How to Write Your Product Tone and Voice Guide
Getting started with a tone and voice guide for your product is an exciting venture. You’ve been tasked to blend together many facets of the company and come out the other end with a document that aims to communicate effectively with your customers, appease a few internal folks, and hopefully upset no one.
Depending on the size of the company you are working for, it is likely there will be others at the table with you, who have indirectly or directly already influenced aspects of the tone and voice guide you need to create, without maybe knowing it. Make sure that you get the right stakeholders in the room. This can include people from the marketing team, decision-makers in the company, and your product team that has probably already added words into the product.
Good questions to ask yourself and the team:
Is there a current marketing or brand tone and voice guide? If so, the two documents will need to live harmoniously together.
What are your company values? Do they come through in your product?
What emotions and feelings do you want your customers to walk away with?
What problems do you currently see with the words used in the product? How can they be fixed?
Describe the persona of your customer and the type of language they use. Listen to the words they use when describing your product.
Once you’ve built a foundation for the document you are being asked to deliver, it could be helpful to do some competitive research to see what others are doing in the industry you are in. There’s a chance that they’ve addressed the same issues and have found an effective way to speak to your target audience.
Difference between tone and voice:
Tone and voice can sound like interchangeable words, and they are often used as such, but there is a distinct difference between them.
Voice: Think of your brand as a person. It has personality and it is best described in adjectives. Come up with several words that describe your brands motivations. What does your brand want to accomplish? Is it serious? Is it funny and relaxed? Thinking of your brand as a person will help you establish a voice that sounds natural to your company.
Here are some brand adjectives that might help get you started in thinking of your brand as a person:
Inventive, practical, reliable, positive, professional, straight-forward, compassionate, dynamic, efficient, trustworthy, funny, cheerful, laid-back, community-driven, empowering.
Once you’ve picked out the words that you think describe your company’s brand, it’s a good exercise to define them in a way that’s true to you. Everyone has different associations to words, so make sure that you explain what each word means in context of the way your company sounds. For example, a company that describes themselves as compassionate might emphasize on preventing user’s frustration with their product, or the need for empathetic user error messages.
Tone: Think of tone as a subset of your brand’s voice that you have already created. The tone is more specific to situations that your customer might find themselves in when they interact with your brand. What kind of tone will they receive when they hit an error in your product? Will they get a message when they’ve done something successfully? Think of the different kinds of tones they might interact with within a single use of your product. There is only one brand for your product, but a tone varies depending on the situation.
Look for inspiration:
Most companies have gone through the exercise of creating a tone and voice guide. Some have stumbled into their voice because they had a strong writer that defined it from the beginning, but for the most part there are many writers, and the best way to get them to all sound the same is to create a tone and voice guide for everyone to follow. So, go and steal from the best:
Mailchimp, Virgin, Shopify, Atlassian, Microsoft
Next steps:
Once you’ve established your brand’s tone of voice, you will want to be consistent in everything that is written in your product. But remember, creating your tone and voice guide isn’t a one-time activity, you will need to be flexible and revisit it frequently. You can’t jump from being serious to being funny — it’s an open-ended exercise requiring updates as you continue to improve your messaging, collect feedback about what is working and what isn’t, and become more aware of your customer needs.
Stay tuned for Part 2 (How to Write Rules and Keep a Glossary) of the tone and voice guide article series. We will take a look at how to create rules and a glossary so that the other writers on your team can all start to write in the product and sound similar so that you have consistency.
