Developing your brand's tone of voice

A step-by-step guide to developing your very-first tone of voice guidelines and implementing them in your organization.

I've developed my fair share of tone of voice guidelines, usually to accompany a brand book or go-to-market strategy. While yes, ideally everyone working for you should know how you want to be perceived, the reality is vastly different. It starts with 27 variations of email sign-offs and ends with confused customers (what is that that winky-emoji supposed to mean?!).

Nailing your tone of voice as a brand is about as important as nailing your values. If you have values, but don't support your staff in learning how to use them when they communicate with customers, you're no better than a person flexing their muscles without sharing their training program.

Your brand's tone of voice is important. To get your message across, to build relationships with customers, to build a lasting brand and (this one is so underrated!) to create consistency. Ever wondered what happens when you start translating your copy into different languages without a tone of voice guide? Here's an accurate picture of exactly what happens:

A tone of voice guide will also help whoever writes for your brand (copywriters, communicators, support staff and many more) to feel secure. Your tone of voice guidelines help them understand what you expect - and make it easier to execute on those expectations.

So how do you develop your tone of voice? 

Well, it starts with a simple realization: writing is hard. 

Not everyone magically finds the right words. Parts of your staff may be writing in a language that isn't their mother tongue, making it even more difficult for them. Low and behold, there are also people who just don't like writing. Yeah, I know...inconceivable.

If you're working on creating a tone of voice, your job simply is to make writing simple. This means the way your brand writes needs to make sense. And to make sense, tonality needs to be tightly connected with values.

It's not that difficult. Actually, it's a lot less difficult than writing itself.

Here's how I do it:

Values first

I look at the brand and company values and try to translate them into writing styles. For example, if a company's most important value is playfulness, I will suggest a style that is more relaxed and fun than for a company who's top value is trust. 

After I've reflected on the values, I'll shop around a bit for other brands with similar values to see how they've been doing things. I'll usually find an example or two that I like and swipe some of their best bits as inspiration. If you're new to tone of voice guides, this is a really important step to get you started. Don't steal, just get an idea of how i.e. playfulness translates into written communication. Two of my favorite companies to look at are MailChimp and Intercom.

Choose a template

There are many different ways to start developing your tone of voice. But essentially, they're all some variation of: value -> writing style -> reasoning.

Here's my favorite template:

I give a really good example of how writing should ideally be like. Then I add a bad one right next to it. I explain the reasoning why one is better than the other and give the reasoning for choosing this style in the first place. For bigger organizations, it makes sense to do this exercise with examples for each department so everyone can relate. You can focus on customer support communication for the CX team and outreach communication for marketers.

By the way, the above framework works really well. I encourage you to go ahead and totally steal this one!

Stick with it

Once you've chosen a template, go through all the values you want to incorporate in your brand's writing and fill the template for each one. 

In the end, you should end up with anything between 2 and 10 of these. In my experience, it never makes sense to introduce more than 5 to everyone. The more you can combine into one style, the easier it is to remember for everyone. 

Ensure your suggested styles are distinctly different! You don't want one style being fun and the other one being relaxed. They are too similar. You want to be going for fun and empathy-driven instead.

Examples, examples, more examples

My template already provides room for examples, but it's important to come up with even more. Examples are how people learn - especially if they aren't avid writers or readers.

If you're having a hard time coming up with examples, stage a dialogue. Ask people to imagine they're talking (=writing) to a customer - how would they write? Take it from there. You may want to do this exercise with each department so they can practice face to face and offer feedback to tweak them in the right direction.

Make it make sense

Personally, I think this is the most important part of your guidelines. The better you can explain why you want people to write a certain way, the more success you'll have. Closing the loop to my opening statement, here's where you'll find out if you succeeded with connecting the tone of voice with the brand's values. If you have, you'll be harvesting aha!'s and smiles. If you've failed, people will look confused. Then it's time to go back and adjust what you've done.

I find a nice way to ensure I'm on the right track with my values to tonality connection is by brainstorming words that come to mind when I think of a certain value and visualizing them. From there, I can then narrate examples and define the tonality more.

Here's an example of words I connect with trust:

Get everyone on board

All right, this is my personal favorite. As a consultant, I often come into a gig last-minute and usually somebody will just dump a tone of voice guide on my desk. I've been doing this for a while, so I can usually extract the info I need, but boy oh boy, it's difficult. 

I believe that if you truly want to get everybody on board with your tone of voice, you need to take the time to present, explain, and discuss it with them. Book a 30 min session with all employees to walk them through it. Encourage questions. Tell them they can reach out to you if they're unsure about something. Make it part of the onboarding experience for new employees. And why not post little reminders on slack every month to help people stick to it? I also encourage you to make the tone of voice guide easily accessible. Upload it somewhere people can find it to look things up or get a quick inspiration boost.

I also ensure to summarize each style in two super-short sentences. This is is like a vitamin boost for the writer's brain when they feel stuck or at loss for words. Another useful crutch is summarizing the style of your brand's voice vs your main competitor's. This illustrates very clearly where you are similar and where you are vastly different.

What else belongs in a tone of voice guide?

Besides the above, I suggest including greetings and sign-offs as well as emoji guidelines. You may even want to say something about paragraph length and punctuation style (I've noticed some people just LOVE uppercase and exclamation marks a tad bit too much.)

Simply put: anything that adds consistency to writing may be helpful to put in your guide. How much in-depth you go depends solely on your brand's constraints, the size of your organization, and (of course) your commitment.

And that's it! Pretty simple, isn't it?

Don't skimp on this. It's worth the few hours of research and effort you need to develop a tone of voice guide for your organization.

Need more input on how to get started with your tone of voice? Feel free to shoot me an email. Want me to do it for you? Request a quote. I'll see what I can do for you.

I've been writing professionally for over a decade and have worked with clients across all industries and cultures. Follow my poetry or subscribe to my newsletter to stay in the know.