Set the tone for your brand

After you have defined your audience and target personas, you can use that information to select the tone of voice for your content. One that matches your product or service as well as your audience. When it comes to content marketing, your brand’s tone of voice sets the tone for all your content, not just text.

What is a brand’s tone of voice?

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the phrase tone of voice as “the way a person is speaking to someone”. In the case of marketing “the speaking” is done through every piece of content that you as a brand put out. Your brand’s tone of voice is a set of guidelines that define how you converse, connect and engage with your customers.

That means text as well as visual and audio content. The text you write, the images and photos you post and the videos and podcasts you share, are all part of the conversation and should follow your brand’s tone of voice guidelines. Consistency in using this set of guidelines will result in recognisability even when you leave part of your brand identity, such as your logo, out of the marketing material.

How do you decide your brand’s tone of voice?

Your brand tone of voice needs to sit in that sweet spot, where your audience can connect with it while it still matches with your brand core values and mission. This sweet spot cannot be defined by one singular word or a simple sentence. And to set it you need empathy, just like with many other content marketing aspects.

A good place to start your guidelines is by considering different tone of voice dimensions and characteristics. You can start broadly but should end up with more specific terms. I have seen some brands use scales for this, putting themselves closer to funny than serious but not too funny, I do not recommend this as it can be too vague.

Fig 1. Tone of voice dimensions examples from Semrush

Along with dimensions, your guidelines should include dos and don’ts. Define vocabulary that you do an do not use; for example what terms do you use to describe your audience, are they clients, guests, customers, consumers. Also be clear on which grammar rules your content should follow; for instance, do you use contractions or not, and do you use British or American spelling. And consider putting in guidelines about controversial topics.

Translating these guidelines into visuals will help to set your brand’s style sheet. For instance, the characteristics caring, romantic and conservative fit better with softer colours as opposed to primary colours which can be seen as harsh; and playful and quirky lend themselves to less straight fonts. If your style sheet was created before your tone of voice guidelines, be sure to check if they line of with each other.

How strict the guidelines should be followed will depend on your industry and audience. Though occasionally switching it up can help ‘wake up’ part of your existing audience that may have stopped engaging, but straying too far from the guidelines is not recommended. Remember to occasionally update your tone of voice guidelines to stay in line with your growing and evolving brand and your changing target personas.

Why generative AI cannot generate text in your brand tone of voice

To follow tone of voice guidelines you need a level of emotional intelligence, just like you do to set the guidelines. Generative AI, like ChatGPT, are really only simple predictive text models, which, while trained extensively, are frequently overestimated in their capabilities. In truth, they only portray an illusion of intelligence and are not actually intelligent as a study by Apple showed; and which was made painfully obvious when someone asked ChatGPT to analyse their new song that consisted entirely of fart noises.

If you spend enough time training generative AI on your own writing, it might be able to generate content that sounds like you wrote it. But you will never be able to provide it with more content than it has been trained on already, making your voice a minority part of its training data. That makes it inevitable that it will mix your chosen style with others it has been trained on. A human content marketeer will always be more conscious of your needs and what they mean for the content that needs to be created.