Voice, tone, and style (oh, my!): What they are and why you should care

Voice. Tone. Style. These words get thrown around a lot in marketing circles but what do they mean for you? If you want to build a strong brand, they mean a lot. These three little words have the big job of helping shape your brand through the words you use and the personality behind them.

What will your audience see in your words? How will they describe your business and perceive your organization as a result of how you put your message out into the world?

The voice, style and tone decisions should start with how you want to be known. You will never have full control over what people think of your brand, but you can influence it through the choices you make.

As you make decisions, it’s important to be honest about what’s realistic so you don’t end up with a misalignment between what you want and what you can do/maintain. Otherwise, your brand will just come off as insincere. This is what happens when a brand that’s conservative and reserved tries to be fun. They may just come off as flippant and that’s not a good impression to make.

A case study in setting voice, tone and style

Let’s say we have a company, ABC Corp, and they’re a B2B SaaS business selling to mid-market and enterprise corporations. The end-user can be anyone from an individual contributor to manager to executive. The champion and the one with the primary problem is usually a mid-level manager. They’ve got some purchasing power, but for this tool they’ll need additional buy-in from their exec to get approval.

I’m being intentionally vague about what area of the business they’re in for now. It gives us freedom to explore different directions we can go with establishing the voice, tone and style of the brand.

Voice: How do you want to portray your brand?

I like to start at the top with the voice of the brand because it’s going to influence decisions you make about style and tone. The voice of your brand where your personality comes through. It’s injected in your content in different ways - through words, visuals, even the processes you establish for dealings with customers and prospects.

Your voice is the brand’s inherent personality and the style and tone of your content help add colour and texture to the big picture of your business. So, how do you establish what each one means for your organization and make them work together cohesively across all your content?

A brand voice can be friendly, helpful, technical, intellectual, or any number of other descriptors that fit your company. When I’m talking with clients about building their brand, I ask for words they want people to use to describe them. This is to establish a guideline for their brand voice.

ABC Corp: They want to be perceived as an approachable, knowledgeable, and friendly brand with some occasional fun mixed in.

Tone: How do you express your brand’s voice?

If content is king, then context is queen. The expression of your brand’s voice changes in different contexts and settings. Having a good understanding of the voice and how to switch up the tone is important to creating compelling content for any medium. But this is something many brands haven’t quite mastered.

Social platforms are built for casual promotion and conversation. The speed of content is fast and furious and it’s a great place to make connections with customers, evangelists, and potential customers.

But what tone resonates with them? Would you adopt a conversational, business casual, or corporate tone?

If you’re using the same tone on Twitter that you use in a white paper, you might not be getting much traction with your social presence. That said, it’s part art, part science. The lifespan and agility of social leaves room for testing the waters with tone and content. If formal works better than casual for your particular audience, by all means keep it formal and technical!

ABC Corp: Most of their content is going to be conversational to business casual. In particular, they want to keep social and blog posts very conversational to promote engagement. Their digital assets (ebooks, white papers, etc.) will sometimes adopt more of a business casual tone as they take a deep dive into educational content.

Style: What are your preferences for communicating information?

Determining the style your content takes isn’t always easy, but it’s by far the least subjective aspect to establishing preferences for your brand.

It’s easy to tell someone to write content with a friendly voice in a corporate tone but everyone’s going to interpret those instructions differently based on their personal experiences and perspectives.

However, your style guidelines are the mechanics of writing copy. They’re the standards you adopt to ensure consistency. When I’m working on style guidelines, I usually start with an existing guide (AP Stylebook or Chicago Manual of Style) as a baseline.

With the selection of a reference resource, I use the corporate style guide to define any exceptions. This is a good way to settle whether the Oxford comma is necessary, unnecessary or used only for clarity. Or perhaps you don’t like the way AP formats bulleted lists. Your corporate style guide is a living document you get to adjust to suit your business.

It’s also a good place to set standards for how your products should be written out, including instructions for when and where any registered or unregistered marks should be added. Here are a few other good items to include in your style guide:

• Messaging, words, or phrases that are no longer used/applicable - this includes products/services

• Regional spellings of words specific to your industry

• Instructions for capitalization in headlines and headings

If you’re using an established style guide like AP or Chicago Manual, it might seem redundant to include grammar, spelling and punctuation guidelines as well. However, it can be really helpful to throw in a handful of explanations and samples you see come up regularly or particularly important rules for quick reference.

ABC Corp: They’ve started a writing style guidelines document for their content creators and editors to use as a reference. Because the vast majority of their audience is in North America (especially the U.S.), they’ve adopted the AP Stylebook with some supplementary preferences and instruction included in their internal guidelines.

What will your audience see in your words?

The goal is for your audience to see a brand that’s consistent with its voice, style, and tone. And, when combined with the message they’re putting out into the world, it feels authentic and relatable to the people you want to help. When you do this you’ll have nailed one of the key components of great content that resonates.

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Not sure where to start with establishing tone for your brand? My next post will give an overview and samples of three of the most common tones used in business writing. Stay tuned!