Personality needs to survive the everyday stuff.
A brand voice is easy to imagine in a headline. It’s harder to maintain in a delivery update, a contact form, or an explanation of your services. Those ordinary moments matter because they make up a large part of how people experience your business.
Start by describing how you want a conversation with your company to feel. Clear? Warm? Direct? Playful? Choose a few qualities that fit the business you actually run, rather than a collection of adjectives that could belong to anyone.
Show the difference in real sentences.
‘Be friendly’ leaves plenty of room for interpretation. Take a paragraph from your website and write it two ways: one that sounds like you, and one that doesn’t. Explain the difference. Maybe you use contractions, prefer short sentences, or avoid language that makes a simple service sound complicated.
Collect examples from the places your team writes most often. A project introduction, an inquiry response, and a straightforward error message will make a more useful guide than a page of abstract promises.
Let the tone fit the moment.
A consistent voice doesn’t mean every message should sound equally cheerful. A launch announcement can have energy. A service interruption needs calm, clear information. A payment question needs precision. Keep the underlying character while adjusting the tone to what the reader needs.
Humour deserves the same judgment. If someone is trying to solve a problem, a joke can get in the way. Personality works best when it makes communication more human without making the message harder to understand.
Make the guide easy to use.
Keep your writing guidance short enough to consult during real work. Include preferred terminology, a few before-and-after examples, and a checklist for clarity. Give someone responsibility for updating it as new situations come up.
Then read your website aloud. If a sentence sounds nothing like something your team would say, it may be time to rewrite it. Your brand should be recognisable in the words as well as the visuals.
Have a project in mind? Let’s talk about what comes next.