The way your business sounds is important. When all your communications have a consistent tone of voice, you gain the trust of your audience and give your business a personality that people can warm to.

This isn’t just waffly marketing talk — studies show a clear tone of voice leads to better customer engagement and higher sales.

If you want to find out more about why tone of voice is important, you might like to read What does your business sound like –and why does it matter?and / or Why you aren’t really a B2B business.

If you’re already convinced about the merits but want to understand how to find and define the tone of voice for your business, read on.

A four step guide to finding your tone of voice

I think there are essentially four steps to finding your tone of voice as a business. The first is to understand who you are as a business. The second is to understand who your target audience is. The third is to refine your findings. The final step is to commit your findings to paper so you’ve got a guide to refer to in future.

As you go through the process of finding your tone of voice, there is one important thing to remember. As Creative Director Doug Kessler says:

We’ve done workshops on [tone of voice] but, to be honest, it ain’t rocket science.

Step one: Understand who you are

The first step to finding your tone of voice is to think about who you are as a business. This is easier than it sounds. Copywriter Chelsea Baldwin sums it up:

Not to get too metaphysical on you, but your brand’s voice is already there — it exists in your company, the reasons it was founded, and how you conduct yourselves in your day-to-day work. You don’t have to worry so much about creating it as you do simply uncovering it.

You can approach this process in whatever way you like.

You can use tone of voice tools to help you.

I used Brand Deck when finding my tone of voice. Nick Parker’s Voicebox is another more than highly rated approach.

If you’d rather do this without using tools, you can go as in-depth as you like. Copywriter Belinda Weaver of Copywrite Matters keeps it simple:

A very simple exercise …is to assign 3 human values that represent how you want your business to be experienced.

It’s also worth digging a bit deeper and thinking about:

What’s really important to your brand?

Who does your brand aspire to be and what is it impressed by?

What blogs does your brand like to read and why?

B2B copywriter Rachel Foster drills down further and lists these questions that need answering:

What are our company values?

Why do we do what we do?

What personality traits best define our company?

Who is our target market?

How do we want them to feel when they interact with us?

How do we make our customers feel like heroes?

What first impression do we want to make?

What message are we communicating?

What pain do we solve?

How do we demonstrate our value and results?

What status quo do we break?

What makes us different?

What unique story do we have to tell?

What are we passionate about?

What other brands resonate with us?

What words do we like?

What words do we dislike?

What words describe the tone we will use?

Do we speak formally or conversationally?

If we could summarize our brand in one word what would it be?

I think the fact there is no standard approach or standard list of questions shows us there is no right or wrong way to approach this. If you can come up with something that feels right using Belinda’s list of questions, you’re good to go. If you feel like you need a bit more support to think yourself into the right frame of mind, Rachel’s list might be the answer. On the other hand, Belinda’s list might panic you in its simplicity or Rachel’s might lead you down a rabbit hole you never emerge from.

The right approach is to do what feels right for you. But what you what to end up with is a short list of values that encapsulate your business and what it stands for.

The only piece of advice I’d offer is to make sure that you end up with a well-rounded picture. If your business was a person you’d want that person to be a well-rounded one. You’re looking for a mixture of hard skills and soft skills in the description. Dan Brotzel, Content Director and co-founder of Sticky Content, explains why:

In developing a brand voice, many organisations make use of tonal values. This helps you work the different aspects of your brand’s promise into your writing.

You might want to be seen as experts in your domain, for example, but you also want your users to know you take customer service seriously.

So having a tonal value like ‘authoritative’ alongside another value such as ‘helpful’ can help you capture and project these different nuances in your comms.

Values enable you to flex your voice for different channels, audiences and message types. You might be a fashion-forward clothes retailer, for instance, so a tonal value like ‘inspirational’might be an obvious choice in lots of contexts; on the other hand, when you’re explaining your returns policy, you probably want to dial up a different tonal value: ‘helpful’ perhaps, or ‘straightforward’.

Step two: Understand who your customer is

The next step is to look at your customer. You need to understand who they are and what they’re looking for from you. Again, there are a myriad of ways to go about this. I recommend developing a customer avatar and I’ve written about why they help here. If you’d like to build a customer avatar, I recommend this guide.

Part of creating your customer avatar will involve understanding the publications they read and the language they use. This is the area to focus on when you’re looking at your tone of voice. Eugenia Verbina, Content Manager at SEMrush, explains how to do this and why it’s important:

Watch how your audience communicate with each other, what they like and dislike in discussion threads, what the overall tone of discussions is, and what language people use to create the most popular content.

Experts say that mimicking the vocabulary of a particular group allows members to feel a sense of belonging. Mirroring your audience’s language will make your content pieces more relatable and bring your brand closer to them. If done right, this will eventually lead you to an increase in sales.

Empathy is key, focus on your customer’s voice, and make it part of your brand tone of voice to build trust and credibility.

But there’s another reason for understanding your customers and how they communicate. It’s to make sure you’re going to get along with them. Let’s say you’re a tech start up and you’ve just defined your brand as geeky, rational and cheeky. You’ve defined your target audience as being geeky, rational and reserved. How will they react to a cheeky brand? Will they be excited by your daring? Or will they be offended by what they see as a cavalier attitude?

This is an extreme example of differences but you need to be confident you’ve got the balance between who you are and who your customers will want you to be. On the other hand, authenticity is key. If your brand is cheeky, your writing will lose all its soul if you try to remain reserved at all times. And if you’re naturally reserved, trying to be ‘a bit wacky’ in your writing will be exhausting for you and cringe-making for your customers.

If you’ve got communications out in the world, you can use these to sense check your conclusions.

To do this, draw up a list of content pieces and communications. Find the ones that most closely reflect the tone of voice you want to use and the ones that are furthest away. Now look at their metrics. If your tone of voice resonates with your target audience, you should find that reflected in the results the pieces achieved.

Step three: Refine your findings

Once you’ve got a set of values that define your business and sit comfortably with your customers, now’s the time to start refining them.

The chances are — especially if you’re a B2B business — that you’ve come up with some generic words. Professional, reliable, straightforward. As long as these words are an accurate reflection, this is fine. As I’ve said before, tone of voice is about authenticity — you don’t want to try to be something you’re not because people will see straight through it.

The trouble is, you could probably use these words to describe most of your competitors too. The aim of defining a tone of voice is to show off what’s distinctive about your business and set yourself apart. If you stop here you’re still going to sound exactly like your competitors. To solve this problem, says Belinda Weaver, you need to unpack your descriptors.

How does a customer experience this personality trait? When you get that explanation happening, you can usually find some more interesting and relevant brand words.

Once you’ve completed this exercise, it’s time to commit your findings to paper.

Step four: Commit it to paper — simply

Committing your tone of voice to paper is the final step of the process. You’re creating a document you can:

• give to your team and to freelancers to explain how you sound
• check content that’s been produced against it to make sure it’s ‘on brand’.

Copywriter Tom Albrighton has some forthright advice on what this document needs to look like.

Personally, I don’t think there’s any need to overbrain written tone of voice. Content consultants who want to play the fairy godmother might tell you that you need a huge manual on how to write in every situation –rather like the expensive ‘brand guideline’ documents that design agencies love to create. Unfortunately, tone of voice guidelines will not compensate for lack of writing ability or common sense, just as brand design guidelines do not turn the average Microsoft Word user into Peter Saville. People with a tin ear for language will not be saved by rules and regulations, because writing is an art as much as a science.

As the saying says, rules are for the observance of the foolish and the instruction of the wise. Those who ‘get it’don’t need loads of detail, while those who don’t will be left none the wiser by it anyway. A one-page summary of your brand values, along with an explanation of how they translate into writing style, will be a huge step forward if you’ve never considered tone of voice before.

Anna Pickard is Editorial Director at Slack and she sums up how Slack sounds in a single sentence:

“Talk as if you’re talking to a colleague you like and admire. That’s the baseline.”

If you can sum up your brand’s tone of voice in a single, simple headline sentence like this, fantastic. You’ll probably want to include some more in-depth information though.

I’d suggest including the traits and values the company has that you identified during the process. Explain what you mean by each of them and give at least one example of how it manifests itself in your day-to-day activities.

You also want to give examples of content that reflect your tone of voice — and examples that don’t. You want to include examples across different media and different situations. For example, the tone you take in a tweet is likely to different to the tone you take in an annual report. Similarly, the tone you use in an announcement about a new product is going to be different to the tone you’d use in an apology.

Finally, you’ll want to review your guidelines regularly to make sure they are still appropriate and relevant. Content strategist Nicola Fleming has some useful guidance on measuring and maintaining brand voice.

If that all sounds a bit nuanced, think of it like this. You speak to your friends in a different way to the way you speak to your bank manager but you’re the same person in both situations. Similarly, if you’re thinking of your tone of voice in human terms you’ll instinctively understand when to dial up certain traits and when to dial them down.

Make your business human

There’s a sales cliche — people buy from people. It’s a cliche because it’s true. It’s so much easier to buy something from someone you like. When your business sounds like a person, it’s easier for people to like you and it’s easier for people to buy from you. That’s why you need to define your tone of voice. More importantly, you need to put your work into practice and start making sure your tone of voice shines through everything you write.