Your company’s tone of voice is as important to your brand identity as your messaging, your color palette, or your logo.
But actually defining your brand voice—and then executing it in every single place you have copy–is no small task.
As storyarb’s Creative Director of Editorial, I work with marketing teams to find the right tone for their ICP. Before that, I coached early-stage startups on content strategy at a VC firm, often before they’d even made their first marketing hire.
Here’s the pattern I’ve seen: To scale a consistent, recognizable brand, you need to codify tone of voice in terms that anybody on your team can use. And as you add more content, writers, and channels, a clear TOV is the only way to maintain brand consistency.
Here’s how to get on the same page. For every page.
Key takeaways: The 3 things you need to know about brand tone of voice
- A clear brand voice definition lets you sound consistent across channels and writers
- storyarb’s tone calibration tool measures brand voice across 6 axes: register, audience expertise, subjectivity, time orientation, geographic orientation, and boldness
- Write like a pop culture character for an entertaining, pre-fab tone
⚒️ Brand Tone Calibration Tool + Rubric
Define your brand tone with storyarb’s bespoke 6-axis framework. Our rubric shares definitions and example companies along each point of axes like formal to playful, objective to editorial, and (our favorite) G-rated to tongue-in-cheek.
The “tone goalie” trap
Many companies start by having one person who approves everything they publish. (Heads of Marketing: This person might be you.) They’re effectively the “tone goalie,” making final language tweaks to keep everything consistent.
For example, in a startup’s early days, brand tone often lives in a founder’s head as a general “this is the vibe I want to curate” thought—and they want their fingerprints all over everything that ships.
That strategy can work for a while. But as soon as you’re publishing more content than one person can handle, you’re in trouble.
At the same time, descriptions like “funny” and “authentic” and “community-oriented” mean different things to different people—so when the tone goalie tries to hand off content approvals, they don’t like the way other people play.
The best way to liberate the team to create content that will always be on brand is by creating a shared tone of voice definition that’s easy to understand—and even easier to take action on.
Building a shared tone of voice definition
An effective brand tone of voice needs to:
- Resonate with your target audience
- Reflect your company values and offering
- Have a concrete definition anyone on your team can execute
At storyarb, this means a voice that speaks to our ICP of B2B marketers and reflects our passion for sharing expert knowledge with the world.
We also document the hell out of it.
A shared vocabulary helps you define—and execute—your brand voice across channels and content assets.
To help you do that, we bring you: storyarb’s tone calibration tool.
We use this 6-axis framework to hone in on tone of voice with all of our clients (and with ourselves). If you can answer where your brand voice falls on these axes, you can develop a distinct, comprehensive, and replicable brand voice.
Register: How formal is your brand?
High formality is a stylistic hallmark of experts and institutions. It often involves technical, industry-specific language and denser sentence structures. You’ll see this in legal documents, medical journals, and official certificates like diplomas and wedding licenses.
Formality builds trust by creating a sense of a greater institution. However, casual language can also build trust, creating the feeling of connecting with a friend. Think “unhinged” social media posts, lifestyle magazines, and cheerful D2C brands.
Audience expertise: How much do you expect your readers to know?
This axis addresses how much your audience needs to know already to get value out of your content.
If you’re writing to experts, speak to them like experts: use the lingua franca of their industry and don’t over-explain concepts they already know. If you’re writing to a more general audience, trade industry jargon for metaphors and educational explanations to bring them along.
You never want to “dumb things down”—but you can make expert content more accessible to a wider audience.
Subjectivity: Do you have a strong point of view?
Do you aggregate data, or share your own perspective on it? That’s what this axis answers.
It’s easy to assume “objective” means “more trustworthy,” but that’s not always true—think of the op-ed reporter whose columns you value, or the friend whose restaurant recommendations you always trust.
Highly objective brands focus on reporting facts and data, then leave readers to draw their own conclusions. Meanwhile editorial brands draw conclusions and share advice. They can still rely on data, they just go one step further to share their own interpretation of it.
Time orientation: What is your timeline?
What is the time horizon you’re solving your ICP’s problems on? This week, or this century?
Present-oriented brands focus on immediate needs and instant gratification, while future-oriented brands focus on future potential and long-term vision. Present-oriented brands offer concrete, tangible products, while future-oriented brands are more about selling a vision.
(We exclude “past-oriented” from because you can’t sell a solution that fixes someone’s problem yesterday. But if you figure out how to do this, please call us immediately.)
Geographic orientation: Where is your audience, literally?
Are you selling to a local audience, or to people across the globe? Your answer will impact things like the references and idioms you use.
Regional brands have a strong local identity and make specific cultural references. Think references to local sports teams, weather and climate, seasonal festivals, and puns and wordplay that only work in one language. (If you write an ad about the Patriots and fall foliage, your audience probably pahks their cahr at the yahd.)
Global brands focus on universal messaging and global reach. They’re culturally adaptable, often translating their marketing materials into multiple languages.
Boldness: How edgy are you?
Not to play favorites…but this is one of the most fun axes to play around on. Boldness is all about humor and personality.
G-rated brands are family friendly, wholesome, and universally appropriate. As you move left to right on this spectrum, you start to get brands that sneak in multiple layers of meaning that appeal to different audiences at once. Tongue-in-cheek brands rely on irreverent humor, adult references, and innuendos. They got edge, baby.
Bonus tip: What pop culture character do you sound like?
If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed by the full, 6-axis tone calibration exercise, we have a hack for you: Pick a pop culture character, and write like them.
This will allow you to write in an entertaining, specific, and pre-fab voice, while making it easier for multiple writers to write in the same style.
(Obviously, avoid publishing anything trademarked.)
When your audience sees the words you’ve written, they should know you’re the one who wrote them. Get your brand voice wrong, and you’re rebuilding trust with every post. But get it right, and every piece of content will reinforce who you are.
FAQ: How to establish your brand tone of voice
What do I do if different stakeholders can’t agree on tone of voice?
This is exactly why it’s so important to document your brand tone in a public, objective way. Defining your brand tone gives you guidelines to point to when explaining copy choices to a wider audience.
For efficiency’s sake, we recommend filling out the tone calibration framework on your own, then sharing it with stakeholders for feedback and approval.
If you decide to walk through the calibration exercise in more depth, we’ve noticed that it’s often it’s easier for business leaders to answer questions about example companies (“Would we rather sound more like Tropicana or Liquid Death?”) than about adjectives (“Would we rather sound family friendly or edgy?”).
Should our brand voice be different across different channels?
Our approach is same voice, different formats. Your brand voice stays consistent, but how you execute it adapts to each channel.
Think of it like this: You still sound like yourself whether you’re texting a friend, presenting in a meeting, or recording a video. Your core personality stays the same, but you adjust for context.
Consistency is what makes you recognizable—but your format can absolutely adapt to each channel’s strengths and audience expectations. For example, you might use more emojis on social media, tell narrative stories in your newsletter, and write super tight, short copy on your homepage.
Shouldn’t brands always be formal, to build credibility?
Not if formality isn’t what your customers are looking for! Your level of formality depends on the product you are trying to sell.
Are you selling something very expensive, highly regulated, or mission-critical? Your audience may feel safer with a more buttoned-up approach.
Are you selling something for daily, casual use, where your “personality” is part of what you offer? In that case, casual may be more comfortable.
Isn’t it unprofessional to be funny?
Au contraire—humor is a great way to be more memorable. Research from Oracle found that 90% of consumers were more likely to remember a humorous brand, and 72% would buy from a brand that uses humor over their un-funny competition.
Your style of humor, be it witty wordplay or dank memes, depends on your audience.
Can I swear?
Your use of profanity depends on your audience. Will they find it offensive, or refreshing? Does profanity feel authentic to your brand? How do your founders speak in public?
Some vulgar language might get caught in email spam filters, so we recommend being a little more cautious in emails (especially subject lines).
There’s a middle ground here too: You can always try a f***ing asterix.
