How to Build a Simple Tone-of-Voice Guide (So Everyone Sounds Like You)
Every small business has a voice before it has a guide — it's just locked inside the founder's head, which works fine right up until someone else has to write the Instagram caption, the EDM, or the "About" page. Then the voice that took years to build starts drifting, one well-meaning but slightly-off post at a time, until regular customers start noticing the brand "doesn't sound like itself" without being able to say why.
The honest reason most businesses never write this down 💖 is that it feels indulgent — like something only a big agency client needs. It's the opposite. The smaller the team, the more people end up writing customer-facing copy without training, and the more a one-page guide pays for itself the very first time it stops someone writing "We are thrilled to announce" when your brand has never sounded thrilled about anything in its life.
What most people get wrong
The most common mistake is stopping at adjectives. "Fun, professional, approachable" tells a new writer almost nothing operationally — three different people will produce three different versions of "professional," and none of them will match what's in your head. Tone words only become useful once they're paired with a concrete do/don't example, because that's what actually gets copied. The second mistake is building the guide once, in isolation, and never testing it against real copy someone else writes. A tone guide that's never been handed to an actual second writer is a guess, not a tool.
Fill in the brackets:
We sound like: [word], [word], [word] — e.g. "warm, direct, a little cheeky."
For each word, one do/don't pair: e.g. Direct — DO say "This won't suit you if [X]." DON'T say "This may not be the ideal fit for all clients."
Three sentence swaps — take three real lines you'd actually publish and rewrite them: Generic: "[bland version]." Ours: "[your actual voice]."
Words we use / words we avoid: two short lists, e.g. Use: "sorted, chat, mate." Avoid: "synergy, leverage, utilise" (say "use").
One house rule: pick the thing that trips people up most — contractions always on, exclamation marks max one per post, emoji from an approved list only, etc.
How to actually build it
Start by pulling ten pieces of your own past copy that felt exactly right — an email, a caption, a text to a customer — and read them back to back. The patterns that repeat (sentence length, how you open, what you never say) are your actual voice, not the voice you think you have. Turn those patterns into the do/don't pairs above. Then hand the finished page to whoever writes for you next — a new team member, a freelancer, even an AI tool you're using to draft first passes — and check their first attempt against it before it goes out. Revisit the guide every few months; a voice that never evolves starts to feel dated faster than a logo does.
- Choosing adjectives so generic they'd apply to any business in any industry
- Writing the guide alone and never testing it on someone else's first draft
- Treating tone as fixed rather than allowing formality to flex slightly by channel while the core voice stays the same
- Making the guide so long nobody actually opens it before writing
- Forgetting to include what NOT to say — the do/don't pairing is what makes it usable
- Never updating it as the business and its audience mature
Frequently asked questions
How long should a tone-of-voice guide take to put together?
A first draft can genuinely be done in an hour if you're pulling from copy you've already written. The refining — testing it against someone else's writing and adjusting — takes a bit longer, but it's still a half-day project, not a strategic overhaul.
Do I need a designer to make it look professional?
No. A plain document or even a page in your shared drive works fine — the content is what gets used, not the formatting. Polish it later if it becomes a client-facing brand asset, not before.
Should tone change across channels, like Instagram versus email?
Formality can flex a little — a quick caption can be looser than a formal proposal — but the core personality traits shouldn't change. If a customer couldn't tell your Instagram and your invoice email came from the same business, the guide isn't doing its job yet.
What if different people are already writing in noticeably different tones?
Don't try to fix everything retroactively — that's a rabbit hole. Build the guide from your best-performing existing copy, roll it out for everything written from today forward, and let older inconsistent content age out naturally as it's refreshed.
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