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Every touchpoint a buyer has with your shop is part of an overall brand experience. It all starts with your brand voice
Does it feel like you’ve been climbing uphill with your shop, especially when it comes to pushing out your products and information on social media or your website?
We’ve heard in our past social media sessions that consistency is important — and while that can extend to scheduling, it also means consistency in how you present your shop.
You might think that you don’t have a “brand” as a small shop, but you definitely do! Your brand is what people know you for, and it's way more than your visual look.
At the centre of the brand is your brand voice.
Brand voice informs your:
Discovering and developing your brand voice is a process that requires some thoughtful consideration and effort — but it also helps to drive your business forward.
We’ve done a bit of piecemeal work on this already, in one of our monthly challenges and with exercises from Katie Dempsey, founder of Brand Ambition, inside the Vintage Sellers Community (Champion members: hit the Branding section to access).
In this branding series, we’re going to go step-by-step to explore how brand voice applies to your vintage resale shop.
It’s never too late to work on your brand voice. It’s not something that needs to be done when you first start your business. And you will continue to refine it over time as your customer changes.
In fact, when something isn’t working — whether it’s low sales or your social media following or your business operations — it’s the perfect time to put some work into your brand voice.
The time you spend on the background work will actually save you time in the long run.
One thing out of the way first: You might not want to do this.
This isn’t fun work the same way sourcing is fun! Thinking this deeply about your shop is also not something you have a lot of time for in the day-to-day frenzy of sourcing and shipping products.
It's also very easy to put off because it feels more intangible, like it doesn't seem to translate to immediate sales.
But when things are a little quieter, or you feel like you need something (i.e. more customers), or you feel like you're stuck, that’s the time to dig in.
Developing a brand voice can feel overwhelming. Especially if you are thinking too much about the whole picture.
So we are going to break it down and focus on one thing at a time.
It’s very easy to overthink all of this branding stuff, but it truly doesn’t have to be a long, arduous process.
I'm going to share some more thorough examples throughout the series, but all you need is a pen & paper or Google doc, and use some bullet points.
Your brand voice is the personality and tone of your shop.
But what does that mean?
Brand voice is how you communicate and connect with your target audience through your written materials.
It’s how you speak about your shop in person, on video, in social media captions, through messages to customers, etc.
It's hard to figure out what your brand voice is without putting a series of other things together first. These are your values, mission, position/pillars, all centred around your ideal customer.
You might want to visit our Finding New Customers series for information on developing a target audience and customer personas before continuing on with this branding work.
A well-defined brand voice separates your shop from other shops. It makes you distinct.
Anyone can put together the bricks required to build a vintage shop, but you are the only one who can communicate it in a way that is unique to you. And there are customers out there who want to hear from you.
Brand voice cultivates customer loyalty, and helps to develop meaningful connections with your target audience.
In our article about identifying your target audience, we discussed how not everyone is a potential customer for your shop.
Brand voice helps to strengthen the attraction of someone who could be a potential customer — they’re going to either like how your shop looks, your shop style, your personality...or they won’t. And that’s okay.
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As a vintage seller, you likely have a lot of one-off business, especially if you are operating primarily online. Someone is searching online for a specific product, they find it at your shop, and then they disappear.
That’s a healthy part of your business. So is finding more lookalike customers to replace the one-offs. And brand voice helps to attract both of those types of customers.
But there are also repeatable customers, who are a core group of folks to which you want to build a bridge.
Some people have favourite home decor or clothing stores. Maybe Homesense or Anthropologie. You want to become that favourite store for your customers.
They need a decor item? They think of you first. They need a piece of art? They browse your collection first. They're searching for clothing in their size? They ask you first.
You want to find the customers who love you.
So what makes a customer return to your shop? It’s not just your selection of items. It’s every touch point that customer has with you.
Simply put, they come back because they liked the experience of shopping with you.
Because of that, the next time they need to find a vintage product, they’re probably going to try you first.
Why? There’s a big wide vintage world out there…and as much as we all love browsing vintage and thrifting all the time, it's a space that's completely overwhelming and way too time-consuming for the average consumer.
If someone can check your curated closet or your wide selection of vintage collectibles first and maybe find what they are looking for before having to go elsewhere, they’re going to try.
If they know they can message you to ask about custom sourcing, they’re going to try.
You want them to try your shop before they turn back to all of the other noise and channels and shopping platforms out there.
How will they know to try your shop? You have to tell them. That's what you do with your brand voice.
You already have a brand voice. But you might not even know it!
We want to discover what’s behind the voice, so that you can replicate it consistently across all of your marketing and communication efforts.
That’s what anchors your shop and helps customers get to know you over time.
If you already have attracted repeat customers, it’s because somewhere in there, you have a brand voice. Something made your shop memorable to a customer and made them want to come back.
Right now, it might come through in your curation or your shop policies or your style of photography or the efficiency of your service or how well you packed your item or the fact that you were able to answer their history-related question. It might be because of all of those things!
What if you could figure out what exactly that brand voice is — the one that makes people want to shop with you — and then make it more known to others?
That’s what we’re going to do.
All with vintage shop-specific examples to help guide you!
Next up in the branding series: How to find your brand voice. We’ll start with values, mission and unique selling proposition.
Do you have any questions about brand voice? Let us know in the comments!
