Whatever your business venture, from selling weird and wonderful items online to a straightforward service for customers and clients, the tone and brand is everything. When you are creating a business image, it needs to be consistent, despite the platform it is on. And when we work online, we can have a lot of control over the brand, but what happens when we step into the real world and need it to be a logical extension of what we provide online? How can this be achieved?
Crafting The Image Carefully
When budget is an issue, you’ve got to learn how to make the most of your limited resources. And in fact, this can work to your advantage, when your resources are minimal. If you have a skeleton staff, for example, and they work online and offline, this is a very simple way to maintain some control over the tone of voice. And when you start to outsource for extra help, it’s an easy way to communicate this overall business image, despite your limitations. Virtual offices work very well in this respect, and on www.yourvirtualofficelondon.co.uk you can make the most of call answering services as well as other virtual functions that can provide this comprehensive image.
Using The Same Language
When it comes to brand voice, it should form a natural part of your business ethics. If you spend a lot of time discussing the tone of voice and specific words, this becomes part of the company culture. And when you are discussing topics offline, you should make the online tone follow the same pattern. It’s a far more organic way to develop this going from offline to online, rather than the other way around. Because online copy can be tweaked with so much, it can lose a lot of its human qualities.
Leverage User-generated Content Online
There are certain aspects of your business that only functions well online. User-generated content is one of those things and can comprise so many different aspects, including online reviews, recommendations from colleagues, as well as videos of photos from customers. You can learn more about user-generated content on www.sproutsocial.com so prospects can learn what it’s like to work with you. This can be difficult to harness, especially if you are setting up more offline meetings, but it helps to bridge the gap between the business and potential customers.
Building The Relationship
If you have prospects that you deal with online, work at meeting them in an offline capacity, and vice versa. This helps to provide a stronger bond between the two entities, while at the same time, ensuring that your brand and tone are fleshed out further. Ultimately, building a relationship between business and client, or company and customer, is about making it more “3D”. This is why many businesses can struggle if they have a purely online relationship with their clients.
It can be a very difficult thing to achieve, but the mistakes that many modern businesses are making, namely providing an online service only, only goes to serve the fact that these companies fall by the wayside when customers are demanding a more comprehensive approach to service. This means matching online to the offline, or if you will, the virtual to the reality.
