It’s something I see with other creative freelancers, too. When you live in a world where tone of voice and messaging guidelines are everywhere, there’s always a sense that you should be adopting these things for yourself. That applies to designers, developers, and just about everyone.
So, to make the most of the unnecessarily long answers I usually type out in emails, here are five things I would want every freelancer to know about selling themselves and implementing a stronger tone of voice (or not).
Five questions about tone of voice for freelancers
What’s your background in tone of voice?
I’ve always been interested in tone of voice and I’ve developed my fair share of guidelines. Sometimes that’s looking at a brand and articulating the tone for the first time – figuring out how they already talk and making that more repeatable. More often it’s working with clients and agencies to develop a tone of voice from scratch, either for a startup or as part of a rebrand.
I won’t bore you with a list but perhaps my favourite tone project was for Vitabiotics. There’s nothing more exciting than taking a very well-established brand and helping hem dial everything up and make it more human, lively and impactful.
How do you develop a tone of voice?
The process used to be a lot of in-person workshops but I’m finding more of it happens remotely. In terms of process, I have this thing about ‘cause and effect’ – you can’t just pluck a handful of adjectives from the air and call that your tone. Well, you can. But those are the ones nobody adopts and nobody cares about.
I like to take people through a process of revisiting the core stuff: what they do and the unique way they do it. That usually comes from interviews with employees, leaders, partners, customers, and so on. Maybe some competitor work too, to see what the rest of the market is doing. Then we just trace the line of cause and effect until we get to tone.
Put it this way: if you sell artisanal crafts and listen to a lot of Enya, there’s a certain personality and way of speaking we might expect. The way you behave as an individual (or business, or brand) will either lead you directly to the right tone of voice, or lead you to the assumptions you might want to rail against with an unexpected tone.
Isn’t a freelancer’s tone of voice just how they naturally speak?
It certainly can be! There’s nothing more off-putting than reading one tone on, say, a website, and hearing a completely different person when you get on a call. We don’t ever want that kind of mismatch.
But we’re also nuanced, complex people with a multitude of personality traits – we’re creatives, that’s sort of in our blood. And it’s impossible to reflect all those things at the same time with just a few paragraphs of copy. That’s why we need to prioritise: not to shut off parts of your personality, but to say ‘Okay, the most appealing parts of my personality for a client are these three things, and I definitely want to get those across’.
Do other freelancers like designers need to bother?
I wouldn’t trust any copywriter who has a bland tone of voice on their website and maybe I wouldn’t apply that same scrutiny to a designer. But a clear, distinctive tone of voice does fit some of the challenges I know freelance designers face.
Like copywriters, designers sell a product that’s hard to judge objectively. People aren’t just paying for the output, they’re paying for your expertise and reassurance that what you’re producing is good. That means that, when a potential client is skimming your website, it’s not always easy to see why your work is better than the next freelancer.
In that sense, a striking tone of voice is another tool in your belt – a way to grab attention and be a little more memorable than the rest (and a little more likely to get the work). Your tone can also position you – it can help you sound premium, or expert, or flexible, or whatever. And that might have implications for how much you can charge or how easy the pitch process is.
What about AI? Will generative AI change the role of tone of voice?
AI is pretty terrible at tone of voice so far. The nature of it means it mimics things and makes copy more homogenous – that makes those more interesting tones less likely. You don’t get an Innocent from the AI – not yet, possibly not ever.
Tone of voice is about lots of things working together – the right sentence structures, the right vocabulary, the right rhythms. As it stands, to get that from an AI you would need a very exhaustive prompt. So you would probably still need very detailed tone of voice guidelines – likely more detailed than a human would need – and, at that point, it’s probably quicker and more affordable to pay a person. And you’ll need someone who understands ToV anyway, so they can check what the AI produces and validate it. As it stands today, I think it’s a false economy.
