Voicing some thoughts…

Having a strong tone of voice for your brand, which is most commonly displayed in company-to-client communications, adverts and anything created by the company, can influence a person into purchasing, or running for the hills. The written word has the power to create a person’s perception of a business entirely from scratch.

Here at the Identity Agency, we’re fairly sure our brand’s tone of voice is easy to understand. We are a no-nonsense company, and our communications are casual and informal to reflect this. After you’ve read this article, hopefully you’ll know all you need to know about the different tones of voice, why they’re important and how to create your own!

Keeping track

Tone of voice also includes the order of the words you choose, as well as images, or lack thereof. It’s important to get it down to a fine art, so consider creating a company guide. This can be used for emails, website text, adverts or anything else written for the company.

brand tone of voice can include internal communications as well.

Laid-back or academic?

A tip for mastering a a casual tone of voice is to swap formal for normal. Try writing as you would chat to a mate in the pub, or use really simplified language.

If you’re looking to go the other way, you should consider looking at a grammar guide for academic writing, or just reading a load of technical text in order to grasp the format.

A word for everyone!

Most importantly, you should be writing for your audience. Make sure they understand what you’re talking about, and answer any of their questions. If they’re wondering what your business is about, you should be making clarity one of your points to work on. You have to be inclusive, and appeal to as wide a range of people as possible, so be aware that colloquial expressions or idioms may not transfer well across cultures.

Consider your target audience when planning your brand's tone of voice.

Clear conversations

Clear conversations rise from a mixture of common sense and educated guesses. Use your own judgement as to what tone will suit your audience best – you should always be appealing to them. If you’re selling stairlifts, you might want to miss out on slang, as these are two different target demographics that have few overlaps.

Layout choices

Subheadings are used to group text around a topic and are a blog writer’s best friend. But, as well as this, they are easier for an audience to read, because everything they need to know on a certain topic can be found in one place. Some people can get overwhelmed when faced with a wall of text, so make them into paragraphs or subheadings!

Similarly, bullet points are great ways to include a list of information. You can get straight to the point, and are extremely simple to read. You can skim a bulleted list very easily, which is why news articles will often summarise the article in a few bullets. When editing, long passages make it harder to spot mistakes, meaning that splitting your long passages of text up can help both the writer and the reader!

Using subheadings in your layout can help improve readability.

Length

Along those lines, keep it short! Research shows that when your sentence length is 8 words, people can understand 100% of it. As it increases to 14 words, people only understand 90% of it, and the longer it gets, the more comprehension is lost.

Timer’s sounded!

Well, there you have it. That was all about a brand’s tone of voice, and why it is important. We also went through how to create your own, and if you find success in our tips, please let us know!