How to Hone Your Brand Voice

Your brand voice is how you share the personality of your brand with the world. It must be consistent throughout your marketing activities, helping prospective clients to understand who you are, what you stand for, and why you’re the right practitioner for them.

The more defined your brand voice is, the easier it is to create your marketing, brief someone to do it for you, or even brief ChatGPT to create something for you.

What Words Describe Your Brand?

Having a few words that describe your brand will serve as a compass for your brand voice and ensure everything you produce represents it.

For example, I use the adjectives pragmatic, trusting, and warm. There are other words I could use, but these are the ones I filter my writing through.

Spend a few minutes listing adjectives that describe your brand and how you want to be perceived. Think about words clients and friends use to describe you, as these offer great insights. From this list, pick a few words that represent your brand values, which will act as your compass.

A great book that will help you is ‘How The World Sees You’ by Sally Hogshead – it will help you identify what others see in you so that you can amplify those traits in your branding and make it unique to you.

Writing Style Outline

It’s helpful to have an outline of your writing style, especially if you decide to outsource any writing in the future. This will guide anyone creating content on your behalf. Here’s an example of mine:

• Brand Description: Pragmatic, trusting, warm
• Style: Simple, short, and to the point - use bullet points
• Use capitals for main page headings
• Tone: Friendly
• Embellishments: Use emojis, use !!!, ??!! or ???, use – to link sentences
• No swearing

A good way to discover your style is to look back over things you’ve written like social media posts, and even messages to friends will give you a good idea of your style. Look at how you construct your sentences, the tone you use, if you add in any embellishments, etc.

Pick Your Brand Topics

Having set topics in your brand voice helps maintain consistency in your messaging and simplifies decisions about what to talk about. Consistency is key in branding, and it helps your audience know what to expect from you.

Pick a few professional topics, such as your expertise, your discipline, the problems you solve for clients, your process, and your values.

Have a few personal topics too, as people want to get to know the person behind the brand. Set boundaries around what is appropriate to share to keep your private life private. For example, I share about my dogs, nature, upcycling, and moving to Wales.

Simple Marketing Message

A simple marketing message, sometimes called an ‘elevator pitch’ or a ‘help statement’, is a concise way to describe what you do. It should appear consistently throughout your marketing.

If people don’t understand what you do, how will they know you can help them? Why would they pay you?

You need a clear message, simple enough for a child to understand and repeat. This way, even if your offering doesn’t suit someone personally, they can recommend you to a friend in need of your services.

Craft your marketing message in a format like this:

• I help (the people you help) from/with (the problem you solve) to (the results you help them achieve) through/using (your approach).

For example:

• “I help women juggling careers and ageing parents to navigate the care system through mentoring.”

The more specific and simpler the language you use, the better. This is a starting point, and your marketing message will evolve over time and the order of the different elements will change depending on where you use it.

Check out this article for more information on creating your message.

AI Brief

If you decide to use AI to help you create content, you need to help it understand how you sound. Use your brand voice to brief it, so it creates content in the right tone on your behalf. Create a set of instructions including:

• What you do
• Your branding outline, including the words that describe your brand
• Your writing style
• Instructions on what you want it to do in terms of writing a blog, creating a social media post, etc.

Here’s an example of what I would use:

"I am a marketing consultant and mentor for holistic practitioners who want to embrace marketing to grow their business and increase their impact. My brand values are pragmatic, trusting, and warm. My writing style is friendly, simple, and to the point."

Brand Voice Guidelines

Create a document listing these elements as points of reference to maintain a consistent voice throughout your marketing. This can be shared with anyone supporting your business to help them understand your brand.

Having this information to hand will help you keep your marketing sounding consistent to your audience. It will help them to build a sense of who you are and whether you’re the right person for them.

If you need help with your marketing, let’s have a chat and I will help you get clear about your best next steps and point you in the right direction.