Is This Enough Snark?

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How to Develop a Brand Voice that People Talk About

We don’t like to brag (but we’re gonna). Marketing guru, Jay Baer, recently wrote that the Daily Carnage is “delivered with just enough snark to ensure it’s opened daily.”

We truly couldn’t ask for a better compliment. That “snark” is our brand voice. It’s our clearly defined writing style that connects with our readers.

But, even though we have it clearly defined, finding your brand’s voice isn’t as formulaic as other marketing strategies. There is a general guide to finding it, though, and we’re writing down our process for you today.

Know your audience. How well do you really know your audience? Even if you think you know them, you should do a ton of social listening to start shaping your voice. Find out where your audience lives online and study how they communicate. Don’t settle for, “Oh, my audience is boring. They use the language that everyone else uses.” That’s never the case. Dig deeper if that’s what you’re coming up with.

Know Your Brand. And know your competitors’ brands. What are their brand voices? Which ones do you like/dislike? Write down answers to these questions:

1. How do you want your brand to make people feel?
2. What are your brand’s values?
3. What personality traits does your brand embody?
4. What kind of person would your brand be?

Make a brand voice guideline. Write down adjectives about what you want your voice to sound like. And, be specific with it. Here are some of the words that came out of our initial brand voice guideline:

• Millennial marketer
• Cheeky and quirky
• Friendly and approachable
• Trustworthy and knowledgeable
• Informal and chatty
• Bold and confident
• Quick and clever
• Culturally aware and sensitive

When you combine all of those words, what do you see? A person! Hopefully someone who you’d want to be friends with.

That was intentional. To create that emotional connection that friends have, we chose to mimic digital conversations close friends have with one another.

Last takeaway: Don’t be afraid to loosen up the language when appropriate. It will, without a doubt, give your brand voice a welcomed human touch. Your brand will be more memorable and remarkable for it.

That’s only scratching the surface of brand voice. We go way deeper on it in this blog post →

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4 Steps to Improve Your Email Deliverability

We’ve got a love/hate relationship with email deliverability. It keeps us up at night, but it also keeps us motivated during the day. Colin Darretta, founder of incentive-based referral program Dojo Mojo, breaks down 6 maintenance methods to keep your email list fresh and clean, which will improve deliverability.

Here are the four areas you should go all in on:

Trim the Fat. Going to the gym sucks but it’s so worth it when you can post those gym mirror pics…

What we’re saying is that shedding subscribers who haven’t engaged doesn’t feel good when you do it. But when you improve your deliverability through a higher open rate, it starts to pay off.

Oh, and don’t straight up delete them. Download the segment of unengaged subscribers and put them in a separate list to try and re-engage them later.

Look Fresh Everywhere You Go. You know those people that only have one nice outfit for funerals and weddings and look a mess on every other occasion? Yeah, don’t be that person.

Make sure your email looks good in everyone’s inbox despite the email server and device they are viewing it on.

Scrub it Clean. Are you writing in a Word doc and then copying/pasting into MailChimp? Stop it. For real. Stop it. When you do that, you automatically pull in useless lines of unseen code. These little pieces of code might never be noticed by you, but email clients read them, and might flag your email as spam. That ain’t good.

Rekindle the Romance. Back to those stagnant emails that you’ve got tucked away for a rainy day. This is where you need to get creative. Remember: You didn’t impress them on the first date. If you’re gonna rekindle the fire, you need to do something more original than roses and chocolates.

Think outside of the inbox for this one. What can you give them that is so valuable they can’t resist?

Really Good Emails provides a slew of killer examples for both retention and reactivation campaigns. Grammarly’s “Wrinkle in Time” re-engagement campaign is one of our fav’s.

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Got Me Like

Pretty clear that Baskin-Robbins’ new digital ads are going after Gen Z. And even though we’re a heck of a lot older than their target audience, it still grabbed us. Their “Got Me Like” campaign perfectly mixed quirkiness, sass, and poppin’ dance moves.

Reveling in trending meme culture, the massive ice-cream parlor embraced weirdness with gif-friendly imagery, animations, and super bright colors. We. Are. Fully. Here. For. It. Plus, it helps that the commercial is also full of yummy delicious treats.

It gladly passes our test of being visually appealing and oh, so attention-grabbing. Try not to want Baskin Robbins now. We dare you. Just try!

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