You’re Wasting Your Ad Budget…
…without a clearly defined brand voice
In 2019, for the first time ever digital ad spend surpassed traditional ad spend and accounted for 54.2% of overall advertising dollars spent. (1)
Companies are willing to spend on digital ads because despite increased competition they remain an effective way for new companies to compete with established brands. When done right, they can put you on the fast track to the Big G -- GROWTH.
Unfortunately, most companies will need to spend a lot to get the kind of customer acquisition numbers they want. For B2C technology ads using Google AdWords, 2.09% is considered a typical clickthrough rate. On the broader Google Display Network, 0.39% is average. B2B technology ads are only a bit better with 2.41% typical for AdWords and 0.46% for GDN. (2) That means if you pay for 100 impressions, less than 3 people will even click your ad, much less buy from you.
You have to get in front of A LOT of eyes to actually start acquiring customers and those costs can add up fast.
You want to squeeze every customer you can out of your ad dollar, which means making sure you’re doing everything you can to maximize the performance of your ads. Targeting users. Picking the right keywords. Using the best copywriting tactics.
And having a well-established brand voice and using it.
Yes, it matters.
How Brand Voice Impacts Digital Ad Performance
Brand voice is rarely part of a digital ad campaign discussion. You can’t put it in a spreadsheet or track its performance in your Facebook Ads manager. Something so intangible can end up feeling like a “nice to have.”
But when you’re going to commit time, energy, and a pile of money to a digital ad campaign, a clearly established brand voice is essential.
Brand voice is how the personality of your brand is reflected in the type of language you choose to communicate with your customers.
An effective brand voice:
Speaks directly to your core audience, providing both clarity and connection to your brand
Helps your creative team work more efficiently because they have a foundational reference for everything they do
Improves conversions by lowering friction and offering consistency across all your marketing channels.
Talk about knowing your audience. What better way to encourage Canadians to practice social distancing?
Brand Voice and Consumer Brand Identification (CBI)
The best way to connect to your target users is by making sure they see themselves reflected in your messaging. The researchers call this Consumer-brand identification or CBI.
Consumer-brand identification (CBI) is defined as ‘the extent to which the consumer sees his or her own self-image as overlapping with the brand’s image.’ (3)
You may already know that consumers (looking at you, Millennials) prefer to buy from brands that share their values. (4)
Brand voice can go a long way towards making sure your potential customers understand your shared values. You know how little time you have to get someone who has never heard of you to click an ad -- if they can recognize those shared values in those fractions of a second, you’re much more likely to get a click.
For example, say you’re creating ads to sell a new productivity application that will help people who work from home stay on task and minimize distractions. If your customers are the people who are going to be using the app, you might write an ad like:
On the other hand, if the users you’re targeting are those people’s bosses who want to make sure their employees are as productive as possible, you might write the same ad like this:
The product and features are the same, but the voice is different. In the first ad, you’re clearly communicating that your company values employees having time to themselves outside of work -- that productivity is a means to an end. Using a voice that’s a bit more playful and tongue-in-cheek tells your users that you don’t take yourself too seriously and relates to employees that hold the same values.
In the second ad, the more buttoned-up voice indicates essentially the opposite: employee productivity can directly correlate to dollars and cents. Maximizing productivity is all about maximizing profits. The users you’re targeting with this more traditionally “business-like” voice are all about making money and take themselves and their work a little more seriously.
Choosing the right voice that reflects your ideal users’ values is essential when it comes to optimizing your digital ad spend.
The Perils of Inconsistent Brand Voice
Above all else, a well-established brand voice is the foundation of consistency, and that’s what’s most important as you’re trying to optimize the performance of your ads. The more consistent the message and voice are between your ads and your landing pages, the more likely users are to stick around and ultimately buy.
Consistency breeds trust.
In the struggle to improve an ad’s CTR, it can be easy to pull out every copywriting trick just to get that click. But how much is a click worth if it evaporates as soon as the user gets to your site and finds themselves confused, concerned and unimpressed?
Take this Google ad from MarketerHire:
This ad is heavy on user benefits (good!) and light on any clear, strong brand voice (not quite as good!) The copy is clear enough but still manages to tell me very little about the shared values of the company and its users.
The ad takes you to this landing page:
The brand voice on this landing page is strong. It’s not “pre-vetted marketing experts” -- it’s The Best Marketers. People who come to this landing page want the best and they don’t have time to deal with things like writing a job posting or scheduling interviews. The target audience and the values of both the brand and that audience are all clear.
What this landing page tells me is that MarketerHire absolutely has a clearly established brand voice, but I’m guessing their understandable drive to get the most clicks possible on their ads is preventing them from letting that voice come through.
A clearly established brand voice can act as the foundation not just for your digital ads and subsequent landing pages, but for all your marketing materials.
Recap
Running digital ads is expensive
CTR is only part of the story
Employing a strong brand voice throughout all marketing channels -- including paid ads -- builds rapport and trust
Users buy from and share brands they trust
A strong brand voice is essential and must act as a strong thread that ties together paid ads with owned media, like your landing pages
If you don’t have a firmly established brand voice -- or if the guidelines you have don’t best reflect your current understanding of your customers -- start now. Preferably before you spend another dollar on ads that aren’t performing how you’d like.
(1) https://www.emarketer.com/content/us-digital-ad-spending-2019
(2) https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/02/29/google-adwords-industry-benchmarks
(3) Tuškej, Urška and Klement Podnar. Consumers’ identification with corporate brands: Brand prestige, anthropomorphism and engagement in social media, Journal of Product & Brand Management
(4) https://www.fastcompany.com/90264170/polarization-is-an-opportunity-for-mission-driven-brands