F I N D Y O U R V O I C E

Tone of voice is not what you say, it’s how you say it.Tone of voice is essentially how your business communicates with the world and, most importantly, with your customers. It’s usually text-based, although you may incorporate it into presentations, podcasts and video promotion too.

Tone of voice represents the human element of your company. It turns a faceless corporation into a company people can trust. It’s vital to establishing your identity, which is what will ultimately sell your products and services. In short, thinking about your tone of voice will be the most important thing you do today.

Developing your tone of voiceThe two key things to ask when developing your company’s tone of voice are:

Is it authentic?

Is it consistent?

This guide is designed to help you find your tone of voice and implement it consistently. Rusty Monkey can help you at each step of this process – get in touch with us to discuss your needs.

Finding your authentic voiceConsumers respond to authenticity because they want to believe that you have their best interests at heart, not your own. If a company exists purely to make itself a profit, then consumers will not want to invest their time and money in it. If your company exists because you believe in something, because you have built it around a core value, consumers who share that core value will happily invest their time and money knowing that they are funding something they believe in, and that you believe in. This is what we mean by authenticity.

So the first step to finding the right tone of voice for your company is determining what your core value is – or what your core values are, if you have more than one.

A great introduction to this concept is the talk by Simon Sinek entitled ‘How great leaders inspire action’. In this talk, he introduces the concept of the Golden Circle.

Why > How > What?

Sinek explains that most companies start by telling prospective consumers what they do. This is a natural impulse, because you’re proud of your products and services and you want people to buy them. But having a great product or service is not always enough. What consumers really care about is the centre of the Golden Circle:

Why do you do what you do?

In other words, what is your belief? What is your core value? It’s harder than you might think to pin this down, because our processes and ideas tend to be focused almost entirely on what we do, not why we do it. But somewhere at the core of your business is a value that drives everything you do. Once you’ve identified that, you can begin to form your authentic voice.

Here are some good questions to ask when determining your core value:

• What do you want to tell the world?

• Why did you first set your company up?

• What basic human value or right do you offer?

• How is the way you work different from other companies like yours?

• How do you want to make people feel?

• What kind of people work for your company?

• What kind of people buy from your company?

• How would people describe your company (not what you do, but why you do it)?

• How do you want people to think about your company?

• What do you believe?

It’s important to answer these questions honestly, because only by doing so can you achieve that authenticity that people want. Don’t try to emulate the values of a company you admire – find your own.

Connecting with your audience

Engaging with your business’s Why will help you to connect with your audience. By establishing a core value, you can generate empathy and understanding with people who believe the same thing.

Even once you’ve determined your Why, it’s very easy to then just talk about yourself and how good you are at what you do. But instead, try turning your Why around to consider how your core belief affects your target audience.

Ask yourself:

• What do they want?

• What is preventing them from achieving this?

• How does your core value enable you to empathise?

• How can you help?

It’s after you’ve had this dialogue that you can demonstrate your skills in delivering What you do. By this point, your audience will be invested, because they believe you can help them, and that you’re doing it for the right reasons. They’re interested in what you do, and they’re willing to trust you to help them out.

Using language to communicate your core value

Tone of voice is how you use language to communicate with the world, so the next thing you need to identify is what kind of language you feel your company should use. Remember, your goal should be to reflect your core value.

Here are some good things that an authentic tone of voice should try to achieve:

• Be honest.

• Be consistent.

• Engage people’s emotions.

• Be empathetic.

• Inspire people’s trust.

• Stand out.

• Be distinctive.

• Be different.

• Have personality.

• Challenge the status quo.

• Demonstrate your intentions.

• Inspire confidence.

• Inspire passion.

• Communicate your passion.

• Carry authority.

• Make your message clear.

• Tell your story.

And here are some good questions to ask when determining the kind of language that’s best for you:

• Do you want to express a sense of humour?

• Do you want to use formal or informal language?

• Do you want to be controversial, or shock people?

• Do you have a lot of technical information to communicate? If so, what’s the best way to do so?

• Do you want to use jargon or avoid it?

• Do you want to appear friendly or authoritative?

• Do you want to be poetic or to-the-point?

• Do you want to be simple or complicated?

• Do you want to follow strict grammatical rules or be more creative?

A lot of this is a fine balancing act. If you use overly formal language, you might come across as stiff and uninteresting. But if you use too many jokes, you might come across as flippant and unprofessional. If you use too much technical language, you risk alienating customers; but if you use too little you may not be able to communicate your products effectively.

It’s also important to consider your audience, the people who will be reading, or listening to, the things you say.

Is your audience a relatively small group of similar people? Or is it a large group of diverse people? Are they young? Middle-aged? Elderly? Are they wealthy or on a budget? Where do they live? What do they do for a living? What do they do in their free time? What other brands do they use? How do members of your audience communicate with each other? What kind of language do they use?

If your audience is quite a small, undiverse group – for example, university students – you can focus your tone of voice to match theirs. You can adopt their colloquialisms and language patterns, their abbreviations and memes.

If your audience is a very broad group of diverse customers – for example, supermarket shoppers – your tone of voice may need to use language that is more widely understood. Avoid niche terms and trendy phrases that many of your customers won’t understand.

You also need to bear in mind the sector in which you work. While you shouldn’t be afraid to push boundaries and break the mould – because that’s how you make your tone of voice stand out from that of your competitors – there are some industries in which certain language is simply not appropriate. It wouldn’t be appropriate, for example, to tell a lot of jokes if you’re a funeral company. Understanding the expectations of your sector is vital.

Keeping your voice consistentOnce you’ve found the right tone of voice for your company, you need to employ it in everything you do. Consistency is vital, because if you use one voice sometimes, and another voice other times, your customer will not know who you are, and will not feel comfortable trusting you. You will lose that authenticity you worked so hard for.

If you have a single copywriter, it’s easier to keep your tone of voice consistent. But if you have several contributors writing all sorts of things for your company, you need to ensure they’re all approaching it from the same position. There are several things you can do to ensure this happens.

• Involve all your staff in the development of your tone of voice. If you allow them to have an input when identifying your core value, determining your language, and finding your tone of voice, they will be much more invested in maintaining the standards you set in that initial process. They might also have some valuable ideas you hadn’t considered.

• Create a tone of voice guide and make it available to all employees, consultants and agencies responsible for creating your content.

• Proofread your content, or hire a proofreader familiar with your tone of voice guide, to ensure that everything you publish – and everything published on your behalf – supports your tone of voice, your core value, and your identity.

Your tone of voice guide

This should be a static guide that informs or reminds content contributors what makes your tone of voice your tone of voice. Here are some tips for writing a tone of voice guide:

• It can be purely word-based, but an inviting infographic may help communicate your points.

• Lists (like this one) are really useful – try making a short list of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ words and phrases – that is, phrases that perfectly sum up your company’s core value, and some that directly contradict it.

• Write the guide itself in your tone of voice, so that by simply reading it, the reader is already immersed in the language you want them to use.

• Make it easy to remember. Your content creators will be much more efficient if they don’t have to refer to your guide every time they write something. In the end, using your tone of voice should be second nature.

• Provide examples from a range of different contexts. ‘Show don’t tell’ is a great learning tool.

Tone versus voice

It’s likely that you will be featuring copy on a variety of platforms, and sometimes the platform will determine the kind of content you can write. For example, while your website content and print brochure content might be quite similar, your social media posts can take on a completely different tone. That’s okay, though, as long as your voice remains consistent. It’s important to recognise that distinction: your voice is who you are, and your tone is how you communicate that. As long as your voice remains consistent, your tone can vary (within reason) from platform to platform.

Visual branding

Ideally, your tone of voice should be established first, and this should inform your visual branding. However, you may already have had your visual branding in place before you started reading this guide. If that’s the case, making sure your tone of voice and visual branding complement one another is vital. Your visual branding should never dictate your tone of voice, and it should never contradict your tone of voice, as this will create an inauthentic persona that lacks professionalism. Your written content and your visual content should harmonise perfectly to embody your core value and your identity as a company.

Tone of voice is not what you say, it’s how you say it.We hope this guide has inspired you to start thinking about your tone of voice. But we understand that in today’s busy world it’s hard to find time for anything other than your day-to-day tasks.

Rusty Monkey’s team of marketing and writing experts are on hand to help. We specialise in developing tone of voice strategies for all manner of business, and in holistically developing tone of voice alongside other marketing strategies such as web development, graphic design, video and SEO.

Get in touch with us today to find your voice. Call 0115 950 0842.

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