How to Write Effective Tone of Voice Content Marketing

The way we speak says a lot about us. Follow the steps outlined in this article and learn how to write simple yet effective tone of voice content marketing guidelines for your business.

Whoever writes your content, one of the biggest challenges we see businesses facing when they come to creating content is doing so in their brand's voice.

It's totally understandable, too. Freelancers rarely scrape the surface of a business, while your subject matter experts are so deep in their areas of expertise that content can often go way over your target readers' heads.

(There's a reason most UK national newspapers assume a reading ability around that of a 10-year-old. Read more about why you need to find the right writing style for your business.)

What's a marketing manager to do?

Enter tone of voice guidelines.

A tone of voice content marketing guide doesn’t need to be complicated and long for it to be useful. In fact, the simpler and more accessible you can keep it, the better.

As a start, we'd recommend that it contains just three sections: a definition of your voice, a brand dictionary, and some objective examples.

But first, what is a tone of voice guide and why does your business need one?

Download the ebook to learn more about tone of voice and how it fits into an  effective content strategy.

Contents

  • What is a tone of voice guide?
  • How to write simple yet effective tone of voice content marketing guidelines
  • Should I create separate social media tone of voice guidelines?
  • Is your tone of voice guide being used?

What is a tone of voice guide?

A tone of voice guide is your company's one-stop-shop for writing in your brand's voice. What is voice, I hear you ask, and how can a brand have one?

As usual, HubSpot provides a neat definition:

brand voice guidelines


Borrowed straight from the learned pages of the HubSpot Academy, this definition clearly spells out what voice means in relation to your brand. We're talking about personality. And in the age of personalisation, human relationships, and customer-facing marketing, a little personality can go a long way.

Whatever your brand's personality, it's important that this remains consistent across all your customer-facing communications, whether your marketing team is writing a landing page, your copywriter is drafting an article, or the sales reps are pulling together a proposal.

Of course, you wouldn't write all those communications in exactly the same way. This is where tone comes in.

brand tone guidelines


Your sales proposal is likely to be a little more formal in tone than your LinkedIn posts, for example. In turn, those are likely to be more professional-sounding than the stories you're sharing on your company Instagram page.

So while your voice should be consistent (and documented), your tone is much more circumstantial. What is the context in which you or your team is writing and what is the right tone to strike?

How to write simple yet effective tone of voice content marketing guidelines

1. Define your voice


The way we speak says a lot about us. With today's consumers demanding authenticity and transparency, your voice needs to be true to your brand, but it also needs to be accessible to your audience. Step one when creating your tone of voice guidelines is defining a voice that meets those criteria.

This exercise should help:

Brand voice exercise

Imagine your brand is a person at a dinner party. You're sitting around the table with your business partners and competitors. It's the Friday after a long week and conversation is in full swing. You know the scene, but can you place your brand at the table?

Think about the typical characters you might expect to see: the outspoken authority leading the discussion, the reserved intellectual contributing insightful remarks, the comedian of the group bringing everyone to laughter with wit and pizzazz.

  • What are they wearing?
  • How long did they spend getting ready?
  • Are they drinking white? Red?  A line of tequila shots at the bar?
  • Of all these people, who are your customers most likely to get on with?

Thinking of your brand as a person instead of a business entity is a great way of bringing it to life and helping to imagine its voice. If possible, engage as much of the senior team as you can to ensure the tone of voice is both accurate and bought in across senior management/the board. Irregularities in voice are glaring. Everyone needs to be speaking in the same voice, after all.

If you're struggling to agree on which person your brand is, try starting with your competitors. It might be that everyone in the room imagines your brand differently but no one's in doubt that X company, against which you've been competing for many years, is the high-brow, holier-than-thou know-it-all at the head of the table.

Short on time? Download our inbound marketing ebook and skip to chapter four, where we reveal how to create a comprehensive communications strategy.

How to Write Simple Yet Effective Tone of Voice Content Marketing Guidelines for Your Business

2. A brand dictionary


The brand dictionary is a collection of words and other directives your team should use across their content because they evoke the right feeling and characterise the way you want people to think about your brand or company.

  • Start by defining the style of language. Is it for everyman or for experts? Is it evocative or straightforward? Contemporary or classic? Pay close attention to your target audience and who it is you want to be starting conversations with.
  • Then spend some time listing out sample words that fit those styles. For example, a word bank for a sunglasses brand might include words like ‘chic’, ‘incognito’, ‘protection’, ‘celebrity’ and ‘summer’, while for a company making racing bicycles it might include words like ‘exhilarating’, ‘flying’, ‘rush’, ‘escape’ and ‘alive’.
  • The word bank should also set out preferred usage for the most important vocabulary and phrases associated with your brand, for example, whether you want your communications to use ‘our employees’ or ‘our people’, ‘bicycle’ or ‘bike’, ‘premium’ or ‘luxury’. 

Every industry and company has its own jargon, and this section of the guide should explain that jargon, so that you can be sure your readers always understand. While you may well be an expert in your field, the chances are that not all of your buyer personas are. Unexplained acronyms can be particularly frustrating for readers.

Speaking in the first, second, or third person

Will your content will be written in the first, second, or third person?

  • First person — ‘I think’ or ‘we thought’. This is helpful for building the author's authority and establishing a personal connection with the reader in blog articles and video marketing.
  • Second person — ‘you think’ or ‘you thought’. Good for showing you really understand your buyer personas, and their pain points and goals.
  • Third person — ‘he thinks’ or ‘she thought’. Depending on your buyer personas, they may relate best to third-person content. This can often be a good choice for case studies or more formal writing, for example.

You might change 'person' for different forms, aiming to strike a more colloquial tone across your blog articles with the second person compared to a more formal white paper written in the third person, for example. The takeaway here is not to write every other article in a different person — your brand voice will change!

3. Actual examples of tone of voice

This part of the guide is especially useful if — as is often the case — more than one person is responsible for creating the content at your company.

List out some sentences or phrases that really encapsulate the style of writing you want and pair these with ‘off-brand’ versions which highlight the differences between what is and what isn't 'right'.

Both types of examples will help other writers to understand what is appropriate. Examples are much more useful than descriptions of ‘brand personality’, which can be rather generic. Traits are subjective, so your idea of ‘confident and warm’ might be quite different from mine.

Should I create separate social media tone of voice guidelines?

The short answer is no. Remember, the aim of the document is to promote consistency across your communications. Unless you are communicating in a different tone from your brand's voice across social media, it is both effective and practical for your social media and wider marketing teams to work from the same guidelines.

Any social-specific guidelines, around brevity or tailoring your messaging to specific platforms, can be included in the main tone of voice guidelines and signposted accordingly.

Related read: How to Attract New Customers on Social Media.

Is your tone of voice guide being used?

It's one thing to create an effective, easy-to-follow tone of voice guide. It's another to make sure everyone in the organisation is working from it.

One of the biggest hurdles companies large and small face when implementing the inbound methodology is keeping your tone of voice guidelines front of mind. This means making them as accessible as possible to different teams across the company. 

It also means keeping the guide updated regularly, so it reflects the current version of the company and its communications.

Tips to make sure your tone of voice guidelines are being used:

  1. Vocalise the importance of the guide to new starters during their onboarding
  2. Make the guide easily accessible on a shared drive
  3. Frequently monitor the guide's usage
  4. If you notice the guide isn't being used or followed, ask why
 

Start striking the right tone of voice in your content

It's not just what you say but how you say it that matters. 

The way people perceive your business is to a large degree defined by the words you use. The importance of consistent messaging can't be overstated. If your business writes in a way that doesn't seem authentic, you risk putting off and even confusing for your prospects — which is the last thing anyone wants.

Tone of voice content marketing guidelines will help, and as you can see, they can be quick and simple to put together.

Wondering how a tone of voice guide fits into your wider marketing activity? Download the ebook to learn more about tone of voice and how it fits into an effective content strategy. Download it now.

Tone of Voice for an effective content strategy

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