Creating your product’s tone and voice
The undeniable advantage of working in the product team is that you can go deeper into the project than in most of the agency work, where projects change fast. At Growbots, after a year of redesigning our app from scratch, came the phase where we could finally focus more on polishing and fixing our previous work. Since we did not have a UX writer and our designs had to be finished quickly to make it on time with the big release, the copy in the app was okay at best. It definitely lacked consistency and, what I deeply regretted, a defined tone and voice.
When the calmer times came I proposed to work on it and not only go through all the texts in the app but also create our own tone and voice. Since it was my first time with a project like that (and I’m not as proficient at the English language as a native speaker) I would like to share with you our process, hoping that you can use parts of it to work on your own company’s tone and voice.
What are a brand’s tone and voice
It’s the way you express your company’s character within the communication with your customers on every touchpoint. It’s how you sound, what words you use, what atmosphere you create in your writing. Your tone and voice are everywhere — every message exchanged with your customers, every text on your website, every slogan on your ads.
“Brand voice is the purposeful, consistent expression of a brand through words and prose styles that engage and motivate. It’s true: The personality of your brand is determined, in large measure, by the words you use and the sentences you write.”
(Source)
Why tone and voice are important
- It’s an expression of your core brand values
- It makes your company more human
- It builds trust and makes people more attached to the brand
- It makes your company stand out from the competition
Different messages = different tone
Your brand can (and should) have a different tone depending on the type of messages. Let me tell you why on your own example. You’re you, and your character doesn’t change much. But your tone vastly depends on a situation you’re in and a person you’re communicating with. When you’re talking with your friends you’re probably relaxed — you use some slang phrases, you joke a lot and maybe even curse sometimes. But when you’re at the official company meeting you probably watch your words — you’re more serious and you try to make a good impression. So even though you’re the same person in all these situations, you adjust and change your tone.
The same rule should apply to your brand’s tone. When communicating different messages, e.g. errors, tips, or feedback, your tone should slightly change. It’s very important to specify it when preparing your guidelines.
Now let me share with you our process of creating the tone and voice guidelines.
Phase 1 — Research
First thing I did was a quick competition analysis. I went through our competitors’ websites and support pages to check what their tone&voice is. This activity will help you to understand how you can distinguish your company from other similar ones, as a unique tone and voice can be a huge differentiating factor. Pay attention to the words and phrases they use, their tone (is it more official or casual?), and consistency.
I also checked how our company is currently communicating with the clients. I looked at our marketing materials (website, blog), and customer success team’s communication. We mostly talk with our clients on Intercom, so I read many conversations to get a feel for our current tone. I picked a few messages that I thought reflect our current tone best.
Phase 2 — Company workshop
To make sure that everyone has the same vision about our tone and voice I organized a workshop. I invited people from the design, customer success, and marketing teams — people that use words on behalf of our company every day.
At the workshop we tried to talk about who our customers are, what they do, and how do we currently communicate with them. Then we tried to find out how we all see Growbots — we generated some character traits that we associate with our company (e.g. helpful, casual, friendly). We found out that our vision is very similar. Everyone more or less have seen Growbots as a young person (we’re a startup), very helpful, someone who learned everything on their own and loves to share this knowledge with others.
Our Head of UX, Piotr, also came up with a great exercise. He printed a photo of a group of people and asked us to indicate the person on the photo that, in our opinion, resembles Growbots the best. Most people chose the same person and it really showed us that our vision is very consistent.
When we had an image of the person that we felt looked like Growbots (we named this person Mark), we did a next exercise that really helped us to translate our vision into something more tangible. We imagined that Mark (Growbots) has his own shop with prospects data, and a customer enters this shop. Then we wrote a conversation that we imagined would happen in such a situation.
We went through the whole possible scenario — from the beginning of a relationship with the customer, through some of his problems and little accomplishments, up to the client deciding to stop using our services. In this scenario, we used a different tone depending on the situation we imagined. E.g. when the client was angry that something was not working, Mark was very calming and helpful. And when the customer had some wins, Mark was cheerful and encouraging, using less formal words.
When we finished working on that scenario, we assigned every Mark’s sentence to one category:
- Positive information
- Neutral information
- An answer to a problem
Then, we analyzed those sentences and marked them on the matrix we created. The matrix consisted of two axes:
- How professional the information sounds
- How energetic Mark was while communicating the information
Thanks to this exercise we were able to assign the types of messages to the tone we want to use in these situations.
Phase 3 — The guidelines
Having all this information I was able to create the guidelines for our tone and voice. It consisted of a few main sections with 1–6 slides per section. Below you can see a sample slide for every section.
- What are tone and voice and why they are important
2. Who are our customers?
3. What is Growbots’ “personality” and an introduction to our persona (Mark)
4. What is our voice
5. What we are, and what we’re not
6. Few rules of our brand’s writing with an explanation and some tips to achieve this style.
7. Some general writing tips — e.g. which tenses to use, how to structure sentences, phrases to avoid etc.
8. Do’s and don’ts of writing for every type of information, consisting of examples of good and bad phrasings.
After creating the guidelines I presented them to product owners, developers and other people working on Growbots app.
Some final tips for creating good guidelines:
- Don’t make it too long because nobody will have time to read it
- Try to make it aesthetic — it makes it not only nice to look at but also easier to skim through.
- Always complement your guidelines with some practical examples, otherwise people will have a hard time using it.
- Specify which tenses should be used in different situations. I noticed that this is usually the most inconsistent area when different people work on the copy.
- Involve as many people as possible when creating the guidelines. Don’t forget about your marketing and customer success teams — they are usually the ones who communicate with the clients most often.
