How to develop a tone of voice for your brand
The words we use in our copy set the tone of our brand voice. Whether it’s a single point-of-contact form, a newsletter, or a full-scale website, your words can paint an image of your brand to establish familiarity and trust.
Your brand voice is crucial in shaping the experiences that customers have with your company. As such, it is important that the tone of voice you apply across multiple touchpoints maintain a consistent experience throughout your entire customer journey.
The tone of voice perfect for banking wouldn’t necessarily suit a theme park. Fortunately, there are a few tips that can be applied across multiple tones of voice.
Keep your target audience in mind
Do you have a vision for your brand’s voice? If not, buying personas can be helpful in giving it a direction. These fictional profiles of your target audience will help you define its needs and wants, allowing you to write with precision about what matters most to them.
A common mistake is trying to target ‘everyone’. In doing this, we assume all our customers have the same mindset and needs.
Brands have a distinct personality that sets them apart from one another. What makes your brand stand out are the values and perspectives you bring to the world. And that’s where the brand voice comes in. It represents your unique perspective and helps you stand out as a unique organisation in an oversaturated market.
Align the website design with the tone of voice
Before you start building your website, you need to create a brand voice and tone. It will help you maintain your website’s identity and position it as the authority in your industry.
It is important for every organisation to have a consistent tone of voice when writing online. The language used should be authentic, easy to recognise, and unique.
Have a clear mission statement
The first step in writing is to pin down your values. Deciding the values that you stand for and believe in helps you to make decisions about how you write, what words you choose, and how to frame ideas. Pinning down your values acts as a foundation – before you can think about how you write, you must decide on what you write.
A clear, focused mission statement isn’t just a great way to stay on track. An effective brand mission demonstrates the core values of your company and inspires your team to work hard towards that vision — even when they don’t feel like it.
Build a consistent presence
Making sure your tone of voice is consistent is a good way to keep people on the same page.
The tone of voice that you use needs to be across all your communications. Your marketing, sales, and customer success teams will all be briefed on how it should sound. Keep checking everything that goes out in your company’s name, especially on social media and email.
The language you use to talk to your customers can have a big impact on their perception of you, and the emotional experience they have with your brand. That is why we’re so passionate about storytelling. Our job is to create content that makes your organisation feel relatable, approachable, and human – which in turn helps to build that emotional connection with your customers.
To sum up
Once you have decided what you want to say, you can think about how best to say it. Developing your tone of voice means choosing the right words and phrases for your audience and subject matter. This is not about dropping grammar rules or writing in slang, but about selecting the most appropriate style for your message, whether it be personal or commercial.
Without a recognizable tone of voice, a company runs the risk of its writing being lost among the vast sea of existing copy. Your organisation’s tone of voice needs to express a unique personality, turning a faceless organisation into a group of people that have authority over their expertise.