What do we mean by ‘Tone of Voice’?
Quite simply, it’s the way you write when you write on behalf of your business.
We’re talking about the style of writing that you use in the copy:
on your website,
across your printed products (leaflets, posters, notices etc.),
on your social media posts and,
anywhere else where you require words to communicate something on behalf of your business.
Getting this voice right - and then keeping it consistent - is absolutely essential to ensure customer engagement with your business and to help build connection, trust and loyalty over time.
As a generation of digital natives, we are exceptionally well-versed in absorbing and interpreting ‘brand speak’ and we know what we like (and what we don’t like).
So, if your business gets off on the wrong foot with your tone of voice, you are pretty much scuppered.
The importance of this is why people hire copywriters for their business communications…
Why can’t I just write as myself - it’s my business after all?
Well, it’s not that you can’t exactly. Of course you can.
It’s just that if you really want to go on to harvest all the goodies that a successful and consistent brand voice can produce, then it’s worth giving the thing a few minutes of consideration - and even sprinkling a little strategic magic over it, if you can.
And maybe you’ll be lucky enough to have a business ToV that is very close to your own, making it a lot easier for you to write in an authentic style. But, in all honesty, it’s rarely this simple and even if you think this does apply to you and your business, it’s still worth reading on, taking a moment to reflect on the choices that you have made about your business ToV and recognising that these are stylistic decisions - even if they have up to now been entirely driven by your gut instinct.
The Style Guide (and why you should want one)
In the trade, we would create a whole document to outline and define a brand ToV. This provides a useful overview to anyone writing copy on behalf of the business. Some people call it a Tone of Voice document or include it as a part of a broader Brand Guidelines document.
If you have a number of outsourced people or employees producing written content on behalf of your business, this is an invaluable tool to ensure that the nemesis of a successful ToV is kept at bay: inconsistency.
If your business tone of voice is inconsistent, then potential customers can’t come to recognise you and if they can’t recognise you, then they can’t rely on you, and if they can’t rely on you, they can’t trust you... you see where I’m going with this?
Even just a couple of paragraphs that sum up how you want your business to be represented in the written form and a few basic practical guidelines can be really helpful to an employee.
Create your own Style Guide
Here is a set of really easy to follow steps, to help you dive deeper into your own business or brand voice and draw up a style guide to keep inconsistency at bay and drive customer engagement with all written communications. Time to select a beautiful notebook, napkin, parchment or similar and put together your business style guide.
“The nemesis of a successful business tone of voice is inconsistency.”
To create the perfect voice for your business, we’re seeking to balance out two central concerns - what you want to say and what your customer wants to hear. So, let’s have a think about those two things as far as your business is concerned.
Task One - What you want to say
Jot down a list of attributes* that you’d like the business to be known for. Get down as many as you can and think broadly.
For example: As a florist, I want my business to be seen as highly creative, stylish, chic, house plant specialists, highly efficient, exceptional service providers…
Task Two - What they want to hear
And now make a list of the qualities that you think your customers would most value from your business. You’ll need to think carefully about why they’re using your business services and what they’d expect and need from your type of business.
For example: As a florist, I know my customers want my business to be approachable, inspirational, creative, knowledgable, specialist, quick, have an easy to use website / app, competitive pricing…
Now circle all the attributes that show up on both lists. These words represent the central expectations that need to be met within your tone of voice in order for everyone to be on the same page about your business - and for both you and your customers to feel like they’re winning.
Go even further to select what you feel are the top three most important of these core values - and these are now the central, key, core, ultimate, heart-of-the-matter attributes that your business tone of voice and all your copy needs to convey.
Put these words at the top of your style guide because they help us to set the tone.
*an attribute is a positive quality or feature regarded as characteristic of something.
Task Three - The Word Bank
A word bank doesn’t contain every word you’d ever use: it doesn’t contain all the general words in the English language and it isn’t a dictionary of jargon (specialist terminology) for your industry. Rather, it’s a carefully curated collection of key words and phrases that sit really comfortably within your brand’s emerging tone of voice.
Start by letting your mind free-flow, keeping in mind the core values or attributes that you selected above, jotting down a broad collection of words and phrases that are associated with the personality of your business.
Here’s an example word bank for the floristry business we launched above:
Botanical, exotic, cocktail garden, garden-wares, al fresco, planters, bamboo, concrete, trend-led, elegant, sophistication, wild, urban jungle, highly scented, social gathering, hosting, succulents, balcony…
As you see, in the first instance, it’s quite a random word-association style collection of words, so once you think you’ve squeezed as many as you can think of onto the page, go back through and cross out anything that’s too vague, non-essential or conflicts with the tone of the rest of the words.
If you want to get a little fancy, you can divide your word bank up into different categories, or simply present it as a list or (my favourite) a word cloud within the document. Anyone who sits and reads through these words should emerge feeling ‘in the mindset’ of your business tone of voice and ready to write.
Task Three - Some key questions to consider:
As a final port of call, answer these questions to provide some additional insights and style guidance.
Some of these questions might not seem relevant considerations for your business at first but it’s worth considering every one carefully - even if that means considering why you’re not doing something - to ensure that you are making conscious decisions about your brand voice, with both your business needs and your customer’s desires in mind, and not just defaulting to your own personal style.
How formal / informal do you want to sound on a scale of 1-10 (1 is completely, utterly relaxed and 10 is the ultimate, selling-life-insurance-level, of formality)
Once you have decided on this rating, it will help to guide you with some of the next questions.
Do you use technical language / jargon associated with your business (or is it off-putting for your customer?)
If you want to create a feeling of exclusivity, or build a tribe of customer’s who feel in-the-club, this is a useful way to do it. But, if you want to be completely inclusive, you’ll need to go easy on the jargon.
Do you use slang or even mild swears?!
It’s not always wrong to subvert and push the boundaries. It can be a useful way to add a little sparkle, some wit, a tongue in cheek tone, some edge and carve out your niche customer. It’s like smearing Marmite on your copy though, so be prepared for binary opposition!
Are you trying to be witty - or not?
Whether something is funny or not is pretty subjective. You’ll need to feel pretty darn comfortable with knowing your target customer well, before you go after their funny bone. But when it works, boy does it work.
How relaxed are you about punctuation and grammar?
It’s nice to create a bit of a signature style with your punctuation and use it with intention to really bring your voice to life. I break a lot of grammarian’s hearts every time I start a sentence with ‘and’ or pepper my copy with very short sentences. But I do it anyway. Because it suits my brand voice to be easy to read and conversational in my style.
Do you use long sentences or short ones? What about paragraph lengths?
If you’re expecting the reader to come to your content with a cup of tea, their biggest and best attention span and a desire to go deep, then you can use longer and more complex sentences and paragraphs. But, if you know they’ll be looking to skim, scan, lightly digest and move on, then help them out with shorter ones.How do you refer to your company - using I/me or we/us?
This can cause some angst amongst small businesses in particular. Generally speaking, if you want to sound like a bigger company with multiple employees, it’s better to go with the third person (that’s we and us). If you want to emphasise personal service, one-to-one attention, access to a particular specialist or you’re building a brand around an individual, you need to go with the first person (that’s I / me / my).
Is there anything you should never ever say… or any words that are difficult in the context of your business?
I recently created a website for a client who explained to me that the word ‘expert’ shouldn’t be thrown around in the website copy because in his industry, expert meant ‘expert witness’ in the judicial sense. So, there you are. Every industry is different. Make sure you know yours.
Time to write
Safe to say if you’ve worked through the questions and considerations in this post, and collated your thoughts and ideas into a document, then you’re well on the way to creating a useful Style Guide for you and anyone else writing for your business.
Treat your Style Guide as a working document - that’s to say it can be amended and added to at any time and should develop and grow organically with your business. Take the time to re-consider your responses 6 months from now and make any changes required to ensure it’s up to date and reflects the growth of your business and your deeper insights into customer needs.
So, now you can go ahead and dive into creating some beautiful written content for your business, reaping the benefits of a consistent and well-considered tone of voice across the board.
If you have any queries about any of this, or need a little extra guidance and support in the process of pinning down your business voice, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me for a chat.