In marketing, it pays to be predictable. The more consistent your brand, the quicker people can understand what you stand for and what you sell. And once those formalities are out of the way, people can begin to feel connected to your products (or your mission, if you have a good one).

One of the most important ways to be predictable in branding is to standardise the way you speak. Standardising isn’t a sexy word – neither is ‘guideline’ – but having some guidance around your tone of voice gives your team the tools to build brand awareness and loyalty. It also makes creative decisions (and just publishing stuff) quicker, easier and less subjective.

So, how should you express your tone to your team and what’s really in a decent tone of voice guideline?

Show how your voice bolsters your existing brand

If you haven’t expressed your tone at all, then linking your voice to your values and your brand personality is always a good idea. Some brands can pull adjectives out of the air to good effect, but usually, hooking your tone of voice onto your existing brand architecture makes it more memorable.

Is your brand personality an inquisitive adventurer? Then perhaps your tone is curious, open-minded and decisive. If your values are caring and innovative, then maybe your tone could be expressed as Genuinely Brave. The aim here is simply to put some stakes in the ground that your guidelines can explore further.

Explain your yeses and nos

Deciding your brand voice is Bold is all well and good, but what does bold sound like? How do bold people talk? Is it in their vocab, or their sentence structures? Think about including guidance for punctuation and formatting in your guidelines as well as overall tone.

To make your guidance useful, it’s handy to include dos and don’ts to describe whichever principles you’ve agreed on. And if you’re finding the don’ts bit difficult, you’re not alone. A good exercise is to take your principle and workshop what happens if you take it too far. If we’re too Bold, then we might sound pushy – how can we stop this happening? Maybe you can use your guidance to outlaw exclamation marks in emails, or bruising your competitors in headlines, for example.

Give examples – especially with humour

The whole point of sharing guidance on your tone of voice is to make things less subjective for anyone who finds themselves writing on behalf of your brand. Giving examples of copy for each of your principles is a good way to help your team work in your tone. But humour is especially tricky to pin down. Tongue in cheek for one person might mean something different to another. It’s also completely cultural. So including examples of your humour or levity (if humour is included in your brand voice in any way) is key.

A useful way to do this is to define your audience out loud. Unless you’re targeting exclusively under 25s then playful references to Love Island are going to fall flat. And this is exactly the kind of thing you can offer guidance around.

Cheerlead your work

Your team is writing on behalf of your brand all the time. Make your tone of voice presentation beautiful. Make it part of your brand guidelines. Make stickers, make posters, make it an integral part of training – whatever you do, don’t leave it going mouldy in a pdf. If you work in a larger team, appoint unofficial tone guardians in teams without writers. You can also offer drop-in copy critiques for anybody in the company to come together and discuss copy challenges together.

HR isn’t immune, either – on-brand internal comms are just as important as customer-facing ones, and improving them is an easier way to improve retention and employee engagement than securing a tonne of investment in new software or infrastructure.  

Hopefully this gives you food for thought and food for typing. Liberate your tone of voice guidance from that floppy one-pager at the end of your guidelines. And if you need any help workshopping or capturing your brand tone on paper, then get in touch.

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