Written by Olga Procevska, co-founder of Writitude
One powerful yet often overlooked tool in achieving effective and impactful communication is the strategic use of verbs.
By emphasizing verbs in your communication, companies can create engaging, action-oriented messages that resonate with brand’s audience and drive results.
It is also a great way to keep your customers at the center of your communication.
Why Verbs Matter
Verbs are the driving force of any sentence. They convey movement, initiative, and change, which are essential qualities for brands that want to inspire their audiences to make a decision in favor of their product or service.
By focusing on verbs, a brand can highlight what it does or what its product or service can accomplish.
This approach shifts the narrative from passive descriptions to active demonstrations of value, making your communication more engaging and impactful.
Consider the difference between these two statements:
- "Our product is reliable."
- "Count on our product for reliable performance."
The first statement merely describes a characteristic, while the second emphasizes action and invites the audience to engage with the product.
It’s much more confident and bold. This subtle shift in language significantly enhances how your message is received and perceived.
To effectively use the power of verbs in your brand's communication:
1. Emphasize Benefits Over Features
When describing your products or services, prioritize what they enable your customers to do.
For example, instead of saying, "Our app is user-friendly," try "Navigate our app effortlessly." It’s the same thought, but with a different punch.
This approach does not miss any of the product’s features and also emphasizes the benefits to the use.
Are you thinking about ways to build customer-centric communication? Verbs may not be the first tool that comes to mind, but in fact, they are key to achieving this.
Verbs can help you move beyond listing features to showcasing the benefits those features provide.
For instance, instead of stating, "Our service includes 24/7 customer support," you could say, "Access support anytime you need it." This language speaks directly to the customer's experience and needs.
Oftentimes, brand owners and communication managers become so focused on the features of their product or service that the customer can become sidelined.
Focusing on verbs helps put the customer where they should be — at the very center of your communication.
2. Inspire Action
Use verbs that encourage your audience to take action. Phrases like "discover," "explore," "unlock," and "achieve" motivate your audience to engage with your brand and experience its offerings firsthand.
For example, "Explore new possibilities with our innovative solutions."
This approach , is supported by insights from marketing experts, who emphasize the importance of active language in driving consumer response.
Active verbs create a sense of urgency and excitement, encouraging potential customers to engage more readily with your brand.
This engagement can lead to higher conversion rates as customers are more likely to act when they feel a sense of immediacy and involvement.
And who doesn’t want to improve conversion rates?
3. Create a Sense of Urgency
Incorporating action verbs can also create a sense of urgency, prompting your audience to act quickly.
Consider using verbs like "act now," "seize", or "claim" to convey a timely call to action. For example, "Seize the opportunity with our limited-time offer."
While urgency-inducing calls to action are not for everyone, if your brand is a new player in the market looking to boost sales, it makes sense to gently encourage your customers to take action.
If you want action, write with action!
Add these Writitude rules to your custom tone of voice guide to add action to your texts:
- Adjust ratio of verbs to nouns and adjectives
- Require urgent-sounding CTAs
The Power of Action Verbs
However, not all verbs are created equal. Specifically, communication managers and copywriters need to make a distinction between action verbs and 'be' verbs.
Action verbs are words that express a specific action or movement, either physical or mental, such as "run," "think," "build," or "create."
These verbs convey a sense of dynamism and activity, helping to illustrate what the subject is doing.
In contrast, "be" verbs—such as "am," "is," "are," "was," and "were"—serve as linking verbs that connect the subject to a state of being or an adjective, often describing a condition rather than an action.
While "be" verbs play a crucial role in constructing sentences by linking subjects to additional information, they can lack the vivid imagery and engagement that action verbs provide.
Scientific Insights on Verb Processing
Scientific studies in linguistics and cognitive psychology highlight how different types of verbs influence perception and communication.
Research shows that action verbs can activate more brain regions related to movement and visual processing.
A study by Hauk, Johnsrude, and Pulvermüller used functional MRI to demonstrate that reading action words activates motor areas in the brain associated with the action described.
This suggests that action verbs can create more vivid mental imagery and stronger connections for the reader.
On the other hand, "be" verbs are often processed with less cognitive engagement since they describe states or conditions without eliciting specific actions or events.
Read more Paper by Hauk, Johnsrude, and Pulvermüller in “Neuron”: Somatotopic Representation of Action Words in Human Motor and Premotor Cortex
Since branding is all about persuasion, the practical implications of choosing between action verbs and 'be' verbs are significant for effective communication.
Using action verbs can make messages more persuasive and engaging by creating a sense of urgency and purpose.
Action verbs direct attention to what can be done, fostering a proactive mindset in the audience. In contrast, overreliance on "be" verbs can result in static and less impactful communication, which is also often perceived as less confident or authoritative.
Add this Writitude rule to your custom tone of voice guide to add action to your texts:
- Require more action verbs and fewer "be" verbs
Don’t Just Use Verbs. Automate Using Verbs.
So it’s clear that by emphasizing action verbs in your communication, you can create a more dynamic, engaging, and persuasive brand voice.
However, what communicators know very well from experience is that all communication “slips” at some point.
Even if verbs are at the center of your brand book, they need to be implemented in every piece of content to be truly effective.
Humans are not very good at consistency, so even if your brand has firmly decided to focus on verbs to enhance persuasiveness, it will be hard to achieve this by human means only.
Writitude allows you to automate your brand’s tone of voice and all decisions you have made about the style of your brand’s communication.
Define a custom tone of voice and share it with all your copywriters and content producers to ensure that every piece of content reflects your brand's unique character and instills confidence while inspiring action in your audience.
