Creating a brand voice is crucial for establishing a consistent and cohesive identity across all your communication channels. It outlines your brand’s unique personality, tone, and messaging style to ensure your content accurately reflects your brand identity and resonates with your target audience.
In this guide, we'll cover the essential steps to develop effective brand voice guidelines, from defining your brand identity to crafting messaging that reflects your core values.
Table of Contents
What Is Brand Voice?
Brand voice refers to the consistent expression of your business’s core messages and how you communicate with your audience and clients across various channels. It encompasses various elements that make up your brand including the language you use and the values you share.
Your brand voice may vary depending on several aspects:
- The channel you use to share your message
- The type of audience you refer to
- The goal you want to accomplish
How To Create Brand Voice Guidelines
- Define your brand
- Identify your audience
- Curate your word choices
- Evaluate your content marketing strategy
- Examine your written content
- Inspect your visual content
1. Define Your Brand
The first and most important step to take when creating brand voice guidelines is to carefully consider your company’s:
- Vision: Think about future goals you want to achieve.
- Mission: Determine your brand’s existence and purpose.
- Values: Define your company culture and the core principles that guide your business.
You can learn more about these three key factors in our guide to brand books.
Then, you should also heed your selling points, i.e., the reasons why your clients use what you offer and how they benefit from that, as well as what makes you better than your competitors. All these factors will help you define your brand clearly and emphasize the purpose of your communication.
Example: Nike’s well-constructed mission statement echoes what your brand voice should be like:
2. Identify Your Audience
To understand how to approach your target market and develop the right brand voice and tone, you should discover who they are. The best way to do that is by conducting in-depth audience research and collecting info about the following key aspects:
- Demographics: Identify the basic information about your typical users, such as their gender, income level, education, and location. This can help you understand the characteristics of your audience. For example, age is a factor to consider when choosing a tone of voice, colors, and even value propositions.
- Likes and dislikes: People like a brand with preferences and styles that match theirs. Find out their preferred channels or content formats, so you can tailor your messaging.
- Pain points: You should know the challenges or problems your target audience faces which your brand can provide a solution to.
- Buying behavior: Wants, needs, desires, and pain points are all powerful motivators that drive purchases. Find out your audience’s interests, values, lifestyles, and motivations to learn what drives their behaviors.
These will allow you to create a buyer persona and help you understand your prospects’ language and what type of clientele you are addressing.
3. Curate Your Word Choices
Think about the words that describe your business. Using specific phrases consistently in your content will help shape your brand voice and tone and serve as an important part of your brand voice guidelines. Additionally, consider your target audience: use your research to use words that also address and reflect their preferences and values.
Typically, people are drawn to catchy phrases that pique their interest and raise their curiosity. For example, Skype prefers using conversation and simple language versus technical jargon in their content. This helps them better connect with a vast user base.
4. Evaluate Your Content Marketing Strategy
Whether it’s written content, video, or images, your content is where your brand voice and messaging are highlighted the most. Revisit your content strategy — use the insights you’ve gathered from your audience research and assess their content consumption preferences.
For instance, if your audience prefers emails, put more work into your email marketing campaigns and ensure that your brand's tone and value are highlighted in your emails. Similarly, if they lean toward video consider, consider doubling down on your video marketing efforts and using new platforms such as YouTube or TikTok to engage with your audience.
5. Examine Your Written Content
To create effective brand voice guidelines, review your existing content across all platforms, including your website’s blog posts and social media updates.
Compare different samples to assess how your brand voice and tone come across. Put yourself in your audience’s shoes: consider whether you like what you hear. If not, what would you improve?
Here are a few more important questions to address:
- Is my content relevant to the values I want to communicate?
- Does it correspond to the message I convey to my prospects?
- What type of tone I’ve used? Is it formal or casual? Does it match my buying persona?
6. Inspect Your Visual Content
Developing brand voice guidelines successfully also requires an audit of the media you use on your website and other channels. Also, ask yourself if the colors you incorporate in your graphics resonate with your buyer persona and align with your brand identity.
Additionally, consider the type of videos you produce. Determine whether they are relevant for your audience or not to ensure they reflect your brand voice consistently.
7. Make Slight Adjustments
Brand consistency is a key factor in building trust and rapport with your audience. Once you’ve established your brand voice, there’s no room for major shifts. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t fine-tune elements of your brand tone and content marketing strategy. By examining user feedback, industry trends, and behavior, you can tweak your content and messaging to enhance credibility and build more trust.
Additionally, exploring additional marketing values, such as influencer marketing can also help boost your branding efforts and gain credibility by association. By partnering with influencers who share your values, you can amplify your brand’s perception in front of their target audience, making your brand stand out even more.
How To Stick to Your Brand Voice Guidelines Successfully
Here are the key ways to effectively adhere to your brand voice guidelines:
- Document your guidelines: The best way to stick to your brand voice guidelines is to document them. A formal document distributed to your marketing or content team ensures consistency across channels. By detailing your brand’s persona, voice, and design principles, this document serves as the go-to resource to maintain alignment with your brand identity.
- Train your team: Besides having a document, you should conduct training sessions to ensure all team members understand and can properly apply the guidelines.
- Regularly review content: Create a routine, system, or process for reviewing your content across platforms to check if they follow your guidelines. This helps spot any inconsistencies early on.
- Gather feedback: Seek feedback from your team and audience to see how well your brand voice comes across. Use their input to further improve your guidelines.
- Update as needed: As your brand grows, make sure to revisit your guidelines occasionally and adjust them to reflect any changes in your business, such as rebranding.
- Share with external partners: Brand voice guidelines are not just for internal use. You should also provide your guidelines to external agencies or third-party collaborators to ensure all your marketing efforts are aligned.
5 Brand Voice Examples To Get Inspired By
Here are the best five brand voice examples that businesses can learn a lot from:
1. Whole Foods Market
Whole Foods Market is a U.S. multinational supermarket chain renowned for its healthy products. The brand displays consistency in combining nutrition, entertainment, and playfulness across its different channels. On Facebook, its posts are engaging and amusing; while also reassuring its clients that it sticks to its community values.
Additionally, Whole Foods Market uses inspiring and playful language when announcing product discounts on their Twitter account, which creates a positive and relatable connection with its audience:
On their website, this friendly and conversational tone remains consistent, even in announcements about in-store events:
2. Apple
According to Statista, Apple was one of the most valuable brands worldwide in 2023, with a market share of $2.91 trillion, second only to Microsoft. As such, Apple is one of the most recognizable companies and a great example of an effective brand voice.
Apple’s tone is simple, confident, and innovative. When you see Apple, you see luxury, exclusivity, and the future of mobile technology; at least, that’s the impression whenever you visit the brand's website or watch its advertisements:
[Source: Apple via YouTube]
3. Slack
Slack is a messaging platform and collaboration hub that embodies clarity. Its brand voice and tone, messaging, and content are simple, concise, humane, and friendly. The brand creates content for a global audience, ensuring that anyone can understand.
Some of their brand voice guidelines include:
- Being concise and saying more with less
- Using common and simple words
- Avoiding slang
- Incorporating active voice
Slack is also an excellent brand voice example that consistently conveys its company vision, as demonstrated on its homepage and About Us page:
4. Dove
Dove is a personal care company known for its confident and empowering brand tone and uplifting and encouraging vision. In all its marketing efforts, the brand embodies its persona that highlights its commitment to delivering high-quality products.
Dove is also among our top brand voice examples that empower its customers to embrace beauty and body image positively by using a tone that’s both inspiring and friendly.
We can see this consistent voice and tone on its social media platforms like Twitter, and on its website:
5. Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola’s unique brand message is to spread joy, happiness, and togetherness among its customers. The company consistently uses a unique, friendly tone in different campaigns and ads. Its focus on positivity and optimism is the defining trait of Coca-Cola's brand voice.
The brand has successfully incorporated this persona into its branding strategy, building a strong brand identity that makes Coca-Cola truly stand out.
Besides its social media platforms, its brand voice is also evident in its video advertisements:
[Source: Coca-Cola via YouTube]
Why Is Brand Voice Important?
The way you deliver your message to your audience matters, as it can be the deciding factor for them to convert. A unique brand tone of voice creates a cohesive personality and helps you communicate with your potential customers effectively.
Here are the three key reasons why establishing a consistent brand tone of voice is important:
1. Creates a Strong First Impression
Consumers are quick to form a first impression about your brand. In fact, it only takes seven seconds. This perception of your brand, however, is not only based on visual elements like logos or colors. Your brand voice and tone can also play an important role in how your target market perceives your business.
A consistent voice can capture consumers’ attention and keep them interested in your content and company. Brand guidelines ensure that every piece of content has a unified style and tone, building recognition, trust, and consistency across all marketing channels. This creates a strong and lasting first impression on your audience.
2. Increases Brand Recognition
A strong tone of voice can help you emotionally connect with your audience and turn your business into a memorable brand. As your content reaches potential clients, they begin to associate your business with certain words, phrases, and ideas. In turn, when they need products or services similar to what you offer, a distinct and memorable brand voice ensures they remember your message and more importantly, your product.
3. Boosts Sales
Consistent brand promotion across all channels can boost your revenue by up to 23%. By maintaining a consistent brand voice across every platform, aided by clear brand voice guidelines, you demonstrate to consumers that you understand their pain points and position yourself as a reliable solution provider. This not only helps you strengthen your brand identity but also earns your audience’s trust, ultimately leading to more closed deals and increased revenue.
Brand Voice Template
If you’re looking for inspiration for your own brand voice, look at our brand voice template:
| Voice Type | Description | Do | Don’t |
| Serious | A tone that conveys a sense of gravity and importance, often used in professional or formal contexts. It is great for high-profile or formal businesses such as attorneys and healthcare practices. | Use clear, precise language and facts to build credibility. Establish authority within your industry with relevant, precise, and expert content using a formal yet inviting voice. | Avoid slang or overly casual language that could undermine the message. Also, use jargon thoughtfully to ensure every reader can understand the value your brand offers. |
| Humorous | A light-hearted tone that aims to entertain or amuse the audience, making the brand appear more relatable and friendly. | Incorporate wit and clever language to engage the audience. Your humor should still be intelligent and relevant to truly resonate. | Don't offend or alienate audiences with inappropriate jokes. Avoid tasteless and offensive humor just to catch people’s attention. Bad publicity is not the way to go if you want a credible brand. |
| Inspirational | A motivating and uplifting tone to inspire the audience to act or feel more positive. | Use motivational stories and empowering language. | Avoid cliches or overly vague statements that don't inspire. Avoid romanticizing or painting unrealistic scenarios. Always maintain a sense of realism. |
| Friendly | A warm and welcoming tone that makes the brand feel approachable and supportive to the audience. | Use conversational language and personal pronouns. | Don't be overly familiar or invade the audience's personal space. |
| Authoritative | A confident and knowledgeable tone that positions the brand as a leader or expert in its field. | Use confident language and cite expertise or credentials. In the right industry, expertise can set your business apart from the rest. | Avoid coming off as arrogant or inaccessible. Being authoritative also means being respectable. Brand Voice Takeaways |
Brand Voice Takeaways
Having a strong tone of voice can turn your brand into an authentic and memorable presence that:
- Creates a strong first impression
- Increases brand recognition
- Turns consumers into loyal customers
- Boosts sales
To ensure consistency across all platforms and content types, create your own brand voice guidelines and adhere to them whenever you publish new content, whether an article on your website or a social media post. The best branding companies ensure their clients' brand voice is always on par.
Creating Brand Voice Guidelines: FAQs
1. What is the difference between brand voice and tone?
While voice refers to your company’s personality, tone is the emotional inflection you incorporate in various content. It's the tool you use to adjust your brand’s attitude in your message based on who you are talking to and what you are talking about. Unlike brand voice, which always remains consistent, the tone can change depending on the situation.
2. What are the elements of a brand voice?
The elements of a brand voice are:
- Personality: Set of human characteristics attributed to a brand, such as friendly, professional, playful, authoritative, or innovative. The personality of the brand should reflect its values, target audience, and industry.
- Tone: Tone refers to the mood or attitude conveyed in the brand's communications. It can vary depending on the context or audience but should always align with the overall brand personality. Examples include sincere, optimistic, humorous, formal, or casual.
- Language: The choice of words and phrases a brand uses in its communication. Depending on the brand's audience and message, it can include industry-specific jargon, slang, or technical terms.
- Purpose: Every piece of communication should have a clear purpose, whether it's to inform, entertain, persuade, or engage the audience. The brand's voice should consistently reflect this purpose, ensuring that all content aligns with the brand's overall objectives.
- Consistency: Consistency is key to establishing and maintaining a strong brand voice. It ensures the brand is easily recognizable across all platforms and touchpoints, from social media and website content to advertising and customer service.
- Adaptability: A brand's voice should be adaptable enough to suit different platforms, audiences, and situations. This flexibility allows the brand to maintain its personality while effectively engaging with diverse audiences.
3. How do you structure a brand voice?
To structure a brand voice, follow the next steps:
- Identify your brand's core values and personality
- Understand your target audience
- Analyze your current voice
- Define clear voice attributes
- Develop detailed guidelines for each attribute
- Apply the voice across all channels
- Train your team on the brand voice
- Regularly review and revise the voice guidelines
