Brand voice guidelines

What brand voice guidelines are

Brand voice guidelines are a short document that describes how your business sounds in writing: the sentence length, the formality, the humour or its absence, the words it uses and the words it never uses. Each trait is shown with a right example and a wrong example from your own material, so a writer can check a draft against it in minutes rather than guess.

They are not a style guide, which settles spelling, capitals, numbers and formatting. A style guide says whether it is "e-mail" or "email". Voice guidelines say whether you would ever write "Hey there" at the top of one.

Who this is for

A business where the writing is done by more than one person, or is about to be. The owner who wrote the original site has hired an assistant, a freelancer or an agency, and every draft comes back sounding like someone else. It also suits a business whose website, emails and social posts already sound like three companies and whose customers have started to notice.

If one person writes everything and will for the next year, a voice document mostly describes what they already do. The better buy is a one-page words to use and avoid list, which fixes the small drifts without a full guide.

What it contains

Five sections, in the order a writer needs them.

Who is speaking. A paragraph on the person the writing should sound like: the experienced tradesperson, the calm adviser, the neighbour who happens to know. This is a decision, made with you, and it settles most of what follows.

The voice chart. Three or four traits, each defined in a sentence and each paired with a quoted right example and a quoted wrong example. "Direct, not blunt" is a trait; the two examples are what make it usable.

Tone by situation. The same voice sounds different on a sales page, in a renewal reminder and in an apology. A short table sets the register for the six or eight situations your business writes in most.

Words. A one-page list: words and phrases you use, words you avoid, and the reason for each. Plus your brand vocabulary, the agreed names for your own products and plans.

Before and after. Four to six real pieces of yours, rewritten into the voice, shown side by side with the original. Writers copy examples far more readily than they follow rules.

What you get

The guidelines. Ten to fourteen pages, with the voice chart and the word list on the first two, because those are the pages that get printed and pinned up.

The one-page card. The voice chart and the ten most important words on a single page, for the person who will not read fourteen.

The rewrites. The four to six before-and-after pieces, delivered as usable copy, not just examples. They can go live.

A one-hour session. On video, with everyone who writes for you, working through a fresh draft against the chart together. By the end each person has applied it once.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A family-run plumbing and heating company has grown to fourteen staff. The owner wrote the website eight years ago in plain, slightly dry sentences that customers liked. Since then an office manager writes the emails, a nephew runs the social account, and a marketing agency wrote four new service pages. The emails are formal and apologetic, the social posts are all exclamation marks, and the agency pages call the company "your trusted comfort partner".

Reading forty pieces across the four channels and an hour with the owner produce a voice chart of three traits: plain, specific, unhurried. The tone table sets one register for quotes, another for the after-hours emergency page, another for the follow-up email. The word list bans "comfort partner", "solutions" and every exclamation mark, and keeps the owner's habit of naming the part and the price in the same sentence. Six pieces are rewritten as examples, including two of the agency pages. The nephew reads the one-page card and the next week's posts sound like the company.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Who writes for you now, what sounds wrong, and what you want to keep. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Scope, number of channels, and the price agreed before anything starts.
3. Reading and listening. Thirty to fifty pieces across every channel, plus a recorded hour with you and, ideally, with whoever customers say they like dealing with. One to two weeks.
4. The draft chart. The traits and the word list first, on their own, so we can argue about them before the full document is written around them.
5. The full guidelines and rewrites. Reviewed by you and by at least one of your writers, because a guide the writers cannot use is decoration.
6. The session. The hour with your writers, and the final documents.

Three to four weeks from first call to final document is typical.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, agreed in writing, and not changed without your agreement. The price depends on how many channels you write in, how many people write for you, and how many before-and-after rewrites you want. A guide that follows a voice consistency audit costs less, because the reading is already done. The pricing page explains how fixed pricing works.

What happens next

The guidelines are meant to be used by your people, and in-house writer coaching is how that usually sticks: a few months of reviewing their drafts against the chart. Pages written before the guide can be brought into line as voice alignment. And if the voice is settled but the claims are not, the messaging framework is the other half.