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Seven steps to creating your company tone of voice 11 January 2025

In a world overloaded with marketing content, your copywriting tone of voice matters more than ever.

Tone of voice goes far beyond simply making a company sound fun or approachable. You could describe it as the strategic application of a house style to define yourself in your market, or you could just say that it’s a great way to make yourself more memorable.

Either way, I hear a lot of business-owners asking about how to achieve the right tone of voice in copywriting. I’ve only seen that trend grow over the 20+ years I’ve been copywriting. AI might be taking centre stage in many companies’ marketing strategies, but research suggests that the lack of an authentic tone of voice in AI-generated content can undermine the perception of a business.

Here are some starting points to help you discover your own tone of voice:

1. Find your people

Not got your marketing personas in place yet? Your marketing personas are the first step in planning your copywriting tone of voice. They provide the all-important steer on who you’re planning your copywriting strategy around. Work out who you want to write for and think about the style that will work for them. Are your ideal clients busy people with limited time or aspirational types who want to feel nurtured? What style is relevant to them? All these kinds of insights will add up to a more clearly defined tone of voice.

2. Try something new

Developing a tone of voice means stepping aside from your usual style of writing and habitual ways of talking about what you do. Look at all the options available to you. Which specific styles would work for your industry? What tone of voice could set you apart from your competitors? Here’s how a new tone of voice helped a company break the mould in its industry.

3. Do some digging

Think about how you want to be seen, then aim to convey those qualities in writing. Want to be viewed as authoritative? Opt for clear, formal sentences. Need to be recognised as an innovator? Look at how to combine the quirky with the credible. Match the qualities valued by your ideal customers with your own copywriting style. Then make sure that it’s consistent across all your content (more on that later on). Be sure to avoid simply opting for one-note approaches, something I discuss in this article about the adjective many companies continue to use when discussing their content tone of voice.

4. Look back

It’s great to keep your copywriting approach up to date. But don’t miss out on the insight you can gain from revisiting older content. Take a closer look at the marketing copy that has worked for you and ask yourself why. Did a specific blog article create a better response? Did a particular email encourage more interest? Analyse the tone of voice and copywriting style you used in that content and consider which of those elements you can bring to your more focused tone of voice.

5. Be yourself

It may seem tempting to take on a whole new persona for your copywriting tone of voice. But you risk losing yourself in the process. If it’s your business, you want your website, your brochure, your blog, whatever it is, to sound like you. You copywriting approach should match who you are.

So be sure to develop a tone of voice that fits with you, whether that’s informal, laid back, energetic, or something else. When a company owner asked me to write blog articles in a style that was very much in her particular voice, as well as appealing to the interests of her business network, my focus was on keeping the blog content true to her character. It seems to have worked, judging by the feedback she’s received.

6. Tell your story

People love stories. So don’t overlook yours in your copywriting and tone of voice strategy. Find what’s appropriate and what you feel comfortable sharing, then bring it to life. An example might be what inspired you to start your business. Build that into your web content. Sharing it as part of your company introduction will help give your tone of voice a more distinctive edge. You can learn about how I approached this for one of my clients here.

7. Be consistent

As I’ve blogged before, consistency is a valuable part of copywriting. Be sure to keep your tone of voice consistent across your marketing content once you’ve established your own particular style. Set a schedule for reviewing it. That way, all marketing copy that goes out with your message will be on-message.

Time to discover your tone of voice?

Your chosen tone of voice has the potential to help you build great connections with your ideal audience. And yours is just waiting to be discovered! Want to know more? Get in touch.