How to write a brand voice guide your team will actually use
Most voice guides collect dust in a doc somewhere. I'd write yours on one page, in a format people can check while they write.
If your business has a voice guide, it probably came with the brand book, the PDF that covers your logo and colors. The voice section tends to be a page of adjectives like bold and approachable. You read it once at the kickoff. A month later, someone on your team is writing a homepage or answering a review, and they don’t open the PDF. Their question is small (do we say “clients” or “customers”?), and they’d have to dig for the answer, if it’s in there at all.
A voice guide your team will use fits on one page. They can keep it open while they write and find an answer in a few seconds. Ours is a few lines and a five-row table, and we check everything we send to a business owner against it before it goes out.
Why one page works better
Voice questions come up in the middle of a sentence. Your writer wants to know whether “affordable” sounds cheap, or whether to say “we” or “I,” and they want the answer before they lose the thought. If finding it takes longer than writing the sentence, they’ll guess. After enough guesses, your website and your emails sound like two different companies wrote them.
One page also makes you choose. There’s no room for every value statement and every adjective, so you keep the rules that change how a sentence reads and drop the ones that only sound good in a meeting.
I’d also write rules a person can check by reading a draft once. You can’t check a draft for “be authentic.” You can check it for exclamation points at a glance. With one page to work with, you end up writing more rules like the second one, since there’s no room to explain the first.
We hold every page on the site for Dante Law, a Florida personal injury firm, to the firm’s voice. That’s 24 practice pages we rewrote, 62 supporting pages, 15 city pages, and 8 to 12 new pieces a month on top of those. With that much writing, I want a guide anyone can check in a few seconds.
What goes on the page
The format I’d use has seven parts, and each one takes a line or two. Copy the table, replace our answers with yours, and you’ve got a first draft.
| Part | What goes in it | Ours |
|---|---|---|
| Whose voice | Who is talking, and whether it’s “I” or “we” | First person, as me: “I” for me, “we” for Metro Media |
| Where it applies | Which writing follows the guide, and which doesn’t | Anything a prospect, client, or follower sees. Internal notes can be blunt. |
| How it sounds | Three to five plain traits | Plain, direct, first person, short sentences, the way I’d say it |
| Say and don’t say | Swaps, with the plain word first | Five rows, starting with “more calls, more cases, more jobs” |
| Never | A few hard rules anyone can check in one read | No exclamation points, no em dashes, no hype, no fake urgency, no flattery |
| One example | A real line, before and after | “We’ll show you what’s costing you calls,” in place of a big promise about growth |
| Who decides | The person who settles anything the page doesn’t cover | Me. Nothing goes out without my OK. |
Don’t skip the “where it applies” row. Without it, people polish internal notes that should be blunt, or let a casual tone slip into what customers read.
Some of your hard rules will be taste, like our rule against em dashes. Write those down too, so nobody has to guess. For longer pieces like this one, we add one more: if the reader needs a technical term, we explain it in one plain line the first time it comes up.
If you’re a law firm, add a line that says where to find your state bar’s advertising rules and who checks new pages against them.
Describing how you sound
I think traits are where most voice guides go soft. Words like “friendly” and “professional” describe almost every business, so they don’t help a writer choose between two sentences. Give each trait an edge, meaning the thing it shouldn’t turn into. Spelled out, ours would be plain without talking down to anyone, direct without being curt, first person without making every sentence about me, and short without turning into a string of fragments.
Without the edge, people overdo it. Ask for “direct” and nothing else, and sooner or later someone sends a customer a curt reply and calls it on-brand.
One way to check your traits is to pull up your biggest competitor’s website and read your words next to it. If your words fit that company as well as they fit yours, keep going.
The say and don’t-say list
Put the plain word in the first column. If all you give writers is a list of banned words, they get stuck mid-sentence with nothing to reach for. Give them the swap and they’ve got the word to use.
Ours has five rows, and the say side reads:
- more calls, more cases, more jobs
- visitors from Google
- cost per lead, return on ad spend
- works on phones
- we’ll show you what’s costing you calls
The other side has the industry term each one replaces, the kind you’d see in a marketing report. Business owners read this post too, so I’ve left those terms out.
Write your say column in your customers’ words. Listen to how they describe the problem when they call, and use their phrase even when it isn’t the technical one. If you ran an HVAC company, yours might start like this:
| Say | Don’t say |
|---|---|
| AC repair | climate comfort solutions |
| We’ll tell you the price before we start. | transparent pricing you can trust |
| a new unit | a state-of-the-art system upgrade |
| Call us, or book online. | Reach out to our team of experts. |
Some rows are bigger than a single word. Salandria is a Toronto demolition company that sells to developers and procurement teams (the people who hire contractors for a company). We held their copy to one rule that cuts a whole style of writing: no “we are passionate about” copy, only facts, projects, and a clear path to a quote.
Writing yours
Start from writing you already have. Pull some emails and pages that sound like your business at its best, plus some that don’t, and read the two piles side by side. The differences between them are your rules, and they’ll be more specific than anything you’d come up with in a meeting.
Write the guide in the voice it describes. If it asks for plain words in a paragraph of jargon, people will copy the paragraph.
Then test it on someone who hasn’t written for you before. Hand them the page, ask for a short reply to a customer question, and watch where they stop to ask you something. Each of those stops is a row you’re missing.
Keep it where people write, pinned in the shared drive or printed next to the desk, and give it one owner. If the same question comes up twice, the owner adds a row, so the answer’s there the third time.
If you’re building a brand from scratch, page four of the 5-page brand brief I’d write before any design starts makes a good first draft.
You’ll know it’s working when people stop asking how to say something and start checking the page. If you’d rather have us write it with you, we do that as part of our brand work.