72: How to create a brand voice guide for your small business {Part 2}
In this episode of ill communication, we’re diving into part 2 of a mini-series on refining, defining, and documenting your brand voice - or your verbal identity.
Your Brand Voice is the words you use, the tone with which you communicate, the rhythm and cadence of your speech and writing, and your personality.
If you haven’t listened to it yet, I invite you to pause and go listen to part 1 in Episode 71 first. It’ll give you the full background into brand voice, what a brand voice guide is, and why all small businesses need one.
In this episode, I’ll lead you through the steps you can take to identify the components of your unique brand voice.
To make it easy, I created a Mini Voice Guide Workbook so that you can easily follow along. Click on the link below to download it!
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
How to research and understand what your quirks and “isms” are
The best tools to analyze your own writing
How to identify your own tone words to describe your brand
How to assign a persona or archetype to your brand voice
So there you have it! I hope you found this episode helpful. When you have your Brand Voice Guide created, it makes outsourcing your copy to your team, subcontractors, and copywriters so much easier because they'll understand how to write in a way that sounds just like you.
Ready to get started? Download your Mini Brand Voice Guide Workbook now.
In our third episode in this mini-series, I'll share a few of the ways you can infuse your voice and personality into your website, your emails, and your social copy. Make sure to watch for it!
Need help with crafting a Pitch Perfect Brand Voice Guide? Reach out to me at hello@kimkiel.com!
-
[00:00:03] Welcome to ill communication, copywriting tips and sales strategies for small business. I'm your host, Kim Keel. I'm a copy coach, sales strategist, and direct response copywriter. It's my mission to help women leaders and change makers amplify their voices through copy. It's why I'm dishing out all the juicy tips, writing prompts, and sales formulas to help you generate more leads, book more calls, and get more high value clients on repeat. Sounds pretty good. It's time to ditch the overwhelm you might be feeling and find confidence in your copywriting so you can get your message out there and attract more soulmate clients. Let's get started.
[00:00:52] Hello. Hello my sweet.
[00:00:53] Friend. Welcome back to this episode of the Ill Communication Podcast. Today we're diving into part two of [00:01:00] a mini series on refining, defining, and documenting your brand voice or your verbal identity. Your brand voice is the words you use, the tone with which you communicate, the rhythm and cadence of your speech and writing and your personality. And if you haven't listened to it yet, please pause this episode and go back to part one in episode 71. First, it'll give you the full background into brand voice, what a brand voice guide is and why all small businesses need one. Today in part two, I'm going to lead you through the steps you can take to identify the components of your unique brand voice. Now, to help you stay organized, I've created a helpful mini voice Guide workbook which you can access in the show notes. So take a minute to download that. Now if you want to follow along and do the exercises to discover and create your brand voice guide. So the first step in discovering [00:02:00] your brand voice and creating your guide is to research. Listen to yourself, read your copy with fresh ears and eyes, put yourself into your audience's shoes and pay attention to how you talk and write. Some of the things I like to do with my private clients is listen back to sales and client calls, to hear how they describe the process of working together, and the outcomes and solutions they create.
[00:02:27] I listen to your podcast episodes and watch reels and YouTube videos. I read your blog posts, emails, and social copy. I look for patterns. I hear common sayings and phrases. I hear the rhythm of your voice and your writing. I listen for your isms, the things you say and how you say them. So in section one of your Brand Voice guide, take notes of your isms, the unique words, phrases you say and how you say them. Observe your emails and social [00:03:00] copy. Do you use emojis, GIFs, all caps or lots of exclamation points? Jot it all down. Take note of your little quirks and isms. For example, I often refer to listeners of this podcast as my sweet friend in my sign off, I'll say, I'll catch you next week. I say silly things like, for the love of cheese, I make a lot of references to pop culture and food and cocktails. I drop the occasional cuss word and I don't take myself too seriously. I do dorky things like saying silly puns or singing, which my kids would all call cringey. Oh, and I talk about my kids and my personal life. When I write my email newsletter, I bold certain sentences and phrases I want to flag for my reader. I'll use all caps or italics to give emphasis to specific words. I use exclamation points, but rarely more than one per sentence, and I try not to use too many [00:04:00] in a single email.
[00:04:01] I love using emojis and pop culture gifts from my favorite TV shows, movies and musicians. So what about you? Research and dive deep into your voice and create a list of your voice, traits, habits, and isms. Next, capture the common themes you talk about and the stories you tell in your business. For example, in my business, I talk a lot about sales copy copy recipes and sales formulas. I talk about creating more ease in your business in life so you can free up time. I talk about writing with persuasion and personality. I also share stories from my personal life and I talk about my background working in charity. I love 80s and 90s Gen X references. I talk about the squeeze of the sandwich generation, and on social media, I often share some of my sociopolitical concerns, and I encourage people to take action and support [00:05:00] the causes that are important to you. Now take a look at the things you never talk about or the things you would never say. So for me, I will never call women lady bosses or mompreneurs unless I'm using it to make a point of what Not to say. I'm not going to tell business owners to suck it up and work harder, and get up an hour earlier to hustle and get shit done. I'm also not going to be overly rah rah or super hippie positive cheerleader type. I won't make everything seem easy peasy and rosy all the time.
[00:05:34] So in your workbook, capture the things you love to say and talk about, and then also capture the things you would never say and you never talk about. Now make a note of your favorite email salutations. How do you start your emails off? Are you like a hey girl friend? Do you say hi first name? Or maybe you're more formal and say dear first name? Similarly, [00:06:00] take a look at the bottom of your emails. How do you sign off your emails? How do you typically end a call or a conversation with your friends? Once you've captured all of this glorious detail about you and your voice, you and your team will be more consistent in writing or creating scripts for your business. So the next section of your voice guide workbook, we're going to get a little nerdy. You're going to analyze your writing. And for this I recommend you experiment with three different tools. Analyze my writing.com Hemingway app, and the Verbatim Voice tool. I'll link to all three in the workbook and the show notes. Now in this section, you take a couple of samples of your favorite or best performing copy and plug them into your voice analysis tool. You essentially just copy and paste it right in. These tools will do an analysis of [00:07:00] your writing and spit out a little report. These tools will tell you what reading level you typically write at, whether you write advanced, complicated sentences with a lot of commas, or if you write simple sentences, it will tell you average words per sentence and average sentences per paragraph.
[00:07:20] Now, this information is so insightful. For example, you might find that you're writing very complex, advanced sentences hitting at a grade ten reading level. Now, if you're having trouble connecting and converting with your copy, it could be that your writing level is too high. So you may choose to experiment by writing a little more simply with less complicated messages, and see if your sales improve. The thing is, when you assess a few pieces of your writing or your podcast scripts, you'll understand your common writing practices, your word and sentence length, reading level, punctuation preferences. [00:08:00] When you understand how you write and communicate, you'll be able to explain that to others who will then write for you. If your VA or your Facebook ads agency is writing copy for you, they'll know whether to write in short, snappy sentences or in long, flowy, poetic sentences. They'll know if you use a lot of exclamation points and question marks, or if you love putting a little side comment into parentheses. Now, along with this very technical breakdown of your writing, you can also make a note of your personal preferences. Do you love or do you hate the Oxford comma? Do you use Canadian or American or British spelling conventions? Do you punctuate every line in a bulleted list? How do you shorten your business name? Do you capitalize the in your business or offer names? If there's any punctuation or spelling error, or a common typo that drives you up the wall, make a note of it here for you and your writing team.
[00:09:00] So [00:09:00] in this section, we've created a very detailed guideline for your grammar, syntax, and sentence structure. And before I move on, let's recap what we've created in our voice guide so far. And just as a reminder, you can access your own workbook in the show notes. So section one is a researching and listening to your own voice, reading your copy, and documenting the patterns, phrases, and style of communication. Section two is where we're getting nerdy and analyzing your writing for the grammar sentence structure. Reading level. And now in section three we're going to describe your tone of voice and your personality. Your tone of voice is how you communicate the feeling, the vibe, the personality of your words and your voice. You get to this by starting with lists of tone words or an emotion wheel, and a quick Google search will pull up all kinds of checklists and images [00:10:00] to give you lists of tone, words, and emotions. You can also ask your best customers to describe you. What are the words they use to describe your personality and vibe? Now, without going into too much detail, some tone words include things like snarky or sassy, polite, genuine, humorous, witty, sarcastic, academic, poetic, lighthearted, or serious.
[00:10:25] When I'm working with private clients to create their brand voice guides, I have a very rigorous process of going through different tone words to narrow down to the top 6 to 8 tone words to describe the brand, and a little note that your tone will change across different channels. So how you speak or write on Instagram may be a little different from the tone you'll use to write a blog post, or when you're teaching inside your courses. The aim here is to clarify and name your personality and vibe, and you can also get there by describing what [00:11:00] you're not. So you might say your voice is witty but not sarcastic. You're playful, but not juvenile. You're smart, but not stuffy and academic. Aim to pick no more than ten tone words to describe your vibe. These tone words create the personality guardrails for your messaging and copy. And if you're using ChatGPT, you can input these tone words to help you generate copy that might sound a little closer to your actual voice. Now, in the fourth and final section of your Voice Guide workbook, you'll create your verbal identity and assign a persona. You essentially describe the character of your voice. Now, one of the tools people love to use for brand voice work is by psychologist Carl Jung and his 12 archetypes. The Jungian archetypes include characters like the sage, the ruler, [00:12:00] the lover, and the jester. Again, you can Google Carl Jung brand archetypes to find out more and pinpoint your brand's best fit archetype.
[00:12:11] I personally use a different tool to pinpoint a brand's persona and voice. I'm certified by the Brand Voice Visionary program, and they have a proprietary chart based on whether a voice has a long, wordy cadence or a short, snappy cadence, and whether it uses a basic vocabulary or a very advanced vocabulary. The voices are plotted on a graph based on what you say and how you talk. Now, in this one, there are nine voice types, like the parent or big sister voice, an anti-establishment rebel voice, the friend at the bar, or a poetic Yogi voice. Now, once I've described the persona, I give it a title like The Maverick Mentor on a mission or The Provocative Scholar. I also like to go further with my clients [00:13:00] and provide some celebrity inspiration for The Voice. So if there's a celebrity who captures the spirit and vibe of your voice, go ahead and name them. It might help you or your writers step into your voice and personality a little more easily. So there you have it. The four sections or steps to defining, refining, and detailing your verbal identity or your brand voice. To review, section one is researching and listening. Section two is getting nerdy and analyzing. Section three is describing your tone of voice, and section four is assigning a persona or archetype. Again, there's a link in the show notes to a workbook where you can create your very own mini voice guide.
[00:13:44] You'll probably end up with 4 or 5 pages to describe your brand voice. And for context, when I create brand voice guides for the bigger brands I work with, they are super detailed. They include sections on staff bios, [00:14:00] mission statement, brand values. They list the brands, products and offers, and I go into a lot of voice analysis and detail around how to write like them. These guides generally clock in around 50 pages, but when you have all that information in one central place, it makes outsourcing your copy to your team, subcontractors and copywriters so much easier. They'll understand how to write in a way that sounds just like you. There's less back and forth in the editing process, because they'll be able to nail the copy on the first draft. And if you're working with a bot like ChatGPT, you can feed it your brand voice information. So the copy it generates for you sounds less generic and a little more like you. In our third episode in this mini series, I'll share a few of the ways you can infuse your voice and personality into your website, in your emails, and in your social copy. If you've [00:15:00] ever said, I just don't know how to make it sound more like me, the next episode is for you. So between now and then, make sure you've listened to part one, episode 71 and download and fill out your workbook and meet me back here in episode 73 for part three.
[00:15:15] Now, if you're finding that you're becoming a bottleneck in your business because you can't write all the copy your business needs, and you want to outsource more copy to your team or to your subcontractors, you will really want to have a brand voice guide on hand. And if creating your own Pitch perfect brand voice guide sounds like way too much work for you, please reach out to me. We can start a conversation about how I could help you in your business. Create a brand voice guide that will give you more freedom and ease in your business, because you'll be able to more confidently outsource the copywriting to others. Anyway, that's it for me today. I'll see you next week for part three of our mini series on brand Voice guides and why you need them. See you then. And [00:16:00] that's a wrap on today's episode of Ill Communication. Hey, if you're picking up what I'm putting down, I would love if you would leave a rating and a review to let me know. And don't forget to follow the show so you never miss out on the tips, prompts, and strategies I share in every episode. They're designed to make you an ill communicator too. As always, you can check out all the links and resources from this episode on the web page. Just head over to Kim keel.com/podcast. I'll chat with you again next week.
Resources Mentioned
Download your Mini Brand Voice Guide Workbook
Listen to episode 71 to learn what your Brand Voice is
Check out the 3 Voice Assessment Tools:
https://www.analyzemywriting.com/
https://www.verbatim.brandvoiceacademy.com/
Additional Resources
Follow & Review
Are you following the podcast? I want to encourage you to leave a review and follow today so you don’t miss any future episodes.
I would also appreciate it if you would leave me a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify! I read each of them, and they help me make sure I am providing the content you love to hear! Plus, you get to pay it forward because it will allow other listeners like you to find the podcast!