Do you know what ‘tone of voice’ (ToV) is? Or what your organisation’s ToV is?

If you’re a marketer, you’ll probably think of it as an important component of brand identity.

If you’re a content writer or copywriter, you’ll likely know ToV only too well. And, perhaps you’ve been the chosen one; tasked with taking some high-level, ‘fluffy’ guideline document and trying your best to apply them to content.

What is tone of voice, and why is it important?

ToV is not so much about what you say.

It’s about how you say it.

It’s the way sentences are put together.

The way words are used. How they sound. Whether they resonate with your audience.

It helps to convey your brand’s ‘personality’.

It’s a way in which your audiences come to recognise your brand.

But it’s not uncommon to find that your business severely lacks solid guidance and direction regarding ToV. As I touched on at the start, you’ll often find brand documents that barely scratch the surface when it comes to ToV.

It is often an afterthought deliverable when it’s part of a bigger branding project.

It often gets shoehorned into branding style guidelines, represented by just a couple of pages.

But all of this is a missed opportunity. And even though we’re savvier than we once were about aspects like ‘branding’, many of us writers are still perplexed to find that our new client/employer has no ToV document or content style guide available when we ask for it.

The good news is that there are still plenty of businesses out there that do treat ToV like the queen she is.

An undoubtedly well-known example, Mailchimp invested a great deal into developing and setting out its ToV. Here’s an extract from their ‘Voice and Tone’ guidance, taken from their Content Style Guide:

*Above image: screenshot taken by author*

No surprises then, when their users see content like this:

ToV is a powerful tool that helps brands connect with, influence, and persuade their audiences.

It isn’t a throwaway phrase or a bullet-pointed one-liner in your branding guidelines; there’s a real art to applying ToV to content which requires true skill on the part of the copywriter. The truth is, it’s not an easy task.

So, glossing over it in a rebranding exercise, or generally not giving it the day-to-day attention it deserves, can often lead to brands missing out on the potential pay-offs in getting it right.

What happens when tone of voice is treated as an afterthought

I’ve seen first-hand how ToV can be misunderstood and deprioritised. I once worked in-house for a highly successful business that had hired a (filthily expensive) branding agency to lead a full rebranding exercise for us.

To my surprise, one of the last things they delivered to the company was a ToV guidelines document. And boy, was it underwhelming — it covered off the basics, so:

The organisation’s brand values (five or six words)
The brand’s ‘personality’ (a line or two)
How this links to the end user/customer (a line)
How informal vs formal you should be in content (a short paragraph)
Rules on wording conventions (half a page)
A small collection of example sentences (a few lines)
‘Quick writing hints and tips’ (half a page)

Of course, when it came to rolling the guidelines out, translating the tenets behind our new tone of voice into real content resulted in a not-too-happy set of senior managers. The guidelines had been signed off and supplied to in-house marketing, but they were doomed to fail from the moment they were conceived. There were many reasons for this…

1. The tone of voice guidelines were created by strangers

In essence, the guidelines were created by a third party who just wasn’t embedded in the culture or values of the organisation — at all. They spent hardly any time in the building, in fact.

This meant that the resulting document contained things which were not aligned with the thinking of our senior managers, such as the recommendation that the tone of voice should now be “far friendlier” than what the business had been used to for the previous 15 years.

To be fair to the agency involved, they had probably received the briefest of briefs when it came to the ToV part of the rebranding project. I imagine it went something like this from the bigwigs in our senior management:

“We want the content to sound like it’s for an intelligent friend of ours who works in our audience’s industry”

“Is that enough to go on, branding agency?”

Probably not?

2. The in-house marketing team weren’t involved in the creation of the tone of voice guidelines

It may seem loco, but my old employer, in their wisdom, didn’t get their in-house marketing team involved in the ToV task, so we couldn’t influence or work with the external agency as closely as we should have done.

It was a shame, as we were of course the closest to all the marketing content — and therefore would have been well-placed to comment and give helpful input.

Plus, with our knowledge of both the company culture and the very strange and quirky internal politics that were at play within the organisation, we probably would have helped to steer the guidelines through towards a result that had real longevity.

3. The final document was ultimately superficial in nature

Because the final guidance content was too high-level, it was lacking in any real substance when it came to the marketers needing to apply it. Applying it with any kind of consistency would be very tricky indeed. There were no proper examples of how you’d use the tone of voice ‘rules’ in real life, no testing conducted with a focus group of any kind…

It may as well have been wrapped in a bow and stacked on a shelf for all the use this document was for us minions in the Marketing Team.

4. Senior management didn’t really understand what ToV was

Other than knowing it was ‘part of the branding exercise’, our senior managers didn’t pay the guidelines much heed; not when it was up against all the pretty new logos and colour palettes they could subjectively comment on.

That was the time to bring their in-house experts (i.e. us in Marketing) along to help, but for whatever reason, they didn’t invite us. This meant that they went through all the motions of creating the guidelines, but they were created in isolation from Marketing, and so when we started to set about integrating this wonderful new ToV into fresh content for the new website we were building, we were the ones who quickly got it in the neck.

Seeing the company’s new ToV applied in real life for the first time was when senior management suddenly realised that they weren’t wholly comfortable with their new shiny way of talking after all…

“This isn’t us.” (But they signed off the document.)

“It’s too friendly.” (But they said they wanted ‘friendly’.)

“It’s not professional enough.” (But they were ok with tone of voice being more informal when it was proposed.)

“It’s too Jack and Jill.” (No idea what this comment was meant to mean.)

As it happens, we had hired a freelance content writer to support us in creating a stack of new content for the new website, and ultimately, it was this poor bloke (Keith, who was lovely and very capable) who got much of the blame for not supplying content that fitted management’s wholly unreasonable expectations.

Senior management had totally underestimated what ToV was all about, and therefore could not visualise how the guidelines would be interpreted in real life.

Starting your ToV project the right way

If there was a moral to this sad tale, it’s that if an organisation wants to create or refine their tone of voice guidelines, it’ll likely need more thought than they first expected.

Starting this type of project ‘the right way’ means that:

The right people are involved from the start. Yes, unfortunately, that does mean senior management and members of the board(!), but also your marketing, content and/or digital team — perhaps your department heads too.
Everyone is engaged with the purpose and direction of the project from the beginning. It helps prevent challenges later on, which makes rolling it all out far quicker and easier.
You’re thinking practically about what your tone of voice guidelines really need to include, from cover to cover.
You want it to be a useful guide, not a piece of propaganda that makes your organisation just ‘sound good’. So, consider how any new ToV ‘rules’ will be practically applied, conduct some user testing if you can, and test-run your draft ToV guidelines by creating a few long-form and short-form pieces, a marketing email, some microcopy…
You keep whoever’s signing off on the guidelines involved throughout, so that there are no sudden surprises that derail or delay the project’s progress.

By investing the right time and people into your ToV guidelines from the start, your organisation can properly embark on a genuine journey towards becoming a more recognised, revered, and trusted source of information.

And I know, it’s not the easiest road to take when trying to get a massive rebranding project over the line — but the potential benefits of getting your new ToV right can spark long-term rewards for your organisation. It’s a no-brainer.

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