A "brand voice" helps you to find an individual voice for your content. This is relevant for both agencies and freelancers in order to stand out from the crowd. I'll explain how to develop a brand voice - including suitable examples, guidelines and templates.

What is a brand voice?

A brand voice determines which personality and which characteristics your texts convey. Ideally, it is recognizable and speaks to the intended target group quite literally. The tonality of the content plays an important role here, as does the level of language.

In order to develop your personal brand voice, you have to make various decisions that are sometimes more and sometimes less obvious:

• One rather obvious question, for example, is whether you want to address visitors to your website as "Du" or "Sie". This is a fundamental decision that already has a significant impact.
• This also includes the impression your brand should convey: Is it young, flippant and non-conformist or, on the contrary, sedate, reserved and conservative?
• The question of language level is more subtle: Is simple language the order of the day in order to reach as wide an audience as possible? Or can it be subject-specific so that a clearly defined target group feels at home?

Colleen Jones from Content Science expresses the goal of brand voice like this: Imagine the ideal personality you want your brand to represent and bring that personality to life in your content.

"I find a handy way to define voice is this: the personality of your content. Is it smart? Kind? Authoritative? Personable? Inclusive? Quirky? Something else? Imagine the ideal personality you want to represent your brand, and make that personality come alive in your content."

Colleen Jones, Content Science

What is a brand voice good for?

The brand voice is ultimately part of your brand identity, just like the company name, the logo, an advertising claim or the chosen colors. It is not always as obvious as the chosen font. But that's why you shouldn't underestimate it: If you get the tone wrong, even the most beautiful corporate identity is of little use to you.

It is important to understand that brand voice is not only used for longer text content such as how-to articles, white papers or corporate e-books. Rather, it applies to all elements that use language in any form and therefore also influences how you name navigation points or how an error message is formulated.

In specialist circles, these mini and microtexts fall under the term "user experience writing" or "UX writing": such inconspicuous elements can be decisive for a successful user experience and therefore crucial for your success or that of your company.

And we're not just talking about your own website here. Think about your social media profiles or your advertising campaigns, for example: Here, too, you want to present a consistent, comprehensible image. After all, it's highly confusing if someone is sent from a fluffy social account to an extremely dull website. It doesn't fit together. There can be exceptions, but they should be well thought out.

One example: If you are making yourself interesting for new employees ("employer branding"), then you can adapt the rules and guidelines a little. Nevertheless, your appearance should not suddenly take on a completely different character.

And last but not least, a brand voice helps you when many different people, departments or even external service providers work on your content. Sometimes texts also come from people who are not responsible for content - for example, in the example already mentioned with the error messages in a form that an external agency contributes. This quickly comes across as inconsistent and unprofessional.

At the same time, such a brand voice is not only worthwhile and important for larger companies or agencies, but also for freelancers in particular: After all, it's your chance to stand out positively and convey exactly the qualities that your future customers are looking for. You can even use it to influence who is included, i.e. who contacts you and who doesn't.

To summarize, a defined brand voice helps you in three ways:

• It can ensure that you stand out from the competition and become more recognizable.
• It appeals to your desired target group so that they perceive you positively.
• It gives you guidelines for content that you can pass on to colleagues, external partners and others. Or that remind you yourself of what you have set out to do.

What should you align your brand voice with?

If you want to develop your brand voice, ideally you already know how your brand should appear. Perhaps there is a mission statement and other basic definitions that you can refer to.

To do this, you need to know who is in your target group and what their expectations are. Used correctly, the brand voice helps you to build a relationship with these people, supported by your content marketing. It is also helpful to look around your industry: How do others perform? What do you like? What is rather boring and interchangeable? How can you stand out positively?

It is generally recommended to be "authentic" at this point too. This means that it should suit you, the company, the products and offers. Otherwise, an arch-conservative company that suddenly wants to appear young and "edgy" quickly brings to mind the meme "How do you do, fellow kids? Or as content strategist Lauren Pope puts it:

"Your voice needs to be authentic, which means it feels right coming from your brand. If you're a hundred-year-old global banking corporation it'll be jarring if you start to talk like a BuzzFeed listicle."

Another example is freelancers who present themselves like an agency, including a "lordly we". This raises false expectations and is very likely to attract unsuitable prospects. In addition, customers will sooner or later recognize these backdrops as such - not exactly a confidence-building measure.

Copywriter Natalia Toborek sums it up as follows: A brand voice is found in the intersection between your unique voice and personality on the one hand, and how you want to present yourself to your (potential) customers on the other. So both come together: What makes you or your company special and what appeals to your desired target group.

Develop brand voice

The crucial question is how you develop and find your own brand voice. Content strategist Lauren Pope sees the following four factors as the foundation for this:

• Personality: The characteristics and qualities that the brand voice embodies
• Tone of voice or tonality: the feelings or moods conveyed
• Rhythm: The tempo and the structure
• Vocabulary: The words used

Let's take a closer look at these four points:

Show personality

The personality should match the values and goals of the company. This does not just mean that it should be "authentic", as described above. It also means that it directly supports the objectives and strategy. So don't choose a voice based (solely) on what you like best or what seems to be popular at the moment.

Lauren Pope also recommends not only defining the personality with adjectives, but also writing a character description. This should help everyone involved to slip into this character when writing something. Specific examples of how these personality traits play out are helpful.

Set tonality(ies)

Tonality, in turn, changes the personality to suit the situation - just as we as humans have a voice and a character, but can sound different depending on the situation. The tone of voice is intended to convey certain feelings or moods in the brand voice and varies them based on the personality.

To do this, it is important to know your own target group well: What do these people want or need? How do they want to be addressed? What do they, quite literally, find appealing in their situation? Ideally, you should set out in the guidelines who you want to address and what you want to convey with your tone of voice. Examples are also helpful here.

Find rhythm

Rhythm is the third factor that determines the impact of a text more than you may realize. An example: Concise statements need short sentences. The previous sentence is an example of this. However, short sentences alone make a text seem choppy. It sounds more like a telegram. In the long run, this becomes tiring.

This is where structure comes into play, providing variety from time to time. The length and structure of your sentences alone can influence how your text comes across: fast and loud, leisurely and quiet ... You can therefore strengthen or weaken what you have decided on in terms of personality and tone.

Define vocabulary

Last but not least, vocabulary refers to which words you use and which you don't use. Here, too, the target audience plays a decisive role: is it the general public you want to address or are you talking to people with specialist knowledge? Here too, there can be variations depending on the use case and context: You address private individuals differently than corporate customers, for example.

It can be useful here to define a specific vocabulary and also to record which terms should not be used because they are misleading, for example. At this point, keyword research can help you to find exactly the terms that your target group uses. See the article Keyword research guide.

Record in writing

With these four points, you are already well on your way. An article in the Content Science Review also recommends recording the results in writing. This is especially true for large organizations so that everyone involved is on the same page. In my opinion, however, this also applies to freelancers, because such subtleties are easily lost in everyday life or forgotten a few months later.

Examples and templates

• A well-known practical example comes from MailChimp: their "Voice and Tone" guidelines are embedded in a comprehensive content style guide. Further examples of these and similar guidelines can be found on this page.
• The Twitter Brand Voice Worksheet can provide additional inspiration. Although it relates to tweets, it can be easily adapted for other use cases.
• You can copy this Google Doc from HubSpot. As you can see, it is very simple: it recommends recording three to five characteristics of your brand voice and then adding a description for each. The "Do" and "Don't" columns are examples of what you should and shouldn't do.

These examples and templates also show you that a brand voice is not as complicated as it may sound in theory. Although you should invest time and effort in your considerations, it is perfectly sufficient if you end up with a short, clear summary. That's even better, because who wants to read dozens of pages just to write a social media post?