Verbal Branding Agency:
Making Messaging, Tone and Marketing Fit

Your verbal brand identity is one of the most crucial pillars for building a compelling brand, and with the help of a verbal branding agency you will ensure your messaging and marketing objectives truly fit.

Simply having your website filled with generic copy without any strategic messaging is noise.

Every brand needs to have a verbal and visual brand identity, but the best brands ensure that both elements are unified and aligned in a seamless way.

Your website and social handles might look colorful and pretty, but without the right writing style, terminology guide and tone of voice, they will be valueless for your business.

The main focus should be on communicating with your audience to grow your business and help them towards a better lifestyle, which you can do by creating a verbal brand identity.

Creating a verbal identity enables you to generate an emotional connection with your audience, and according to a study by Motista, emotionally connected customers have a 306% higher lifetime value.

You can expect such customers to stick with your brand for an average of 5.1 years, and make recommendations for your brand at a high rate of 71%.

Simply put, thinking of this as just another task in your branding journey and not taking it seriously can affect your business down the road.

Need to hire a verbal branding agency? Contact Brevo to help shape your brand’s verbal messaging strategy.

Verbal Brand Agency: First, what is verbal brand identity?

Trends change and languages evolve periodically, and somewhere after 2020, the rate of this change increased drastically. And yet, even though language adapts quickly and repeatedly, the languages of many brands remain robotic or static.

To add a human and emotional touch to your brand, you need to develop your company’s verbal brand identity.

That is, you need to identify how to express your brand's voice through specific terminology with a set tone of voice.

A verbal brand agency helps develop everything from tag lines to terminology guidelines to product descriptions.

Have you noticed that some brands call their customers a family and not just a customer? Well, it's not just a coincidence, but rather a deliberate part of their verbal brand identity and messaging.

The words a business uses need to be well-crafted to mix with marketing strategies and the right tone of voice. It's not like you need an identity just to sell to your consumers but also to attract the top talent for your business. And due to this, you need a voice, tone, style guide, and messaging.

As per Crowdspring, 78% of consumers value and trust brands that come up with custom content rather than generic content.

Custom content is something that's true to your brand and sets you apart from your competitors. That different style of your brand is the verbal brand identity.

If you continue using a templated form of your messaging, then with more companies transitioning online in your industry, it's likely that your brand will lose its voice! And eventually, you'll be putting up a fight to get heard in a crowd filled with competitors.

So if verbal identity is all about defining the right set of words, tone, and messaging, where should you use it?

Once you get a hold on defining you're messaging and tone of voice, you can use them as your master tools to create:

• Your Brand Name
• Your vision statement
• Taglines
• Terminology guidelines
• Writing style guide
• Your marketing strategy

• Content strategy
• Pitch Deck Proposals
• Social media positioning
• PR communication
• Banners, posters, and business cards
• Product descriptions

And the list continues: you can add the brand's touch anywhere you think it's good to have.

How important is verbal brand identity amid your bigger marketing strategy?

The answer is: verbal brand identity is highly crucial for your bigger marketing vision.

Various granular elements will help you to create a successful big-picture plan because every word you choose to communicate with your audience weaves a story and attracts them to have two-way communication with you.

Today customers don’t want to engage with a brand that only makes commitments but doesn’t make an effort to strike a conversation with them and understand their needs better.

You might have your logo and color theme with you, but those graphic elements are void without actual communication. Now let’s put this straight: graphics and color do the job of attracting your audience, but verbal strategy does the work of communicating and converting them.

So, if you want growth in your business and want to foster good customer relationships, get in touch with Brevo, a verbal branding agency that’ll help you create an audience that’ll stick around.

3 important components to create an effective verbal brand identity

A verbal brand agency will help you define the tone of voice of your brand, as well as bring your messaging to life.

But what does this messaging need to include?

An effective verbal brand identity consists of five crucial components, as highlighted below.

1. Create brand-centric definitions before you start

Take a look around and you'll see there are various ways a brand defines its verbal identity. It's crucial for you to have your brand’s guide of terminology definitions at the beginning of your verbal identity process. There is no need to load the document with tough to remember words. You must keep these definitions brief and easy to remember.

Remember: You're not creating this document to impress someone but to communicate better with your audience. And there is no guarantee that people will understand it if you add very complicated or use advanced literary devices.

The objective here is to align the particular tone and voice with your brand's personality. The best way to do this is to understand brands around you and learn from them. Analyze their patterns and word choices, and then look at how they have created and broken down the various elements of their verbal identity.

2. Enlist fundamental traits of your brand personality

Brand voice or brand personality, however you may call it— is who you are as a brand all the time. It doesn't matter what situation your business is in, whether it's a social media post, a press conference, or a marketing video— your brand's personality stays the same.

For example, your brand's personality should have defined traits— positive, humorous, and valuable. These traits create a trail for you to follow for the verbal brand identity ahead.

3. Recognize the tone of voice

Unlike a brand's voice, your brand's tone changes according to the situation. It can be according to your audience, the emotion, or via the medium you're communicating.

While defining the tone of your brand, make sure to create boundaries for that. Your focus should be on empathizing with your audience most of the time.

If you're confused about whether this is your brand's tone or voice, ask yourself if this particular quality applies to your brand all time. If yes, it's part of your brand's personality, but if it doesn't, add it to your voice.

3 brands nailing their verbal brand identity

1. Starbucks

It is a no-brainer that Starbucks has to be the first one on the list. Starbucks has clear brand guidelines, and they are even available online. The company also has a dedicated section for the brand’s voice and tone.

If you notice, the Starbucks brand voice is expressive and functional. They have leveraged the functional tone to redirect their users to order with a purpose. This also helps in keeping the copy clear and transparent for the customer.

And the expressive tone gives life to the overall brand personality of Starbucks. Combining both of these allows the brand to connect with its customers in a more relevant manner.

2. MailChimp

If you’ve ever thought of creating an email campaign, then out of all software, you might have crossed paths with MailChimp. This email marketing software is known for its informal tone but in a borderline manner.

If you read MailChimp’s brand voice guidelines, it explains how to use humor and the conversational tone to write relevant content. MailChimp prioritizes clarity and value above any jargon or technical language and it’s evident in their content.

3. Old Spice

Old Spice is more than 80 years old, and its branding is aging like a fine wine. If you look at their website copy, it is evident that they sell confidence and not perfumes. Pay attention to their words and how they portray their products across their websites in front of their audience.

But unlike now, Old Spice wasn’t good at their branding, and due to which they were losing business. So it underwent rebranding in 2010, and as you see it is now much more humorous.

If such an old brand has to go under such a huge branding makeover to sustain themselves in the market, then what is your plan?

How Brevo (a verbal branding agency) helped FWD develop their messaging?

Brevo is a fun and client-loving verbal branding agency that has helped various brands perfect their visual and verbal branding.

FWD is an insurance company whose mission is to change the way people feel about insurance.

Set for Health is a full-coverage health plan, and was positioned as a comprehensive and empathic product. But the real challenge was to encourage people to protect themselves before possible health problems arise.

We like to proceed with a call to discuss everything related to their current strategy, voice, and brand personality.

And then, we discussed the big hairy goals of their company. As we spoke, we decided to show the insurance product not just as a necessity but in a positive light. The FWD team is lively, and we jump-started the brainstorming session by exploring people’s aspirations without the fear of illness.

For Set for Health, it was decided that we would create a series of content pieces bursting with life: travel, family, career, and fitness. This included an interactive 180-panoramic, showing different healthy and unhealthy behaviors — a playful way to encourage viewers to consider making lifestyle changes.

Part of this was a GIF that depicted a survivor's life, relaxing by the beach, having successfully overcome life’s medical challenges. Ultimately, the launch was a success.;

How Did it Go

As the campaign went into full swing, many people showed greater interest in the insurance plans after seeing the application of these benefits in human, aspirational scenarios.

Responding to inquiries also became more intuitive for FWD’s partner agents with the help of their new streamlined brochures and sales materials.

Despite the complex perception that surrounds insurance, working with FWD was a delight. Today, we continue to be their agency of record, collaborating on several campaigns to continue uplifting their customers’ quality of life.

Confused regarding your brand’s verbal messaging? We are an email away

Brevo is a verbal branding agency determined to help brands craft a verbal identity that communicates to your audience in a way that sends the right message.

Our process of building your verbal identity involves many steps that keep you included throughout. Such a process helps us understand your goals and vision regarding your brand in a clarified manner.

So stop giving your brand a generic identity because it deserves better.

Send us an email, and we’ll help you through the process.

Verbal Branding Agency:Making Messaging, Tone and Marketing Fit