What are some tools or methods to audit your brand voice and tone?

1 Define your brand voice and tone

Before you can audit your brand voice and tone, you need to have a clear definition of what they are and how they align with your brand identity, goals, and audience. You can use a brand voice chart to document the characteristics, adjectives, and examples of your brand voice, and a brand tone guide to outline how your voice adapts to different situations, contexts, and emotions. These documents will serve as your reference points and benchmarks for your audit.

2 Collect and categorize your content

The next step is to gather and organize your content from various sources, such as your website, blog, social media, email, ads, brochures, videos, podcasts, and so on. You can use a spreadsheet or a tool like Airtable to create a content inventory and assign attributes such as type, format, channel, purpose, audience, and tone. This will help you analyze your content more efficiently and systematically.

3 Evaluate your content quality and consistency

Now that you have your content inventory, you can start evaluating the quality and consistency of your brand voice and tone across your content. You can use a scoring system or a checklist to rate your content based on criteria such as clarity, relevance, accuracy, readability, emotion, and personality. You can also use tools like Hemingway, Grammarly, or Readable to check your content for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and readability issues.

4 Compare your content with your competitors

Another way to audit your brand voice and tone is to compare your content with your competitors and see how you stand out or blend in. You can use tools like BuzzSumo, SEMrush, or SimilarWeb to research your competitors' content strategy, performance, and audience engagement. You can also use tools like Brandwatch or Mention to monitor your competitors' social media presence and sentiment. By doing this, you can identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in relation to your competitors.

5 Survey your audience and stakeholders

The ultimate test of your brand voice and tone is how your audience and stakeholders respond to your content. You can use tools like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, or Google Forms to create and distribute surveys to your customers, prospects, employees, partners, and influencers. You can ask them questions about their perception, preference, and feedback on your brand voice and tone, and how they affect their trust, loyalty, and engagement. You can also use tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, or Mailchimp Reports to measure your content performance and audience behavior.

6 Implement your findings and recommendations

The last step is to use the insights and data from your audit to improve your brand voice and tone and align them with your brand identity, goals, and audience. You can use tools like Google Docs, Trello, or Asana to create and share a report that summarizes your findings and recommendations, and outlines the actions and timelines for implementing them. You can also use tools like CoSchedule, Buffer, or HubSpot to plan, create, and distribute your content with your refined brand voice and tone.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?