Dorien Morin-van Dam on Discovering Your Voice Through Collaborative Onboarding & Text Analysis

Brand voice is a crucial element of a business's marketing strategy and an integral facet of growth. As the public face or persona of a brand, a brand's voice is its calling card — the image consumers have of a company that influences whether or not they feel aligned with a brand and, ultimately, whether they move from consumer to customer.

Brand voice is also an influential way of distinguishing a company in the marketplace, especially in digital environments like social media. A good brand voice is authentic, relatable, and unique. When consumers encounter your messaging, they immediately recognize it as coming from you, not your competitors.

Brands work hard to discover and develop their voices and even harder to establish them as their public persona. The good news is that many tools are available to help you navigate the brand voice discovery process and develop a public face that aligns with your values, mission, and business goals.

Dorien Morin-van Dam, owner of More in Media, gives her opinion on collaborative onboarding and text analysis for developing a brand’s voice. 

Collaborative Onboarding

Collaborative onboarding is the practice of involving multiple people from an organization in the process of orienting new hires.

Traditional onboarding approaches typically match new hires with a single veteran employee. This one person is responsible for guiding the new hire through the onboarding steps, answering their questions, and acclimating them to the work environment.

Collaborative onboarding follows a slightly different template. New hires still work closely with an individual veteran employee, a “buddy” who acts as a point person to answer questions, show them around the workplace, and introduce them to other employees. This person may also distribute onboarding materials, such as the employee handbook and relevant paperwork. However, instead of restricting onboarding activities to the new hire and their point person, collaborative onboarding includes other company stakeholders — other veteran employees, higher-level executives, and representatives from departments across the company.

How Collaborative Onboarding Works

The process can vary depending on the needs of specific organizations but in general, collaborative onboarding involves the following components:

• Project participation: New hires help with ongoing projects with teams from their own and other departments. This is an opportunity for the new hire to experience and understand the roles and responsibilities of teams across the company. It’s also a chance to make connections with employees beyond their own department.
• Team-building activities: New hires take part in activities focused on building familiarity and rapport with team members from across the company.
• Inter-departmental meetings: New hires are given the opportunity to participate in various company meetings. They may observe managerial meetings with their superiors or meet with higher-level executives one-on-one. These meetings are a chance for new hires and employees from all levels to dialogue and share ideas and knowledge.
• Social events: Socializing is an important aspect of collaborative onboarding. For new hires and current employees alike, it’s an opportunity to get to know one another in social, non-professional contexts and allows the new hire to establish familiarity with new colleagues.

Benefits of Collaborative Onboarding

Collaborative onboarding poses several benefits to employees and companies alike. It often allows new employees to be integrated into the new work environment more quickly than those who experience traditional onboarding. When they aren’t siloed to a specific department or unit during their earliest days and weeks, new hires can immediately make introductions with a wider network of colleagues. This allows them to feel welcomed and supported by their new colleagues, which makes them more engaged, increases job satisfaction, and even improves morale in the workplace.

Employees develop a comprehensive understanding of the company from their very first days on the job. In addition to the orientation they receive to their own primary department, they meet with and shadow colleagues from other units. This provides insight into the interlinked dynamics from various departments and promotes widespread knowledge sharing across the company.

For a brand that is still in the process of discovering its voice, collaborative onboarding is especially beneficial because it:

• Promotes idea sharing: The process not only puts new hires face-to-face with a broader network of colleagues but also encourages them to participate in various activities and share their ideas. For companies, the new hire represents the opportunity to get a fresh perspective on the brand’s image.
• Eliminates knowledge silos: By exposing new hires to multiple departments, they’re provided with the opportunity to learn from colleagues across the company; then, once the onboarding process is complete and the new hire settles into their primary department, they can serve as a source of knowledge for the procedures and responsibilities of other departments.
• Improves cohesion: Consistency and cohesion are integral aspects of building a successful and impactful brand voice. A brand's tone must be the same no matter the channel where consumer interactions take place. Collaborative onboarding can help ensure consistent brand messaging by guaranteeing that employees from all departments are aligned on the company's values, mission, and communication style.

Common Tactics Used for Voice Discovery Through Collaborative Onboarding

You may be wondering how brands can use collaborative onboarding to streamline and improve brand voice discovery. Just as the collaborative onboarding process can vary from workplace to workplace, so can the specific methodologies used to involve new employees in brand voice discovery. A few common ways include:

• Discovery meetings with key stakeholders and decision-makers: As new hires are onboarded, they attend a series of meetings with stakeholders and superiors. These meetings are a chance for new hires to learn brand ideology from the people responsible for making the decisions that determine the image the brand presents to the public. New hires also receive insight into official company goals and details about the target audience.
• Customer insight gathering: Brand voice is influenced as much by the company as by its target audience. Understanding that audience — its demographic make-up, pain points, preferences, and so on — is crucial for establishing a brand persona that impacts consumers. Allowing new hires to perform customer insight-gathering tasks, such as administering and reviewing surveys and interviews, equips them with a first-hand understanding of the target audience from the very beginning of their tenure. In turn, they are better positioned to make informed, meaningful contributions to the voice discovery process.
• Competitor analysis: Similarly, new hire participation in competitor analysis gives them insight into the ways your competitors are successfully engaging your overlapping audience, or how they are failing to do so. The new hire then enters the workplace with a fuller understanding of the marketing tactics and strategies that do and don’t work on your target audience.

Leveraging Text Analysis

Text analysis refers to the process of processing text data and analyzing it to derive information and insights, which brands can use to inform important decision-making. Manual or traditional approaches to text analysis require people to read and interpret various documents. However, text analysis is more commonly performed with computers and, increasingly, can be optimized with the help of AI technologies. Language models are trained to read and interpret human-written documents, extract information, and translate that information into actionable insights that inform business processes.

“AI tools are game-changing for voice analysis, but here's the right way to use them: First, ensure clients have their own internal chatbot or system - never put client data in public AI tools,” Morin-van Dam advises. “Remember though, the AI does the analysis, but you need to do the inference. Use your human judgment to validate the AI's suggestions and test them.”

Text analysis applies to a wide range of digital and analog document types, including internal documents and memos, social media content, emails, product reviews, and customer reviews. A range of text analysis methodologies may be applied to analyze texts, such as:

• Sentiment analysis: This involves analyzing texts to assess whether their driving sentiment is negative, positive, or neutral.
• Word frequency analysis: This counts the number of times certain words appear in a text or dataset, which gives brands insight into the frequency of words used in relation to the brand. Doing this aids in trend tracking and can benefit search engine optimization (SEO).
• Keyword extraction: This automatically identifies words and phrases from the text to identify its key themes, topics, and ideas — an important tactic for discovering the most relevant content keywords consumers are using online.

New technologies and tech innovations have drastically changed text analysis. In particular, AI technology has made the process faster, more efficient, more accurate, and more valuable to businesses. Large language learning models (LLMs) — the name given to artificial intelligence systems trained to understand human language and "read" and analyze text data written by humans — are capable of processing, summarizing, analyzing, categorizing, and collating data at speeds far beyond human capability.

How Text Analysis Works

When applied to vast data sets over periods of time, AI-powered systems ensure consistency in voice text analysis, guaranteeing, for example, that the same words are extracted across data sets. They also narrow the margin of error, making it far less likely that words or analysis subjects have been overlooked. Finally, programs that are driven by AI can leverage the technology for text summarizations to translate data into more comprehensive insights.

The text analysis process generally happens like this:

• Step 1 — Data Collection: Text data is gathered from the various sources of interest to a brand, which may include emails, social media content, and news articles, as well as consumer-generated material like product reviews, forum posts, interviews, and surveys.
• Step 2 — Preprocessing: Once the data has been gathered, the text goes through preprocessing. This involves cleaning it by removing unnecessary characters, breaking it into words or phrases called “tokens,” and classifying individual words according to their part of speech.
• Step 3 — Feature Extraction: During this phase, the text is combed for the appearances of various terms, such as keywords, names, or recurring topics.
• Step 4 — Analysis: The text data may be analyzed according to any specific analysis technique, including text and sentiment analysis, NER, and topic modeling.
• Step 5 — Interpretation: In the final stage, the results of the analysis are reviewed to follow the results to their conclusions and to extract insights that are then applied to decision-making processes.

Those conclusions and insights derived from text analysis have various ramifications for the process of brand voice discovery.

For example, analyzing consumer-generated data to extract sentiments or keywords associated with your brand can produce information that cues you into audience perception by revealing how people talk about your brand, especially on digital platforms like social media. Are consumers enthusiastic about your brand? Or are they airing their grievances about a disappointing product, lackluster service, or negative customer service experience?

Similarly, text analysis can provide insight into how specific marketing strategies or products impact your target audience. This can help you determine whether a new marketing campaign impacts brand perception in intended ways or whether a newly launched product is aligned with your audience's needs and preferences.

Brand Voice KPIs to Monitor

Testing is an integral aspect of the brand discovery process. Marketing testing reveals the brand attributes that have historically had a positive influence on your target audience, while consumer test methods like A/B testing can reveal how consumers are currently perceiving your brand.

“Your KPIs should align with three things: your goals, your budget, and your resources. You can have ambitious targets, but without the team or budget to support them, you need to be realistic,” Morin-van Dam highlights when determining which metrics businesses should monitor. “Start by measuring any growth - daily at first, then weekly - and adjust based on what's working.

Of course, testing is only as valuable as the metrics you're considering. When it comes to brand voice, some of the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) to track are:

• Engagement metrics: On digital platforms, engagement metrics refer to things like click-through rates (CTRs), time on page, and email open rates. Tracking these metrics lets you know whether your voice is making enough of an impact on your audience to spark their engagement. Unopened emails, abandoned sites at the landing page, and unclicked search result links can indicate that your current brand voice isn't effectively speaking to your audience.
• Sentiment analysis: This testing method reveals the sentiments or feelings that are expressed in relation to your brand. Consistently negative sentiments — frustration, disappointment, anger — are a sign that your brand's reputation is suffering.
• Conversion metrics: Whether or not consumers take a desired action is a prime indication of how successfully you've influenced them with your branding. Engaged consumers progress through their brand journey and become paying customers. If consumers repeatedly abandon carts in your online store or fail to schedule appointments, it could be time to overhaul your strategy.
• Brand awareness metrics: Brands with voices that read as authentic and honest are the ones that consumers connect with, and consumer connection is essential for boosting brand awareness. If your market reach isn't expanding, altering the tone of your brand voice may be necessary.

Strengthen Brand Recognition With a Strong Brand Voice

In the age of AI and other technological innovations, tools like collaborative onboarding and text analysis are more efficient, accurate, and valuable for voice discovery than ever before. They can also monitor important metrics like engagement, conversions, and brand awareness.

While there's no strict formula for discovering your brand's voice, several strategies can help you develop a voice that resonates with your target audience. Leveraging the power of these tools can enhance the discovery process and improve ongoing efforts to maintain an effective brand persona.

About Dorien Morin-van Dam, Owner of More In Media

Dorien Morin-van Dam is a social media strategist, organic social media specialist, trainer, community manager, and keynote speaker. She has been a social media professional for over 10 years and is a Certified Social Media Professional and Agile Marketer. Dorien, often recognized on-stage by her signature orange glasses, has experience in a multitude of industries from local B2B and B2C clients to national and international brands.
 

About the Author

Elaine Margrethe Alcantara Content Writer at Clutch

Elaine Margrethe is a part of Clutch’s global team of writers. She is responsible for writing blogs, supporting blog processes, and content creation efforts.

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