A compelling B2B brand voice is a must-have for standing out and connecting with your target audience. This voice is your company's distinct personality and emotional tone that flows through all communications.
This guide provides practical steps to build a B2B brand voice that drives engagement and sets you apart in your industry.
You'll learn how to create an authentic, consistent voice that speaks directly to your customers and reinforces your values.
1. Understand Your Audience to Shape Your B2B Brand Voice
Creating a B2B brand voice begins with knowing who you're talking to. This foundation allows your messaging to connect with the right people.
Identify Decision-Makers
B2B purchases typically involve multiple stakeholders with varying levels of influence. You need to map out the final decision-maker, influencers, researchers, and end-users who shape the buying process.
Tools like ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help you map organizational structures and identify key players.
Conduct Audience Research
After identifying your audience segments, dig deeper with user research that uncovers how decisions get made, where they look for information, what criteria they use to evaluate solutions, and how they prefer to communicate.
Gain these insights through:
- One-on-one interviews with clients and prospects
- Focus groups exploring shared challenges
- Surveys for quantitative data
- Customer advisory boards for ongoing input
- Keyword research to understand search behavior
- Website analytics to see how users interact
- Intent-based research to find active buyers
Develop Buyer Personas
Turn your research into detailed buyer personas. They should include job responsibilities, main challenges and goals, preferred communication channels, content habits, and decision criteria.
Remember that your brand voice needs to connect with various audiences while staying consistent. Technical decision-makers might want detailed specs, while executives focus on ROI and strategic fit.
2. Define Your Brand's Core Values and Mission
Your brand voice should reflect your company's mission and values.
Articulate Your Purpose
Start by examining your mission statement and core values to derive communication principles. These elements should guide how your brand's personality comes through in every interaction. If innovation defines your company, your language should feel forward-thinking and progressive to match.
A brand style guide is a great way to make sure your brand's visual and verbal elements consistently reflect your values.
Align Voice with Values
Different values lead to specific voice characteristics. For example, innovation shows up as forward-thinking language, reliability comes through as measured, detailed communication, and collaboration translates to partnership-focused messaging.
Consider a company focused on simplifying procurement. Their B2B brand voice would be clear, concise, and straightforward, reflecting their commitment to making complex processes easier for clients.
B2B professionals can spot disconnects between stated values and communication styles immediately. So, when your brand voice authentically reflects your principles, you establish immediate credibility.
3. Audit Existing Content
Before creating new brand voice guidelines, take stock of what you already have.
Evaluate Current Materials
Gather representative samples across all channels such as landing pages, blog posts, marketing emails, social media posts, sales materials, and technical documentation.
Assess each piece using these criteria:
- Consistency: Does the tone stay the same across different content?
- Tone: Where does it fall on the formal-casual spectrum?
- Language patterns: Do certain phrases or structures repeat?
- Formality: Does it match your audience's expectations?
- Industry terminology: Is it used appropriately?
- Emotional impact: Does it create the feeling you want?
Use a simple 1-5 scale for each criterion to quantify your findings.
Learn more: How to Improve Brand Consistency for Medtech Companies
Identify Gaps and Inconsistencies
As a web design agency, Webstacks has worked with many B2B startups and enterprises who are frustrated by the inconsistency of their brand on different platforms.
To solve this issue, first look for disconnects between channels or content types. Do you have formal website copy but casual social posts? Sales terminology that differs from marketing materials? Inconsistent product descriptions? These gaps confuse your audience and weaken your brand voice.
A website performance audit can also help identify technical issues that may affect content delivery and user experience.
Gather Feedback
Get input from inside and outside your organization.
Ask employees from different departments how they perceive the brand voice, interview customers about their experience with your communications, and use heat maps or user testing to see how people interact with your content.
After your audit, summarize your findings in a reference document.
This becomes your starting point for developing brand voice guidelines that address current weaknesses and build on existing strengths.
3. Develop Your B2B Brand Voice Profile
B2B brand voice profile guides all future content creation and makes sure your messaging connects with your audience.
Select Descriptive Adjectives
Choose 3-5 primary characteristics that capture both your values and what resonates with your audience. These adjectives should define your brand's personality. For example:
- Slack: helpful, conversational, straightforward
- IBM: authoritative, visionary, precise
Your selected traits should reflect your unique market position. Are you a trusted expert? The innovative problem-solver? Your characteristics should align with this positioning.
Create a Voice Chart
Build a voice chart that expands each characteristic with a clear description, do's and don'ts for writers, and real examples showing the characteristic in action.
Here's a sample for a B2B software company:
- Characteristic: Knowledgeable
- Description: We show deep expertise without talking down to anyone.
- Do: Use industry terms when appropriate, support claims with data
- Don't: Overuse jargon, assume everyone has the same expertise
- Example: "Our AI-powered solution increased efficiency by 37% in recent deployments. Let's explore how it can be tailored to your specific workflows."
4. Implement Your B2B Brand Voice Across All Channels
With your brand voice profile ready, it's time to activate it throughout your organization.
Train Your Team
Successful B2B brands invest heavily in training content creators, customer-facing teams, and leadership to make sure everyone can apply the brand voice. Try these approaches:
- Run interactive workshops introducing the brand voice profile
- Create detailed style guides and training materials
- Hold regular sessions to address questions
- Appoint brand champions in different departments as go-to resources
Training isn't just a one-time event, so schedule regular refreshers to keep your brand voice top-of-mind.
Update Content
With your team prepared, update your existing content. Prioritize based on visibility and impact.
You can prioritize high-visibility materials like the website homepage, sales collateral, and key marketing pieces. Move to frequently used customer communication templates. Then gradually update less visible but important content like technical documentation.
Factor In Consistency
Consistency can be challenging, especially for larger organizations. Address these common hurdles:
- Make sure your brand voice translates across email, social media, video, and in-person interactions
- Foster collaboration between marketing, sales, customer service, and product teams
- Provide clear guidelines for agencies, freelancers, and other content creators
With AI tools, it has become much easier to improve brand voice consistency. LLMs can follow your prompts and tweak messaging to match your guidelines. Still, you always need a human in the loop to review all materials before they go live.
5. Monitor and Evolve Your B2B Brand Voice
Your B2B brand voice needs ongoing attention and refinement.
Gather Metrics
Track both quantitative and qualitative metrics::
- Share of Voice (SoV) with sentiment analysis
- Brand awareness and recognition
- Perception metrics
- Engagement statistics
- Conversion rates
These indicators reveal how your brand voice performs in the market. Rising positive sentiment within your SoV suggests your voice resonates with audiences. Improved engagement across content channels indicates your voice captures and holds interest.
Solicit Regular Feedback
Direct feedback offers insights that metrics alone can't provide. You can run surveys and focus groups with clients and prospects, or collect input from sales and customer service interactions.
Stand Out With a Great B2B Brand Voice
An engaging B2B brand voice gives you an edge that goes beyond product features. It boosts recognition and does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to audience engagement.
Ready to start? Begin with a quick audit of your most visible marketing materials. Gather a small team and identify the characteristics that should define your brand's voice. This simple first step will set you on the path to a stronger, more consistent brand presence in the B2B world. And then you just build from there.
If you need help building your B2B brand, Webstacks’ team of web design and development experts is ready to help.
