Your brand voice influences how people feel about you and if they want to work with you.
However, it never ceases to surprise me just how many brands come to me wanting help with their content marketing…
…then confess they haven’t established what their brand voice is.
Sometimes these are well-established brands that just haven’t given it the thought it deserves.
They put lots of work into the brand visuals, the brand website, and their social media.
But they don’t consider how the language they use in those places impacts the way their audience feels about them as a business—and if they’re the right company for that person to work with.
If that’s you, don’t worry—we can fix it!
In this post, I’m going to lay out a few ideas for things to consider when you’re trying to create your brand voice.
Formal vs informal writing styles
Consider how you feel about someone who talks to you like this:
You are going to love the way our new app helps to save you time.
Technically speaking, there’s nothing wrong with it. But it feels clunky and formal. It’s language that would be much more comfortable in a school essay or an academic paper.
In everyday language it can feel stifled or stilted and make you uncomfortable rather than at ease. You may not notice this consciously, but you’ll feel less connected to brands who write this way—and you may not be able to explain why.
As a business, people need to feel like they can relax around you; they can trust you; like you’re the people they should be working with and you’re talking to them on their level.
Whenever you use language that’s a little bit too formal or academic it can come across as you thinking you’re smarter than your customer.
While throwing in the odd word like tchotchke is fine, big words and long sentences work against you.
The bigger the words, and the longer the sentences and paragraphs, the harder your prospect’s brain has to work to make sense of your writing. And that’s where you tend to lose people.
On top of that, if they’ve had a long day, if they have a short attention span, or if they’re neurodivergent, they may not fully process what you’re trying to say, so they may just give up and go elsewhere.
Most B2B businesses want to make their customers’ lives easier, or help them in some way. Your language should reflect that, too.
Now let’s look at example two:
You’re going to love the way our new app saves you time.
While still maintaining it’s professionalism, this example is much closer to how people speak in everyday life, and it’s much easier to understand.
Quite often, businesses think relaxed, personable is going to come across as how someone talks after a few pints with their best friend. And some brands do want to write that way.
But actually, casual language just means writing how people speak without all the fillers.
There’s a big difference between plain English and sounding like you’ve had a night down the pub.
This is much more casual, for example:
You’re gonna love how our new app saves you time.
For some brands (and people) the use of ‘gonna’ and ‘wanna’ makes them want to die inside, so they run away screaming from it whenever they see it on a page.
Other people don’t even notice when it’s used.
This is why knowing your audience—and how you want them to feel about your brand—is really important.
How do you want your audience to feel?
This is really what your brand voice is about.
We may not always realise it, but the language we use, the language the people around us uses, and the language of the websites that we visit affects how we feel about those people and businesses on an often subconscious level.
However, as mentioned above, a lot of people and places don’t think about how they phrase things before they start writing or speaking.
Most businesses know how they want their audience to feel when they create their company branding and when they’re looking to hire certain types of people. They don’t realise how the language they use does or doesn’t reflect this.
I’ve worked with many brands who want to come across as modern and forward-thinking but their writing style is deeply formal.
Worse, it may even be negatively isolating their target audience without them even realising it.
If someone doesn’t understand what you do because you’ve made them work too hard to understand it, or they don’t understand the advice you’re giving them, they’re going to run away faster than someone who hates ‘wanna’ or ‘gonna’.
As mentioned above, plain English is your friend. It’s the best way for any business to write even if you don’t have a brand voice. It will always be the easiest for people to understand.
That means, at its simplest, using language that a primary school child can understand.
It’s surprisingly hard to write something in simple language because we’re not actually trained to do that—we’re trained primarily for an academic audience unless we specifically work to train ourselves out of it.
When it comes to deciding on your brand voice, focusing on the emotions you want to provoke in your audience is the best place to start.
If you want to come across as trustworthy, being too casual or too childlike in your writing can mean people don’t feel like you’re educated enough to help them.
On the other hand, if your writing style is too formal, even in traditionally more ‘serious’ industries like finance, it can make your brand feel opaque and unapproachable—maybe even like you’re trying to hide something.
A formal or academic writing style turns you and your business into an inaccessible fortress. Most people will give up rather than trying to gain access because it’s simply too much effort.
This isn’t The Princess Bride, where they’ll keep going until they can find a way in because getting inside is the only way for them to achieve their goal.
In real life, there are so many other options out there, why would they work harder if they don’t have to?
They’re much more likely to choose a brand that’s granting them access to an open field or playground.
In an age where transparency and authenticity is so important to consumers, you want to use language to reflect that these are things your brand embodies.
Even if these aren’t technically values for your business, there are some things people want to see from every business, and honesty is one of them. The best way you can reflect that is by using clear language.
An example of what not to do
It’s rare that I name and shame brands, but in this case, I think it’s important. It highlights an issue, and it also shows you what not to do.
Just before Christmas, LastPass shared details of a hack which accessed customers’ vulnerable password data. It couldn’t get much worse for a password manager used by millions of people.
Or could it?
First of all, they published this information two days before Christmas—when most people were already on Christmas break.
Next, they hid details of what was leaked in the fourth paragraph of the blog post announcement.
The paragraphs were long and verbose. It took a lot of brain power to read.
The actual writing style of their announcement was deeply technical, despite the fact that a lot of their users aren’t software developers.
The basic structure of an announcement or press release is to put the most important information in the opening paragraph(s) because a lot of people won’t keep reading. This threw that structure out of the window.
All of these things together feel like very conscious decisions to try to hide from their mistake.
Unfortunately for them, the way they handled this news worked against them much more than what actually happened.
When a company handles such vulnerable data, writing about it in such an inaccessible way frustrates their customers and those who cover tech news. It’s horrific for their brand image.
Choosing your voice
How do you choose your company’s voice? In a way that works?
We’ve talked about company voice triggering emotions, but what if you can’t articulate the emotions you want your reader to associate with your brand?
Here are a few examples of things you might want your reader to feel about you:
- Trustworthy
- Friendly and welcoming
- Knowledgeable
- Empathetic and understanding
- Calming
- Clear
- Inspired creatively
- Encouraged
- Entertained
These are just a few examples designed to trigger ideas.
You could use a combination (such as empathetic and knowledgeable), or it could depend on the content you’re writing.
There’ll generally be an overall pattern that ties in with your company’s mission and how you help your customers, though.
If you’re working with a writer and don’t have a brand voice, giving them a list like this will help them design the voice around the emotions you want to influence.
If you’re not working with a professional writer, you could outsource your brand voice creation to them so that they can articulate it in a way that makes sense to you and the rest of your business in the same way that graphic designers help with visual brand style guides.
Conclusion
Voice is a huge, but often underestimated, part of any brand.
If you’re not sure what yours should look like, start with how you want your audience to feel. The language we use has a huge impact on this, sometimes without us even realising it.
The more you consciously consider the feelings you want to be associated with your brand, the more effective your copy and content will become.
Need some help with your brand voice? Check out my content marketing packages.