Ask a business what its brand voice is and you’ll usually get a list of words. “Friendly. Professional. Approachable. A bit fun.” Ask three people in the same business to write a post in that voice and you’ll get three completely different posts.
That’s because a brand voice isn’t a vibe. A vibe lives in one person’s head. When that person is on holiday, busy or leaves, the vibe goes with them. If you want everyone, from the new starter to the freelancer you’ve just hired, to sound like the same business, your voice needs to be written down.
Keeping a team on the same page is a big part of my job, and a good brand voice document is one of the simplest tools for doing it. Here’s how to write one people will actually use.
Why doesn’t “friendly and professional” help?
Almost every business wants to be friendly and professional. Those words don’t separate you from anyone, and they don’t tell the person writing what to actually do. Is friendly “Hiya!” or “Good morning”? Is professional “We’d be delighted to assist” or just “Happy to help”? Without examples, everyone fills in the gaps with their own idea.
A useful voice document replaces those vague words with clear choices. Not “we’re friendly”, but “we use first names, we say ‘we’ and ‘you’, and we’d rather sound like a person than a policy”.
If only one person knows how your brand sounds, you don’t have a brand voice. You have a bottleneck.
What goes in a brand voice document?
Keep it short. Two or three pages is plenty. If it’s twenty, nobody will read it. These are the sections I’d include:
- Who you’re talking to. A few lines on your customers: who they are, what they care about and what they’re worried about when they come to you.
- Three or four voice traits, each with a “this, not that”. For example: “Confident, not cocky. Warm, not gushing. Plain-speaking, not blunt.”
- Words you use and words you don’t. Your names for your products and services, any phrases you love, and the jargon or clichés you’ve banned.
- Style choices. UK or US spelling, how you write dates and prices, whether you use emoji, capital letters in headings, exclamation marks and so on.
- Real examples. The most important part. More on that below.
Examples do the heavy lifting
People learn a voice by seeing it, not by reading a description of it. So for each trait, show a before and after. Take a real sentence that’s slightly off, then rewrite it the way you want it.
Before: “We are delighted to announce the launch of our new service offering.” After: “Big news: you can now book us for weekend shoots.” The second one is shorter, clearer and sounds like a real business talking to a real person. Ten examples like that will teach your team more than any list of adjectives.
It’s also worth showing how the voice flexes. Your brand should still sound like itself when it’s replying to a complaint, but it won’t sound the same as when it’s celebrating a launch. Include one example of each: a social post, an email, a reply to a happy customer and a reply to an unhappy one.
How to write it without a week of workshops
You don’t need a big brand workshop. You can draft a solid first version in an afternoon.
- Gather your best bits. Pull together ten pieces of content you’re proud of: posts, emails, website copy, even a brilliant reply to a customer.
- Spot the patterns. What do they have in common? Short sentences? Humour? Lots of “you”? Those patterns are your voice.
- Gather your worst bits too. Find a few pieces that felt wrong and work out why. Those become your “not that”.
- Read your customers’ reviews. The words customers use to describe you are often the best clue to how you should sound.
- Draft it, then test it. Give the document to someone who’s never written for you and ask them to write a post. If it sounds right, the document works. If not, add more examples.
Put it where people will see it
A brand voice document saved in a folder nobody opens is just as useless as no document at all. Make it easy to find. Pin it in your team chat, add it to your onboarding for every new starter and freelancer, and link to it from your content calendar.
If you use AI tools to help with drafts, this document is gold. Paste it into your tool’s saved instructions and your first drafts will start much closer to how you actually sound. You’ll spend less time rewriting and more time adding the bits only a human can.
Keep it alive
Your voice will change a little as your business grows, and that’s fine. Give the document an owner and a review date, every six months or so. Add new examples when someone writes something brilliant. Remove rules nobody follows. A voice document should be a living thing, not a museum piece.
Get it right and something lovely happens. Customers can’t tell who wrote what, new people get up to speed faster, and the one person who used to check everything finally gets their evenings back.
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