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Think about your favorite brand- envision your experience engaging with them (whether that be on their website, social media, or one-on-one) and reflect on what comes to your mind when they are mentioned. How would you describe them to a friend? What would be your justification as to why they are your favorite brand? Likely, themes of personality, reliability, and connectedness will arise when thinking about the brands you love.

As the market becomes more and more competitive (as well as saturated), customers continue to seek out unique experiences that connect with them in personal ways- meaning brand voice has become increasingly important.  

Brand voice refers to a company's unique perspective, values, tone, and personality- all of which play a role in brand identity. A strong brand voice can set your company apart from your competitors, build authority with your audience, and help form connections within your target market.

But why should you care about your brand's tone of voice? As a business owner, marketer, or business division lead you are responsible for creating and communicating your brand's message to the world. By paying attention to your brand's tone of voice, you can create a more engaging and memorable message that will resonate with your audience. This will help drive more traffic to both your locations and website, increase engagement on your social media channels, all leading  to more revenue, and pleased customers.

Best Practices

At LocalClarity, we believe that your brand voice matters, so we help you to take control of your voice, your brand, and your future. LocalClarity’s crash course on brand voice recommends the following 5 actions to get you thinking about your own brand and its voice:

• Understand what brand voice is: It’s a big part of your brand identity, and encompasses your brand tone, personality, and beyond.
• Develop a strong brand voice: A strong brand voice can differentiate your competition, build authority with your audience, form connections, and increase consistency across your platforms.
• Plan an internal assessment of your brand and customers: Identify your unique brand traits by asking yourself (and your team) questions like what makes your brand unique, how you would describe your brand if it was a person, and what your primary values are as a brand.
• Audit your content: Review all your current content and ask yourself if it communicates the characteristics of your brand identity and if it feels authentic to your business.
• Define or refine your brand voice: Once you have a clear understanding of your unique brand positionality, develop a brand voice that is consistent across all channels, and use it to communicate your perspective and values to your audience.

It is also important to understand that your brand's tone of voice is more than just the words you use. It's also about the way those words are delivered! Your tone, pace, and rhythm of your message all contribute to your brand’s reputation. Ideally, your brand has personality and identity that customers can relate to and engage with on an emotional level. Overall, through developing a consistent tone of voice, brands can build a deeper relationship with their customers- all which can lead to increased brand loyalty and repeat business.

Brand Voice in Review Replies

Brand voice extends to client communication and review responses, across all of the ratings and reviews you might receive. It is important to have a brand voice that makes sense for you in replying to reviews, considering how your tone might differentiate between a happy 5-star client review and a 1-star, upset client review. When setting up our AI tone of voice prompts (described in detail below) or replying to review responses through the LocalClarity platform, we recommend the following best practices:

• Do not repeat your business name in a response to a negative review. You don’t want Google indexing your business name with an associated negative term. In your review responses, remove keywords such as location name, location specifics (such as cross streets or street names), and any other keywords popular for your specific industry.
• On the flip side, do use keywords like your brand name and location name in positive review responses!
• However, do not keyword stuff! Keyword stuffing is considered spam, and can cause your account to be flagged or removed by Google for abuse.

With LocalClarity’s recent AI-generative review responses and natural language processing sentiment analysis platform enhancements, your brand can utilize the power of some of the most cutting edge technology to manage your reviews across multiple platforms.

However, even the best AI needs to be trained! But how specific can you get with AI generative responses? Read on to see the different  variables you can leverage when using natural language processing and artificial intelligence for review responses:

The Basics:

• Your business name: remember, using your business name in positive review responses is advised, while using your business name in negative review responses is not.
• The reviewer's name: Using the reviewers name in your response can help to build a connection with the reviewer and make them feel valued.
• Your response tone: Think about if you want your responses to be formal, casual, or somewhere in between- this can also vary by star rating!

The Specifics:

• Your actual response content: Do you want to include a universal introduction to all of your review responses generated by AI? If so, you can include, within your tone of voice prompt, a statement such as “always begin by saying thank you.” This can also be utilized for call to actions at the end of your responses, such as an invitation to continue being a customer or a request to contact your team for remediation.

Create Your Brand Tone

When you create a new AI tone of voice (as pictured below), you are crafting a short statement that sets the personality of the AI-powered responses of each review star rating and (optionally) assigning this AI tone of voice to one or more location groups. As pictured below, each star rating can receive its own tone guide, allowing you to customize exactly how you want your brand responding to differently rated reviews.

To navigate to this section in the LocalClarity platform, go to settings → Manage AI tone. You will then have access to editing and creating AI tones of voice. When you assign an AI tone of voice, each location group can only have one AI tone of voice assigned.

*Creating a group of locations in the LocalClarity platform allows you to apply one tone of voice for your AI generative review responses across multiple locations, providing your business with the unparalleled ability to create a unified tone of voice across wide locations.

We encourage nuance. Do you want your review responses to become more formal as your reviews become more negative? Do you want to include emojis in your positive review responses, but not to negative star reviews? This not only doable, but ideal! Simply create and input your personally curated AI prompts to create a completely unique brand tone guide.

Using AI in LocalClarity

Navigate to your ReviewsInbox. There, select a review as normal. You will then be presented with the option to generate an AI-powered response to the selected review, as pictured below.

Clicking “AI Response” will feed your review into OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool, generating a reply that matches the content of the review with your brand voice. If everything looks good, you can click Post. You always have the option of editing the response directly or even clicking Regenerate to be presented with a different option.

The introduction of enhanced AI tools into everyday life has not decreased client need and want to feel connected to their favorite brands. Brand personality and tone have become more important than ever, and differentiating yourself from your competitors should be easy. We are excited to continue offering the best in class tools for local reputation and review management, as well as personable support to help you meet your local goals.

Reach out to LocalClarity at [email protected] today for a product demo, and to learn how you can optimize your brand, time, and money for success.

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