Maybe that’s because it’s work that has legs, something a brand could be using for years, even decades. Maybe it’s because it’s the ultimate copywriter wankery, a chance to play around with adjectives and try to distil incredibly complex and nuanced ideas into three or four big personality traits. Maybe it’s because it’s quite expensive.
But, despite my interest, tone of voice isn’t for everyone. And, if it’s for anyone, it’s definitely not for some guy in your sales team or the junior marketing bod you’ve just hired fresh out of uni. Here’s why (and what you should be giving them instead).
Everyone has a tone of voice (not everyone needs a tone of voice)
If your strategy involves keeping your organisation secret, denying that you exist, and secretly controlling the world from the back corridors of power, stop reading. But, if you have a strategy that involves communicating with anyone, about anything, ever, you have a tone of voice.
Maybe it’s bad. Maybe it’s the tone of a delirious fever dream, with your personality veering from one thing to another. That’s still a tone, albeit a crap one. It exists whether you want it to or not.
So let’s get that out of the way: yes, you have a tone of voice and everyone in your organisation feeds into it. They create your tone of voice every time they write an email or jump on a call to discuss some bullshit that could’ve been an email.
But when we talk about tone of voice and who it’s really for, we’re not talking about tone of voice as a thing you have. We’re talking about the fun (for me) process of understanding, evolving, and articulating that tone of voice, then turning into guidelines.
A tone of voice project is about how you take something elusive and make it tangible. Why? So it becomes portable.
If you work with a freelance copywriter for all your copy, your tone is going to be fairly consistent when it comes to your marketing touchpoints. But if you have multiple people writing on behalf of your brand, things get messy.
Clear, easy to digest tone of voice guidelines promise to fix that problem by giving people consistent ways to write. Newsflash, my guy: they almost certainly won’t address the problem at all.
If you have a strategy that involves communicating with anyone, about anything, ever, you have a tone of voice.
Me, just now
Using guidelines effectively can be incredibly difficult
When I’m working on front-facing copy, I’m acutely aware of cognitive overload and the danger of throwing too much at people. Maybe readers can hold 3-4 ideas in their mind at the same time, but wouldn’t it make life easier if we just did them one by one?
Tone of voice guidelines, on the other hand, seem to be almost entirely written with little or no concern for how people think. Nobody can tell me that a 40 page deck with dozens of ‘do and don’t’ lists is something you can get into your head and start using effectively.
At the same time, guidelines tend to stop short of practical information. It’s one thing to say ‘We write conversationally’, but non-writers don’t always know what that means. What are the hacks? What’s the one thing I can do all the time to bring this part of the personality to life?
I’m not going to BS you and claim that tone of voice guidelines are totally useless. I love them. I love writing them, I love seeing well-written ones. But they’re for people who give a shit about marketing and copy. They’re for other agencies, other copywriters, and the people who have the time and energy to methodically check through and make sure the tone is coming across.
If your intention is to get some tone of voice guidelines, then send them to the entire company so they can ‘get on brand’, don’t waste your time or money. It takes more than that to meaningfully influence how people write.
How to actually influence people to write in your tone of voice
Are you a fan of fantasy novels? Game of Thrones and dragon stuff? If so, enter a new imaginary world where you inspire a love of writing in every member of your team, teach them how to interpret tone of voice guidelines, and everyone suddenly writes with control, poise and personality.
If you’re more into the gritty realism, let’s do it this way: JUST TELL PEOPLE WHAT TO SAY.
You should definitely have some tone of voice guidelines, particularly if lots of people communicate on behalf of your brand. You should 100% have some general guidance that people can refer to – this could be a copywriting style guide, or some simple ‘We don’t say x, we say y’ ideas.
But we’re here to get people to do it right, not to offer a complex puzzle box that they can decrypt to know whether they should say ‘We will…’ or ‘We’ll…’.
More than anything else, the tone of voice is a foundation. We build on that foundation by just handing people actual copy they can steal and use with little to no modification.
Call it a copy platform, a messaging guide, storytelling – whatever. But if Tony in Sales is about to send a bulk email about a particular product, he should be getting a block of product copy written by someone who knows what they’re doing, then tweaking it to suit the moment.
As standard, I would recommend putting together long, short, bullet point, and headline copy for:
- Every department, division and part of your business
- Every product, if they’re compelling enough and not commodities (it’s necessary for Microsoft, it probably wouldn’t be necessary for Asda)
- Every major audience – start by copying and pasting your generic copy for each department/product/etc, then tweak it with relevant pain points and only the most relevant benefits
And, if your people are writing their own copy, get someone more experienced to check it over against the tone. A copywriter can do that fast, making targeted tweaks to shift the tone where appropriate.
That’s how you get people to be consistent – by removing the guesswork, confusing guidelines, and space for interpretation. As a result, you get:
- Copy that’s consistently in the right tone of voice
- A faster way to pump out comms and get on with other stuff
- Less uncertainty about whether copy is going to be on-brand when you write it internally
- A clearer, more cohesive way to communicate with your customers – in one tone, using the same vocabulary, banging the same drum
