Content Marketing
Brand Voice Guidelines — 7 Tips For Polishing Your Brand Voice
Learn how to create engaging brand voice guidelines that resonate with your ideal audience. Create your brand identity and keep it consistent with these tips.
Few things have the power to set you apart from your competition quite like your brand voice. After all, when it comes to content marketing, standing out includes not just what you say, but how you say it.
Whether you’re writing a press release or a social media post, being consistent with your messaging across every channel and platform is a must.
To help you keep your content on-brand across every post and page, we’ve developed this step-by-step guide to creating brand voice guidelines. Plus, get seven tips on how to polish your brand voice.
Your brand voice is the “personality” of your business that you communicate to others. Your brand is much more than your logo or slogan; instead, it’s a combination of your voice and values in a way that’s consistent and, over time, easily recognizable.
To determine your brand voice, there are a few questions you should ask yourself.
Think of this exercise as taking the first steps toward sketching out what kind of “persona” you want to convey to your audience or ideal customer.
Once you identify your brand voice, it’s something you can consistently highlight in content briefs, to encourage consistent communications.
First, consider: “What is your brand?” and “What do I want to be known for?”
It seems like a basic question but it’s meant to go deeper.
Example: A hypothetical cosmetics brand may prioritize eco-friendly beauty.
Considering not just what your brand is, but what you want to be known for will provide you with a goalpost to evaluate how well your brand voice meshes with the audience you’re looking to attract.
If you’re struggling to come up with ideas, start with a blank sheet of paper and add adjectives that describe the personality you want your business to have.
Is your brand:
Write down as many as you can, since you can always revise later.
Next, ask: “Who is your ideal audience?”
Example: Going back to the aforementioned cosmetics company, your audience may:
Identifying who your audience is and what they are most interested in can help you create a niche content strategy that aligns with your brand voice and connects with your readers.
One of the best ways to determine your brand voice is to look at your existing communications.
If you’ve already published pieces, such as blog posts, or even internal communications, looking at how you phrase them can help you narrow down your brand voice.
Ideally, you’ll want to gather material from a variety of different channels, including blog posts, social media posts and customer service emails, to name a few.
Look at each communication carefully and ask:
Example: there’s a significant difference between receiving an email that reads: “Thank you for contacting us. Your inquiry will be processed in 3-5 business days” versus “Hey! Thanks for reaching out! We got your message and you’ll hear back soon!” One relays a more formal tone, while the other is more approachable.
As you do the brand voice audit, make a spreadsheet of important attributes you want your brand voice to have.
Example: What does “friendly” mean to your brand? What kind of example would denote that? What about “professional”? When you include specific examples, it makes it easier for everyone on your team to understand the style and tone you’re going for.
One of the most challenging parts of developing brand voice guidelines is maintaining them across different channels from social media to web content to customer support.
If your brand voice is approachable and friendly, this should be the tone across all channels from a social media post to a customer support email.
Example: A gourmet coffee brand that projects an image of being friendly, energetic, and helpful. In this scenario, your brand voice might be reflected like this across different mediums:
Being consistent with your brand voice means that everyone, at every touchpoint and every stage of interaction with the customer, knows how to properly embody the brand’s voice. This means more than just hosting a one-off workshop or webinar.
Have templates in place that exemplify the brand voice, not just for your website, social media, customer service and email newsletter, but also:
It’s also a good idea to do periodic content reviews or audits to be sure you’re staying on track with the tone and style across all of your content.
While you’re periodically auditing content for brand voice you can also use the Originality.ai Site Scanner to identify potential instances of AI text across your website in 1-click. That way you can review areas that may need additional editing to keep brand voice consistent.
Now, that’s not to say that you can’t ever change the brand voice you’ve created.
What was popular even a year ago in terms of approach might not connect with your audience the same way today.
Your audience and trends may change over time and as your business grows, so it’s important to monitor and adapt to these changes.
A good approach is to collect feedback via surveys and or AI tools to do sentiment analysis and make sure you’re staying on the right track.
Now that you’ve got the main foundation set up, it’s time to do a little polishing and refinement.
These little steps can make a big difference in terms of how your brand is perceived!
Include the words you want to use (for example, saying “clients” versus “customers”). Then, also make a list of words to avoid that don’t align with the brand voice.
In general, unless your audience is extremely knowledgeable about your product, you should avoid using industry jargon.
Consider these questions when it comes to sentence structure:
The active voice is direct and engaging, speaking directly to your audience. Alternatively, the passive voice can seem more aloof and detached.
Is your brand a proud supporter of the Oxford comma? Is it acceptable to use casual grammar (like starting a sentence with “And” or “But”)? Is there a preferred style for when you’re citing a reference, such as APA or MLA style?
If you’d like your editorial team to incorporate a grammar checker in their workflow this is also a great spot in your guidelines to note this.
No matter what type of brand voice you want to exemplify, it’s always a good idea to use inclusive and accessible language wherever possible.
That means checking the readability of text while also using language that’s welcoming to all audiences and being mindful of diversity.
Be consistent in terms of how you want to structure headings, lists and bullet points, as well as the use of emojis in communications.
Clear formatting is also a fantastic way to improve visual readability in web publishing.
Does your brand incorporate AI in content marketing? With the rapid developments in AI, it’s essential to be clear about how your brand approaches AI use, especially considering that one of the common issues with AI text is that it’s often bland or unengaging.
So, to make sure your brand voice stays consistent and ensure everyone on your publishing team is on the same page it’s essential to highlight AI guidelines.
You can also incorporate a Site Scanner to check web content for potential instances of AI that require further review. That way you make sure that you’re consistently aligning content with brand voice.
Creating a brand voice isn’t a “once and done” exercise. It’s more like an ongoing evolution that changes over time with core company values as its anchor.
By keeping these points in mind and training your team on how to use the brand voice in their own communications, whether that’s through web design, social media posting or PR management, together, you can continue to carry your brand forward and create lasting impressions with your audience.
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