A brand tone of voice is an all-encompassing element that focuses on the first, and lasting, impression your customers get of your brand. As well as looking specifically at what you say, a brand tone of voice considers how you say it, across all communications both written and spoken.
The words we say in everyday life define who we are. And what we say, every bit as much as where we say it, helps to shape our brand. In fact, in many places – such as Twitter – it’s often our words that have the most significant possible impact on people, over and above other forms of media. The slick ability to react to a meme can win over a new audience, or our tone at the point of frustration can keep hold of existing customers. So we must be correctly in control of what we’re saying, as a brand, as a company – even as representatives of an organisation.
Our process looks from the outside in, first considering your audience and how they’re likely to perceive the way you speak through to the types of content you might be looking to create and right down to the length of the sentences you write.
Tone of Voice Brand Guidelines
The tone of voice brand guidelines defines a brand’s personality through communication. They establish consistent language styles, guiding interactions to reflect brand values. These tone of voice brand guidelines ensure messaging coherence across platforms, fostering relatability, trust, and recognition while creating a unique and resonant brand identity in every communication touchpoint.
If you’re looking for help with your tone of voice brand guidelines, we can provide an approach that suits your needs, whether this is a detailed workshop or a simple questionnaire to kick things off, and the final deliverables can match what you’re after too – from pure one-page reference sheets to in-depth style guides which can compliment your brand guidelines.
Content Workshop
Your brand tone of voice isn’t just how you speak. It’s about what you say as much as anything. If our bodies are 80% diet and 20% exercise, then our tone of voice could be considered 80% subject matter, and 20% word choice. Our language tones our bodies, but we feast on content, especially today when channels have exploded all over the internet, and it’s difficult to keep up with producing words. In addition to our brand tone of voice workshop, we run effectively what’s part two – the content workshop. From this, we’ll be able to define a structured approach for what to say in whatever channel you want – from social media to digital PR work. You’ll never be short of something to say, as we’ll help you develop some robust content themes.
Content Marketing
The last part turns you from having a brand tone of voice into thinking like a publisher. Imagine you’re behind your editorial desk at some prominent magazine like Vogue – you’ll be looking a year ahead to work out what you want written about, and you’ll know what events are going on, and what is a very Vogue thing to be said for each of them. Content marketing means the same for you. We’ll help you define what should be saying and the topics that you should be talking about.
We’ll turn the content themes that we discussed in our content workshop into a plan of action. We’ll liberate some wild ideas from your head, out onto paper and then allocate them to different channels: your website, your blog, your Facebook page, whatever you want. This works perfectly for all forms of media, not just the written word. From the channels, we build this out into a calendar – if you want to create some of the content yourself, or need us to write everything on your behalf. We’ll give you some clear visibility of what’s going on.
Once everything is in motion, we’ll keep you on schedule with regular coffee-fuelled editorial catch-ups.
Contact us today to talk about your tone of voice brand guidelines.
