Finding your tone of voice helps your business stand out and build personal connections with customers. If you have a distinctive voice, it creates recognition and trust across all your communications, from website copy to social media posts and customer emails.
What is tone of voice?
Tone of voice refers to how you express your brand and personality through written and spoken communication. It includes the words you use, punctuation, sentence structure, personality, humour, and the overall impression your communications create. Every business has a tone of voice, whether intentional or accidental.
Your tone of voice appears everywhere you write and speak:
- Website copy
- Social media posts
- Video content
- Marketing emails
- Customer service responses
- Sales materials
- Internal communications
- Talks and presentations
Big brands spend a lot of budget and resources defining and maintaining a consistent tone across all touchpoints (and ironically, most of them still sound the same). For small businesses and solopreneurs, the tone of voice often reflects the founder’s personality directly, so it’s essential to put thought into it and ensure it sounds consistent if multiple people are creating communications.
Tone of voice as part of your brand identity
Your visual identity (logo, colours, typography) captures attention, but your tone of voice will get the interest.
A thoughtfully crafted tone:
- Creates consistency across all communications
- Builds recognition without visual elements
- Helps customers understand your values
- Will entertain or make people interested
- Makes your business feel familiar and trustworthy
- Differentiates you from competitors.
Consider how you’d recognise certain brands purely from their writing style—without seeing logos or colours (think Oatly, Innocent, BrewDog). That’s the power of a well-crafted tone of voice.
Using your authentic voice to stand out
Many businesses default to overly formal, corporate language because it feels professional or because the leadership team wants to appeal to a wide audience. However, this approach often creates bland, forgettable communications that fail to connect with customers.
Using your authentic voice:
- Creates genuine connections with your audience and feels more human (especially amongst AI-generated content)
- Will feel natural and sustainable to maintain once you’ve nailed it
- Makes your business more approachable
- Builds trust
- Helps you connect with like-minded customers and puts off the wrong type of people.
As AI-generated content becomes more prevalent, your authentic human voice becomes an increasingly valuable differentiator. People crave genuine connections and can sense when communication feels templated or artificial.
First understand your values and audience
Before defining your tone of voice, you need clarity on two fundamental elements: your core values and your audience.
Your core values are the principles that guide your business decisions and behaviours. They’re not just marketing slogans but deeply held beliefs that influence how you operate. Your tone should naturally reflect these values—if you value transparency, your communications should be clear and straightforward.
Understanding your audience helps you communicate in ways that resonate with them while remaining true to yourself. Consider:
- Their demographics and interests
- Their communication preferences
- The language they use
- Their needs and challenges
- How they like to be addressed
The sweet spot for your tone of voice sits at the intersection of your authentic personality and your audience’s expectations.
How to find your tone of voice
Here are practical steps to help you discover and refine your tone:
1. Analyse your natural speech patterns
Pay attention to how you speak in casual, comfortable settings:
- Record yourself explaining your business to a friend
- Note phrases you use frequently
- Identify your natural rhythm and sentence length
- Consider your use of humour, questions, or storytelling.
These elements of your natural speech provide the foundation for your written tone.
2. List words that reflect your brand values
Create vocabulary lists that align with your core values:
- Words you want to use more often
- Words that feel misaligned with your brand
- Industry terms you might need to simplify
- Alternative expressions for common concepts.
This exercise will help to build awareness of language choices that strengthen or weaken your intended tone.
3. Practice writing how you speak
Write a draft as if you’re speaking directly to a customer:
- Don’t edit as you write
- Let your natural patterns emerge
- Use contractions (I’m, you’ll, we’re) as you would in speech
- Vary sentence length based on your natural rhythm.
4. Read your writing aloud
This will reveal whether your writing sounds authentically like you:
- Does it flow naturally or sound stilted?
- Are there phrases you’d never actually say?
- Does it feel comfortable in your mouth?
- Would friends recognise it as your voice?
If anything sounds unnatural when read aloud, revise until it feels like you.
5. Try dictation
Using dictation software can help capture your natural voice:
- Speak your content rather than typing it
- Edit for clarity but maintain the conversational quality
- Preserve your unique expressions and cadence
- Notice where your enthusiasm naturally emerges.
- Dictation often preserves personality elements that get lost when writing directly.
6. Create a simple tone guide
Document your findings:
- 3-5 tone words (friendly, straightforward, thoughtful)
- Examples of phrases that capture your voice
- Notes on sentence structure preferences
- Guidance on the level of formality/friendliness/humour, etc.
This guide will be something to refer back to for consistency in your communications and help others write in your voice if needed.
Refining your tone over time
Your tone of voice will evolve as your business grows. Schedule regular reviews of your communications to ensure your tone remains:
- Authentic to your current values
- Relevant to your audience
- Consistent across channels
- Distinctive in your market.
You can ask trusted customers for feedback on how your communications make them feel. Their perspectives might highlight elements you’ve missed.
Finding your tone of voice isn’t about creating a polished, corporate persona. It’s about communicating authentically in a way that resonates with your ideal customers. When you write as yourself—with intention and awareness—you create connections.
A distinctive voice can become one of your most valuable business assets. Done really well, it’s impossible for competitors to replicate and instantly recognisable to your audience. In a world of increasingly generic and boring content, your authentic voice might be your most powerful differentiator.
