Why you should create a tone of voice for your brand

Giving your brand a tone of voice outlines how you’ll communicate with your customers. An effective brand voice can be the difference between creating a business message that stands out, gets noticed and drives leads, and one that blends into the background. A tone of voice document acts like something of a rulebook and should be applied to all the content and communications your business produces.

What is a tone of voice document?

A tone of voice document outlines the way you communicate with your customers. It’s the voice of your brand, its personality and character. This can be conveyed in the tone you take, the way you write and the words you use.

Your tone of voice should reflect your company aims, market and standing. Think about who your customers are and what they expect of you. You’ll also want to consider how you want to portray yourself within your industry, alongside competitors and to your target market. A law firm, for example, may adopt a tone of voice that feels more professional and serious, while an online e-commerce store may look to be more friendly and approachable.

Whatever grammatical, style or writing rules you decide upon for your brand voice and personality should be applied to all forms of content, whether you’re producing an offline brochure, blogs or social media posts.

Some tone of voice examples include:

• Formal vs informal
• Empowering and uplifting
• Humourous and approachable
• Professional and business-oriented
• Ambitious and motivational

Why is tone of voice important for your brand?

Having a recognisable and consistent tone of voice document is an important step towards creating a brand that people know and trust. By communicating in a certain way, your customers can recognise your company, or may feel that your brand is more personable and approachable. Brands wanting to assimilate into a customer’s daily life may communicate in a friendly manner, as a trusted peer would do. Elsewhere, a brand that wants to convey a sense of knowledge and wisdom in certain areas may communicate in a manner that showcases authority.

Your tone of voice should be appropriate for your target market and audience. Get it wrong and it can seem jarring and out-of-place, which might lead to customers thinking twice about engaging with you. Get it right, however, and you’ve set yourself up for building a recognisable brand that people will know and trust.

Brand voice matters. Consider some famous brands and how their tone of voice works for them. The way you say things can have a great effect on your audience, helping to reassure them, build trust and comfort, and ultimately drive sales and turn them into effusive customers.

How to create a tone of voice for your brand

Before you create a tone of voice document, you need to have a clear outline of what your company is, does and who you are. What do your customers expect from you? At this stage, it’s good to have a look at some competitors to see how they’re approaching things and have a think about how you’d like to position yourself within your market.

From there, once you’ve chosen the character and personality of your brand, you can go about creating a tone of voice document. A tone of voice document should be applied to all written communication with your customers, from any blogs you produce and emails you send out to social posts and the content that appears on your website. Your brand voice should be present everywhere – break it and you risk breaking the trust or engagement of your customer.

There are several things to consider when creating a tone of voice for your brand:

• What age are your customers?
• What is the most common gender?
• What’re are your competitors saying?
• What industry are you in?
• What is the socio-economic standing of your audience?
• What are you trying to provide or sell?
• What job do your customers have?

As you start to build up an idea of who your audience is and how you want to communicate with them, you can begin to flesh out the finer details of your brand voice. Once you’ve decided on a few character traits, you can apply all the tuning and refining to your communication styles, such as whether you’ll use colloquialisms, or always use contractions, or if you’ll steer clear of the Oxford comma or not. A tone of voice document doesn’t have to be so detailed either, you can just keep it as a basic outline of your brand personality if you wish.

Defining your content audience



Next, you’ll have to figure out how you’re going to be communicating with your audience, as different mediums will often require different approaches – the language and style of writing on a long-form opinion article are likely to be different from an upload to Instagram, for example.

Consider:

• Where your content will be consumed
• What information your audience wants and what you’re willing to provide
• What questions, ambitions and problems your audience are facing
• What they value
• How they communicate with their peers and in social circles

The aim is to become a trusted friend and a reliable resource. With the right approach, you can develop a tone of voice document that spans all the content and communication your business produces. By having a consistent voice, your customers are likely to engage more with your brand – leading to improvements in leads, traffic and – ultimately – sales.

If you want to discover more tone of voice examples you can take your first steps towards brand personality here.