Skip to content

What is your brand voice online and why is it important?

Picture of Flowmesh

What is a brand’s tone of voice?

Tone of voice describes how your brand communicates with your target customers and influences how they perceive your messages. Your tone of voice helps you communicate your brand personality and values, and assists in building community. Think of the difference in tone on Twitter, for example, between Innocent Drinks – cheeky, independent and witty, even though they’re owned by Coca-Cola – and Coca-Cola itself – fun but fairly conservative and accessible.

Why is it important?

Having a predetermined tone of voice aids in consistency of communication and messaging, not only in how you ‘show up’ online but also to ensure in larger organisations that everyone is aligned. So, if multiple authors are tweeting or writing from the same account it all sounds fluid and coherent. If you’re a business who works with multiple agencies, or freelancers, having a documented tone of voice makes a significant difference in ensuring your marketing, sales and internal comms materials are consistent and cohesive. Developing a tone of voice guide can also help you identify what your brand is and isn’t. Are you funny? Intellectual? Concise? Creative? Technical? And what does this mean for the types of writers and content producers with whom you choose to work?

How do you create your brand tone?

Identifying your brand values can help you establish clear tone guidelines that your team can rely on when crafting copy. Many successful brands dedicate a special section of their brand guidelines to tone to ensure consistent brand communication.

Step 1: Build a matrix for your brand that will assist with developing your tone of voice – map out your brand’s:
  • Values (pick 5)
  • Characteristics (pick 5)
  • What we are (pick 8 or so)
  • What we are not (pick 8 or so)

This helps you to create consensus on who you (your brand) are and what tone to use. A useful and creative way of approaching this would be to imagine your brand or business as a person: what do they care about? Look like? Value? Sound like? What other brands would they associate with? With which customer types or audiences would they most like to associate? How would this influence your tone?

Step 2: Create a brand tone guide by building on this matrix with real-life examples of FAQs and responses and communicate this to the content team, and anyone else who will be publishing content on your platforms. Getting specific is really important here – every business wants to be “professional and approachable” – but what does this mean for your business? Does your business want to be relaxed and informal? Educational? Smart? B2B companies often play it very safe with their tone but this could be a place to differentiate from competitors. Having a little more personality evident in your communications might feel risky, but it can pay off in more audience attention and engagement.

Step 3: When enough effort is focused on reinforcing the established guidelines, your brand voice becomes an integral part of your company's culture, like a personality embedded in the mind of an entire organisation. Regularly revisiting and updating your tone is also important. If you can, test your tone across your digital channels and use analytics to refine it.

The Mailchimp Content Style Guide also provides helpful tips and key elements for writing with your brand voice.
While your visual branding helps drive instant brand awareness, a consistent voice helps you create a more authentic connection with your audience. It may take some time to perfect your company's tone of voice, but using these steps will help you build a recognisable corporate identity. In this way, you set the tone for your company's content and help create a consistent brand voice.

Additional reading and research:

Blog comments