Have you thought about the tone of voice of your brand?
Are you serious and professional, or casual and playful?
Whatever you choose, it’s important that your tone of voice is consistent.
No matter how your customers engage with your brand, the WAY you talk matters.
Ideally, when you have a strong tone of voice, your website, social media posts, sales brochures, presentations and even emails are written in the same style. This gets waaaay tricky when you have plenty of staff all representing your brand and producing content on your behalf
A good way to start is to create tone of voice guidelines for your brand. This is a document that specifies why it’s important for your brand to have consistent communications.
(Lots of brands spend forever specifying the branding guidelines for their logo and branding, and produce beautifully detailed branding guideline documents.) But the words? They often don’t get much thought.
Here’s what to think about when defining your brand tone of voice:
>>WHY it matters in the first place (to get people on board)
>>Your brand VALUES and what they mean to your company
>>How your brand conveys PERSONALITY
>>The way your brand uses LANGUAGE
>>Your ideal CUSTOMER (everyone with a neck doesn’t cut it)
>>Your preferred WRITING style (the real nitty-gritty of how you use bullets, key phrases, words you do and don’t like, style guide you follow)
>>Samples of what good writing looks like for your brand
This isn’t a one-pager. You need to go into detail.
The biggest mistakes I see with brand tone of voice?
- not bothering to define it
- not getting staff on board with it
- being too strict about it
Your brand tone of voice is a living document
If you have gone to the effort to create a tone of voice guidelines, is it lost somewhere on your intranet or is it being regularly disseminated amongst your team? Take the time to revisit it and introduce new staff to it when they join the biz.
Are you being too strict?
If your guidelines are super strict, writing ANYTHING for the brand becomes a nightmare. It takes a full day of cross-checking against a manifesto of so-called rules. That sux for your staff and it ends up being disregarded completely because the rules are too intense and detailed.
The idea of a tone of voice is to EMPOWER your staff to write with confidence. Let them feel comfortable with the guidelines (not rules y’all) and make them EASY to stick to.
Need some help with your brand tone of voice?
I LOVE to take clients through the process. We even do some silly exercises, and it’s loadsa fun. Fee? AU$797. Give me a call on 0406 993 464 to chat about how we can work together.
Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash
