Tone of voice

Tone of voice is written down as a short document: the vocabulary you use, how you address people, typical sentence length, a list of banned words and, above all, examples. A copywriter builds it with whoever actually writes every day, not with the marketing director who approves texts once a month. It comes after positioning, alongside the visual identity or just after it.

An events agency whose posts are written by three people sounds like three people. One is casual, one is formal, one writes press releases. The customer does not analyse this, they simply feel the company has no face. The same split usually sits between sales emails and Instagram. Tone of voice closes that gap in a few days and saves rewriting on every campaign.

The process: gather twenty to thirty of your real texts, mark what fits and what does not, write a say this, not that table using sentences from your own communication, then test it on three fresh texts. One to two weeks. From the client we need access to existing texts and the names of everyone who writes, sales and support included.

The weakest form is a list of adjectives like friendly and professional, which everyone reads differently. Watch the opposite extreme too: a tone of voice that is too distinctive cannot be used in a complaint reply or technical documentation. Write down where it loosens and where you simply state facts. And tone will not rescue a message nobody wanted to read.

A test we run with clients: take three competitor posts, remove the logos and have the team guess which one is yours. If nobody can tell, you do not have a tone of voice yet. A habit worth passing on: keep the banned word list in a shared document and add to it whenever a sentence grates. It becomes the most used page.