Branding Save Yourself the Headache by Creating a Brand Voice Style Guide Elizabeth Holloway Branding 7 mins read Sep 2, 2024 Save Yourself the Headache by Creating a Brand Voice Style Guide - Elizabeth Holloway Presenting a consistent brand voice is key to successful marketing strategy, but that can be tricky when you’re working with multiple stakeholders, content creators and social media teams. The solution is to create a brand voice style guide. This is a document that outlines audience segments and personas, voice, tone and anything else that is relevant to how you present your brand’s personality. With clear directives for your brand voice, you avoid all the guesswork and trial and error that can go into creating campaigns and communicating with your audience. To help with that, we’ve put together a short guide on how to create your brand voice style sheet. What is a brand voice? Brand voice is, in essence, how you express brand identity and personality in internal and external communications. It’s something that should remain consistent over time because it’s a reflection of your brand’s core values and identity. Moreover, voice encompasses all of the communication tools you use, from language and tone to branding assets like logos, colour palette and iconography. Why do you need a brand voice style guide? Behind every brand are countless people and teams working in concert. Among them you’re going to have stakeholders, content writers and creators, designers, social media managers and more, working on branded content. A style guide provides a set of instructions that ensure that no matter who is working on the content that it speaks with a unified brand voice. If you don’t have that, you run the risk of giving your brand multiple personalities. This will muddy your messaging and have serious implications for brand recognition, trust and engagement. A brand voice style guide provides a roadmap for maintaining consistency in your branding and identity that everyone can follow. Not only have all the important decisions already been locked in, but your style guide will cut down on time spent discussing how to keep new content on message. Building your brand voice style guide Building out your brand voice style guide is a multi-step process, but it’s more than worth the effort. It’s going to involve exercises to define your brand’s personality archetype, core values and how you want to communicate with the different segments of your audience. Brands will typically enlist the help of an agency like Third Wunder to create their brand voice style guide, but we’re providing an overview of the process to give you an idea of what to expect when creating your own. 1. Define your brand personality For this first step, you might do a bit of anthropomorphizing of your brand. The idea is to ascribe to your brand the kinds of adjectives used to describe people. What kind of person is your brand? Are they playful? Authoritative? Informative? Or maybe they’re empathetic? You can use your mission statement or statement of values to identify key characteristics of your brand. Those core values will translate into brand identity and personality, but so will the language and tone used to write them. For example, if your mission statement has a casual, informal style, this can translate into a brand personality that is youthful and doesn’t take itself too seriously. 2. Craft your voice archetypes An archetype represents a model image of a person that can transcend language, culture and time. You can think of them as categories of people. Invented by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung in the 1940s, archetypes have more recently been adapted to describe brands, as well. There are 12 brand archetypes in total and they include the Creator, the Explorer, the Caregiver, and the Outlaw, among others. Each archetype has traits associated with it. By mapping the traits you identified as part of your brand personality onto the different archetypes, you’ll be able to decide which are appropriate for your brand. 3. Develop voice do’s and don’ts At this stage, you’re going to outline specific, tangible rules for language use, tone of voice and style. This is the part when your style guide starts to feel like instructions. Each brand has wildly different do’s and don’t because they’re informed by your messaging, as well as brand identity and personality. Often included in this part will be a style sheet with specific spelling and grammar rules, as well as defined tone of voice for addressing each persona and context. There will also be examples, which we talk more about in the next section. 4. Create examples Lastly, you’re going to include some concrete examples of how your brand should or should not present itself across different platforms. This part is very important because written guidance can be up for interpretation, but examples make it very clear how you are meant to adhere to the brand voice. Tailoring your voice for different platforms Now that you’ve got guidelines in place for your brand voice, let’s talk about how you apply them across different platforms. There are specific user expectations attached to each platform your brand appears on. The success of your campaigns is dependent on being able to tailor your tone to each platform without compromising your brand voice. Your style guide is an invaluable tool for helping you create platform-specific content as it will have examples for each platform you use. Here are some other practical tips for maintaining a consistent brand voice even as you adapt your content to different contexts: Know your audience on each platform. Different social media and content platforms attract different demographics and user behaviors. Research the typical audience and content style for each platform you use, and adjust your tone accordingly. Tailor your tone to the context. While keeping your overall brand voice consistent, modify your tone based on the platform and content type. For example, use a more casual, conversational tone on social media compared to a more formal tone for official announcements or professional content. Adjust your language and style. Consider the language norms and content formats popular on each platform. For instance, use more hashtags and emojis on Instagram, while keeping LinkedIn posts more professional and industry-focused. Maintain core brand attributes. Identify three-to-five key attributes that define your brand voice (e.g., friendly, informative, innovative) and ensure these remain consistent across all platforms, even as you adjust your tone. Be flexible but consistent. While adapting to different platforms, maintain enough consistency in your overall messaging and personality that your brand remains recognizable across channels. Consider the user’s mindset. Think about why people use each platform and what they’re looking for. Adapt your content and tone to meet those expectations while staying true to your brand. The evolving voice: keeping up with the times Keeping your brand relevant and part of the conversation is an ongoing effort. That means keeping up with the latest trends in your industry. Brands that demonstrate awareness of the latest pop culture and social discourse in their field have an easier time establishing themselves as a credible authority. More than just keeping up with trends, you should be assessing how your content and campaigns are performing across each platform. Social media offers a unique opportunity to hear from consumers. They’ll let you know what they love and hate about anything you do. By paying attention to the conversations happening around your brand, you can fine tune your brand voice for those channels, as well as identify gaps you could be filling to better serve your audience. What’s the takeaway? Your audience is going to be interacting with your brand on multiple channels, which makes consistency a big factor in the performance of your campaigns and branded content. By crafting your brand voice style guide, you provide your creative teams with tools to ensure that everything you put out is on brand and on message, no matter the context. Need help creating your brand voice style guide? We can help you workshop your brand voice and create a style guide to ensure that your voice stays consistent even when working with multiple stakeholders. 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