Small Bytes: Maintaining Your Brand's Tone of Voice

In this episode, Martin Sully discusses how to maintain a brand's tone of voice. He explains the difference between brand voice and tone of voice, and emphasizes the importance of aligning the brand voice with the company's mission, values, and target audience. Martin also suggests creating a written style guide to maintain consistency in communication. He advises auditing past content to ensure it aligns with the brand's tone of voice and highlights the significance of authenticity in influencing purchase decisions.

Key Takeaways

• Brand voice and tone of voice are two separate things, with brand voice being consistent and tone adjusting based on the audience's emotional state.
• Align the brand voice with the company's mission, values, and target audience.
• Create a written style guide to provide guidance on communication.
• Audit past content to ensure consistency in tone of voice.
• Authenticity influences purchase decisions and builds stronger connections with customers.

Transcript

Martin Sully (00:00.338)
Lizzy Killen, this one is for you. This is the Level Up Podcast. I'm your host, Martin Sully, a brand strategist, designer and founder of Snapper Studio. And I'm on a mission to help you gain clarity and confidence in your brand. I'll arm you with bite -sized tips.

and introduce you to friends of the show who are taking their brand to the next level.

Martin Sully (00:37.307)
My friend Lizzy Killen has been building a business where she supplies really beautiful teas and not teas like, have a cup of English breakfast tea. Yummy. T -shirts, shirts.

basically she supplies and makes and gets like handmade like the most amazing t -shirts and her brand has been building really beautifully. And I'm really pleased to be able to say that I've been a small part in just trying to help her give her some of the things and give her some of the ideas to kind of help help her. Anyway, she has always been one of the people that

question things and helped me clear up some things and actually is a little bit of an inspiration as to why I got into this and did this set of series of podcasts. Her question was this, How do I maintain my brand's tone of voice? Really simple question, but funnily enough, when I'm putting together research, I give it a little, you know, a little bit

a little bit of a search. And Funnily enough, there's little to no coverage on Google Google. But if you alter your question, how do I maintain my brand voice? You can actually find something. So, if you want to do that as a starting point, do that. But first, I need to make a distinction for you. Brand voice and tone of voice.

are two completely separate things. Your brand voice is always the same. It's the bit that is influenced by the personality that you create, but your tone adjusts depending on who you're talking to and their emotional state. So that's why they're two different things. You can still retain all your personality, but if somebody's, you

Martin Sully (02:59.446)
If you're talking to somebody that's a little bit down, an empathetic and understanding voice will connect better and show them how much you care. Simple. And if you get a bad review and you go in all defensive, you're likely to never hear from them again. And they will spread their message even further. That's why

The message we relay and the way that we the tone of voice that we use to talk to people says a lot about your brand. So where should your brand voice come from? You need to have a think about the following things. First, you need to look at your company's mission. What are you actually trying to achieve?

If you are focusing on sustainability, your voice might reflect a love of nature and an awareness of environmental issues. Okay. You also need to work out what your company's values are with your brand values, and they can be reflected in your personal values too. So whatever your core values are, they need

be reflected in your message. Yeah, If your one of your brand values is to be empathetic, you need to use empathetic language to communicate your compassion or respect for that topic. Thirdly, you need to look at your target audience. And unless you know who you're talking to, you won't be able to use their language.

That's another thing that's really important for that brand voice that we're building. So, yeah, I guess that's how you focus on actually achieving the voice and making a voice, but actually maintaining it is a bit different. Here's what you probably should do. Get all those words and phrases and ideas down on paper, because at the end of the day,

Martin Sully (05:26.486)
If you work with a brand strategist or tone of voice, you know, copy messaging specialist, they will provide a written style guide. And that is essentially what we're going to do. If you want to go into it, You basically need to start using a written style guide because it's going to be really helpful. It gives you and your team guidance on how to communicate what your do's and don'ts are like.

What words do we not, do we never use? We don't use X, Y, Z. We don't use ABC. We definitely do phrase it like this. Do, do, do, do, do. Okay. So yeah, we are basically looking at making the language in there really clear, really concise, and making sure that it's easy to understand and highlight any

differences in different scenarios. Keep your brand voice authentic, align it to your values and your services and your products for sure. And don't forget that authenticity influences the purchase. One of the last things that I love to do and I will always tell people to do is jam pack it with the emotions you want to communicate.

How do your services and products make people feel? And the one thing off the back of this, if you were going to do anything with this advice, is to have a look at auditing everything you currently have. Yeah, I get it. That could be a big task. But there's nothing worse than focusing on all the ongoing work that you are going to be doing and making sure that your tone of voice is correct for that. If there's

ton of past content that's completely out of whack because you are opening yourselves up for all sorts of issues around consistency, people, you know, not have building that trust, breaking that trust. That is not a good thing. So places to particularly look out because it's probably one of the things

Martin Sully (07:54.274)
doesn't get done enough is to make sure your website is up to date. Make sure that your social media stuff is up to date. Make sure it's everything. all those little touch points you don't think about are up to date. Say you've got a download on your website. You get a PDF come through. You've got an automated set of emails. Are the emails that you receive off the back of that or up to scratch? Are they doing the right thing?

are the is the download appropriate is the voice in the download right is it still right just have a check of those things it's a good start like i said authenticity influences the purchase and all of this makes for better first impressions it

dingishes your brand, makes it more recognisable and builds stronger connections with your ideal customers.