How to create distinctive tone of voice guidelines for your business

A consistent, familiar tone of voice is the foundation of good brand communication. It helps your company to stand out from competitors, build credibility and create meaningful connections with customers.

While most companies have brand guidelines that dictate use of logos, fonts and colour palettes, fewer have guidelines on tone of voice. 

Your brand’s tone of voice reflects the personality and values of your business. It should resonate with your audience and show them what they can expect when interacting with your business, whether it’s making a purchase or following you on social media.

A tone of voice could be friendly, disruptive, funny, serious or something else – what matters is that it aligns with what your business is trying to achieve. 

Take Monzo, a modern, digital bank that aims to “make life easier, not harder”. Their tone of voice is positive and accessible, using language their audience would use:

“Get instant notifications the second you pay. Set budgets for things like groceries and going out, and get warnings if you’re spending too fast (if you want them).”

At the other end of the spectrum, HSBC is a traditional bank that dates back to the 1800s. Its tone of voice is confident and insightful, leaning on more formal language:

“Our Business Banking Account is designed for small and medium sized enterprises with established needs who require the support of a dedicated Relationship Manager and specialist teams.”

At Inkwell, we often get asked about how to develop a tone of voice and keep it consistent. This article should provide a useful starting point to:

• Define your brand’s personality 

• Create a tone of voice that will resonate with customers

• Develop clear tone of voice guidelines 

You can then download your own free, editable template to set tone of voice guidelines for your business. 

Six steps to creating tone of voice guidelines

Step one: Reflect on your mission and values

Start by thinking about what your company wants to achieve and what you need to do to get there. Your mission, purpose and values will inform your brand personality and the characteristics you want to be associated with. 

Consider:

• What your brand personality is at the moment

• What you want your reputation to be

• What you don’t want to be known for

Step two: Find out who is engaging with your brand 

Look at the audience that is most engaged with your brand – is it the audience you want to attract? If so, review your top-performing content and the language your audience responds best to. This will inform your brand voice later on in the process.

If you’re not attracting the right audience, think about what you need to do differently. Identify new target personas and look at the brands that resonate with this audience, such as content they’ve liked or companies they follow on social media. 

Step three: Look at your industry and competitors

Once you’ve got a clear idea of what you want to achieve and the audience you’re targeting, take a step back and examine the space you’re operating in.

Analyse your competitors’ brand voice and personality. Your tone of voice can be a powerful differentiator and valuable tool for attracting customers, but only if it feels unique to your business. 

The last thing you want to do is to develop a new tone of voice, only to find out it sounds exactly like everyone else. Digiday wrote a great article on the phenomenon of The Funny Brand Voice, explaining that:

“As brands look to stand out by using trending phrases, so-called Gen Z speak and cultural moments, many are inadvertently sounding the same [...] It creates a social media landscape in which many brands are sacrificing individual brand voice to boost engagement online.”

Think realistically about your industry’s image and the inherent customer expectations. What do you need to make customers feel in order for them to engage with your brand? What objections might they have?

A good example of this is in industries like healthcare or financial services, where lives or livelihoods are on the line and trust is imperative. You don’t need to use formal language to come across as professional and reassuring, but a tone that’s too casual might actually deter customers from using your services. 

Step four: Define your tone of voice

Create a list of adjectives that reflect how you want your brand to sound. For example, is it:

• Friendly or reserved?

• Funny or serious?

• Accessible or exclusive?

• Simple or complex?

• Familiar or disruptive?

• Realistic or idealistic?

This list should provide a starting point for your thinking, but in reality, most brand voices will sit somewhere in the middle of each spectrum. We use a sliding scale in our brand workshops to visualise this – you might decide that you’re 80% friendly and 20% reserved.

Once you’ve got some general ideas, narrow these down with more specific descriptions. This will help you to carve out a niche, but also provide much-needed clarity in your tone of voice guidelines.

You want other people in your business to understand your tone of voice at a glance, but ambiguous words can easily be interpreted in the wrong way. For example, “serious” risks translating into “boring” – better options might be “authoritative”, “clear” or “direct”.

Step five: Create a word bank

It’s one thing to define a tone of voice in theory, it’s another to put it into practice. Word banks are a useful tool to help your team start using a new tone of voice until it becomes second nature.

A word bank is a short list of words (20-30) that you’d expect to use when writing for your business. You can create the list by drawing from top-performing content and customer language, as well as researching synonyms – just make sure it aligns with your brand voice.

Word banks are by no means exhaustive, nor do you need to use every single word when you’re putting together content. But you’d be surprised how quickly a distinct tone of voice takes shape once you’ve got a list of words in front of you.

Here are two examples of word banks:

Word bank one: A financial publication

Tone: Corporate, professional and complex 

Leading, authority, quantified, soaring, yielded, integrity, responsibility, accuracy, policymakers, genuine, resilient, valuations, economic, maximise, beneficiaries, stability, fragmented, modernise.

Word bank two: A customer service platform

Tone: Friendly, disruptive and optimistic

Engaging, fascinating, high-value, drive, navigate, pretty quick, exciting, thrive, brand new, enhance, opportunities, cutting-edge, quality, crucial, compelling, irresistible, smooth, essential, invest, winning, incredible.

Step six: Develop tone of voice guidelines

The final step is to compile this information into tone of voice guidelines for the rest of your business. 

Your tone of voice guidelines should include:

• An introduction to the guidelines (i.e. why they matter and how they should be used)

• A description of your brand voice, including core characteristics

• Examples of how your tone of voice is used in practice

• Tips of what to do and what not to do

• Any tone of voice variations (i.e. social media might be more informal than whitepapers)

• Links to other relevant resources, such as your style guide, company mission statement and customer persona docs

Tone of voice guidelines need to be visual, accessible and straight to the point, so your team can skim read them and understand your target tone at a glance.

Ready to create your own?

We’ve developed a tried-and-tested template to help you create your own tone of voice guidelines.

Simply fill in the form below and you’ll be redirected to create a unique copy of the template in Google Sheets. This file will be private to your organisation and can’t be viewed by anyone else (including us!).

If you’ve got more questions about creating a tone of voice or you’d prefer a PDF version of the template, send us an email and we’ll be happy to help: hello@inkwellagency.co.uk.