your marketing analytics with influencers to encourage competition and creativity. If your influencers are highly-motivated to represent your business, analytics-sharing sessions will reveal which among them is drawing in the most consumer attention – not to mention which tonal tactics and brand personality traits are proving to be the most effective.

Creating and maintaining a brand’s tone and voice requires consistency. Establish that consistency in the tone’s creation–make it a part of your brand. If you do, you’ll be able to ensure that your team’s influencers don’t stray, even as they maintain their creative approach to your campaigns. Want help with all aspects of your influencer campaign? Sideqik’s end-to-end tool helps you find, understand, track, and build relationships with influencers.

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Nancy Rothman

Nancy is a passionate, results-driven marketing executive with more than a decade of experience in building robust integrated marketing programs for brands of all sizes, with specific expertise in the martech space. Prior to Sideqik, Nancy held roles at four successful martech startups, each of which received multiple series of fundraising and included two acquisitions. At CallRail, specifically, Nancy served as the director of marketing where she built the company’s brand and established it as a leader in its space. She also held roles at MeetEdgar, where she oversaw the entire sales and marketing practice, increasing the company's user base and annual recurring revenue, as well as PureCars, which was acquired by Raycom Media in 2015. As vice president of marketing for Sideqik, Nancy is responsible for developing and executing on the company's marketing strategy to drive overall business growth.