When Tom Savano launched their award-winning premium cocktails, setting the right tone with their brand story was such a high priority – they invented an iconic founder, and named their company after him. But in many ways creating the perfect tone of voice is similar to conducting an opera.
How will you meet the expectations of the front row consistently?
Is your audience suave and professional, seeking to impress? Or are they giddy debutants, looking for a good time? Only the data will tell you. According to Forbes, consistent branding increases revenue by up to 23%, but trust in a brand’s shared values accounts for a whopping 64% of all brand loyalty. Marketing guru Robert Cialdini points to this similarity bias as one of the six main drivers of customer behavior; your brand must speak to your customer intimately – and intimacy is created by an affinity. In other words:
You may not be your customer, but your brand must be tuned to her perfect pitch.
Fine-tuning your brand identity follows your market research and customer engagement, which must become integral to your corporate identity. The world’s major market research giants use both quantitative and qualitative methods to engage with audiences, assess satisfaction, and gauge trends – leading with online and mobile/sms surveys, which together account for 79% of customer responses. A consistent feedback opportunity after every customer engagement remains the global gold standard of brand monitoring.
Are you and your customer still singing from the same score?
When you’ve discovered your niche, identified your customer, listened for what gets her up in the morning, and harmonized your brand strategy with her developing story, you’ll be well on your way to identifying a tone of voice that can be used when you write content, or other marketing materials.
According to Salesforce, a multiplatform CRM solution can generate a 27% uplift in customer retention, which is a goldmine, given that Harvard Business School author Fred Reichheld has found that just a 5% annual improvement in customer retention can increase long-term profits by over 25%.
Successful multiplatform marketing creates multitasking bottlenecks. On the Modern Wisdom podcast, millennial mind modeler George Mack got the industry on its feet with his aria to multitasking apps, claiming that if the government were to fund just five days of paid leave for the non-coding workforce, to learn Zapier, the value to the economy would be “a-mazing.”When someone that young warbles something so wise, I’m willing to forgive the hyperbole of a rising inflection – and join in.
Encore!
Also deserving of a bow, Seth Godin’s legendary podcast sermons from the marketing mount, preaching his pithy mantra of “trust-building consistency,” inspire the kind of integrity that can get a brand to the altar of earned trust. The idiosyncratic tone of your brand may catch her eye, but loyalty is a lover’s unspoken language, embodied by your company culture.
Your brand is your bouquet, but you – and those who deliver for you – must be her Romeo.