Creating a Voice & Tone Guide for your SME
The best analogy for why brand tone and voice consistency is important is, perhaps, the logo: if Nike changed the famous tick on every piece of clothing and advertising it produced, would it be as successful?
Creating a consistent brand tone and voice for your company builds both conscious and unconscious recognition in your audience. It lets people know they’re in the right place, and it also lets them know what kind of service they can expect. It sets the tone for the relationship.
Having a documented voice guide also helps your marketing team stay focused throughout the campaign cycle — from idea generation through to delivery. As you can no doubt tell, I’m a huge advocate for voice and tone guides; they’ve helped me create working environments in which content editors are clear on their objectives and how they can achieve them.
In this post, I’ll be talking about how you can create a tight set of company voice and tone rules that your internal or external marketers can follow.
Voice = How Your Company Sounds
Tone = The Mood of any Given Communication from Your Company
Your company’s voice should stay pretty much the same, but your tone will change depending on what you’re writing, and the intended audience.
Let’s start by talking about voice.
Voice
Your voice = audience research + your SME’s core message + encoding
Audience Research
We perform a kind of research every time we meet someone for the first time; we throw some subjects out there to see what hits and what misses. We listen to the language the other person uses, the facial expressions they use, and we create an internal comms strategy just for them.
It works in much the same way with any marketing project but we have more resources available before we start the conversation. With a little research we can find out how where our audience hangs out online, what they read, and the language they use. I find creating an audience persona helps me focus on appropriate language; here’s a template to get you started.
Start by filling in information on age, job, location, family, political leanings, professional goals, personal/professional challenges, and the tone they use online. You should end up with something like this:
Age: 21-35
Location: London
Family: New parent
Professional position: Senior executive
Professional goals: Managerial promotion within 5 years
Personal goals: Buy a house
Interests: Childcare tips, money-saving, family-friendly weekend trips, staycations, value for money.
Education: Secondary school.
Voice online: Hopeful, sometimes pessimistic, open to suggestions, shares knowledge confidently when in a position to do so.
Already, you’ll have a better idea of how best to communicate with this group, but hold on. Put the information to one side for now; we’ll be referring back to it later.
Your Core Strategy Statement
I covered how to create a core strategy statement for your marketing content in another post, but here’s a short explanation: it’s usually a single sentence that sets the direction for content projects large and small. It ensures everything you do moves towards the same business goal.
Brain Traffic created the very useful achieve—be—do approach to developing a core strategy, which boils down to:
Achieve: What business goals your content strategy needs to support/achieve
Be: What you produce
Do: How you produce it
Add in some aspirational thinking and you’ve got yourself a core content strategy statement. Here’s a real example I created for Higher Education (HE) college UKCBC:
Achieve: Our content needs to support enrolment goals by delivering relevant traffic (mature students) to our site and guiding those prospective students through the enrolment funnel.
Be: We’ll deliver information that speaks to the concerns of our audience in their language. We’ll show them how they can access HE, and how they can study while working.
Do: We’ll produce targeted guides, podcasts and videos that educate prospective students on their choices. We’ll deliver our content via relevant online channels.
The information above formed the basis for the college’s core strategy statement:
“Be THE online resource for prospective mature students, and help those who didn’t study a degree understand they still have academic opportunities.”
Within this statement are some more clues to, what eventually became, the College’s voice; resource indicates plain-speak, knowledge, and trust; academic opportunities speaks of aspiration; mature students have outside commitments, so language indicating a support structure seems appropriate.
Now it’s time to combine everything for the final part of our equation.
Message Encoding
You’ve come home late (again) from work because an important meeting overran (it’s a crazy pre-covid hypothetical meeting). Your partner has already voiced concerns regarding your working habits. Now you’re going to have to communicate something that placates your significant other while emphasising the importance of the meeting. How do you do it? By encoding, of course!
Our voice (including in the situation above) must do two things:
Deliver information
Achieve an objective
This is called encoding, and it works in the same way for business comms. Delivering information effectively requires audience research; achieving an objective requires strategy.
During the encoding stage, we combine the knowledge of our target audience with our core strategy statement to create a guide for our company voice. If we do it well (and produce relevant content), everyone wins.
Let’s put our encoding into action using the research and strategy information from the previous sections:
Best Voice for Delivering Information to our Audience: Efficient, plain language. NO JARGON. Positive change. Supportive. Knowledgable. Empathetic.
Best Voice for Achieving Our Objective: Trustworthy. Educational. Valuable. Informative. Fun. Aspirational. Empowering.
Now we have all the information we need to create a short, succinct set of rules that can be used to create marketing copy for any project.
Our voice
We’re educators: We give people well-researched information that helps them make the best decision for their future. Our voice is clear and informative.
We’re aspirational: We show people just how accessible higher education can be and what you can achieve once you’re here. Our voice invites people to dream.
We’re efficient: Our audience is busy working and raising children; they don’t need fluff. Our voice is concise.
We’re fun: Our college is built around community, friendship, and support. We want to help students build towards a better future and have a blast while they’re doing it. Our voice is upbeat.
Tone
The hard part is over, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know; now the hard part begins. But seriously, finding the right tone for a given piece of marketing material is mostly common sense. I recommend putting all confirmed comms projects through the quick equation below before you start the creative work.
Purpose of piece + audience’s state of mind = tone
Audience’s State of Mind
If we know how someone feels, we can better decide which tone will elicit the response we want.
When creating your marketing material, think about where it will fit in your sales funnel, what topic you’re referencing, along with the time and date you will be publishing. All of these variables will affect how your audience feels — if you’re referencing the COVID pandemic after a new lockdown has been announced, for example, an appropriate tone might lean towards spirited perseverance.
Purpose of Marketing Piece
Every piece of content should have one of the following goals:
To increase brand awareness
To increase brand traffic
To increase engagement
To increase leads
To convert
The same goes for any marketing comms material, and your tone will change depending on the purpose. If you’re looking to convert, you’ll be using using tight sentences and the imperative mood; you’ll be presenting your offer and the benefit at the start. Brand awareness, in contrast, is more about communicating the defining characteristics of your business; the indicative mood is commonplace in this type of marketing comms: “We are your neighbour; we are your friend; we are enter company name here.”
Have you found this useful? If so, feel free to share it among your peers. And if you’re really impressed, consider hiring me to design your voice and tone guidelines, or for some outstanding content.
Oh, and I’ll be converting the information from this post into graphics (great printout material) for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter; consider following me on those channels.