Do you care about accessibility and good user experience?
So do we.
Do you want customers to quickly understand who you are and why you’re different?
Let’s make it happen.
Are stakeholders grappling for consensus on communication style?
We can unite them in a shared vision! (too lofty?)
Are your people struggling to implement vaguely defined brand guidelines?
Content approvals taking forever and causing friction?
Stakeholders feeling isolated from comms processes?
Tone of voice design can fix all of that.
Just looking for some lightweight guidelines for page 14 of your brand book?
Let’s not do that.
Why change your brand tone of voice?
After all, as long as the audience understands what you’re saying, does it really matter how you say it?
We think it does.
Incidentally, so do Nike (inspirational), Monzo (straightforward and kind) Apple (idealistic), Google (approachable) and Salesforce (optimistic) to name a few.
How you speak is foundational to your brand.
Designing an authentic tone of voice lets you embed your principles into all of your communications, driving clarity and consistency across channels.
Organisations ask us to improve their tone of voice for lots of reasons.
Some of the common ones include:
- Wanting to be taken more seriously by new customers
- Wanting to be perceived as experts
- Wanting more influence in their sector
- Wanting employees and partners to change their behaviours
- Wanting to differentiate in a crowded sector
- Wanting to put users at ease
- Wanting to drive specific customer behaviours
- Wanting to improve customer retention
Is it time for you to think differently about how you speak to customers, employees and other important people?
Yes?
Then the first step is to connect with one of our senior tone of voice consultants for a quick discovery session.
What is brand tone of voice?
If visual design is how your brand looks, tone of voice design describes how it sounds.
An authentic tone of voice makes what you say more memorable. It helps your audience feel understood.
And it makes your content work harder. The effort of designing your tone of voice shows up in lots of places, including:
- Landing pages
- Help pages
- User journey
- Error messages
- Advertising
- Blogs
- Thought-leadership
- Social media
- Microcopy
Getting value from tone of voice design
Historically, tone of voice has been treated as a branding exercise. And quite often, it’s branding and design agencies that deliver brand tone of voice guidelines. Not language experts.
Tone of voice is a language exercise. You wouldn’t ask a copywriter to design a landing page.
We believe your tone of voice deserves more love than a few slides in your brand guidelines deck.
Implementing your tone of voice
One of the biggest challenges for brands is implementing their tone of voice consistently. We’ve worked with numerous brands who have invested in branding, which included tone of voice guidance, who had no idea how to actually put the guidance in practice.
Our process solves that problem.
By collaborating with us in the design phase, you are equipping yourself and your team with a lot of the knowledge they’ll need in the implementation phase.
Do you need a tone of voice agency?
Imagine it’s six months from now…
There’s consistency across all communication channels
Your people are more confident in their work
Your mission and values are crystal clear
More customers are reading your emails
Your audience perceive you as experts
Problems are resolved quicker
Content approvals are happening faster
Your comms teams are significantly more productive, focusing on work that attracts new customers, drives brand awareness and positions your organisation as the experts in their sector.
All because you took ownership of the challenge today and embraced an outside perspective.
Our tone of voice design experts leave your people with absolutely no doubt about how to communicate purposefully and consistently, in a way that drives the change you want to see.
A well designed brand tone of voice will make your brand become better at:
- Building trust
- Demonstrating expertise
- Entertaining your audience
- Rapport building
- Communicating consistently across all channels
- Improving accessibility
- Establishing category leadership
- Growing brand affinity
- Driving engagement
- Responding to negative feedback
- Sharing challenging news
- Keeping employees engaged
Tone of voice design is more than just another marketing exercise
Our tone of voice design programme has solved real business problems for clients.
Here are three examples.
Increased revenue from delinquent accounts
A UK consumer lending group was able to reduce customer delinquency and improve collection rates by redesigning their tone of voice. Their previous language was too formal, which customers perceived as threatening. With our help, they were able to ‘engage as partners’ to resolve payment issues.
Increased reinvestments of maturing deposits
A UK-based wealth management company was able to increase reinvestment of maturing fixed term deposits by more than 20% compared to the previous year. When a fixed term deposit matures, it automatically pays out to the client’s nominated bank account, unless the client instructs the investment company to reinvest it before the maturity date. We challenged the client to be bolder and more positive about the upsides, rather than focusing on the risk of doing nothing. Success followed.
Increased response rate to screening reminders
A USA-based health insurance company was able to increase by almost 50% the response rate to screening reminders targeting a specific demographic. Their previous tone of voice was perceived as impersonal and complex, which alienated policy-holders at a time when they needed to engage with them. By carefully redesigning and optimising their tone of voice, we were able to support our client in achieving its goal of increasing screening reminder responses.
What does the tone of voice design process look like?
Tone of voice design is a reliable and specific process.
The outcome is predictable: you will have at your disposal a bank of assets that will equip your team to adopt the new tone of voice.
Deliverables:
- Discovery session
- Tone of voice workshop
- Feedback session
- Competitor analysis
- Content review & ‘jargon audit’
- Accessibility audit
- Language prototyping
- Tone of voice documentation
- Style guide
- Implementation manual
- Stakeholder training sessions
- Copy reviews
- Coaching sessions (optional)
- Implementation support (optional)
Our tone of voice design process takes about 4 weeks
Here’s what the handover looks like
You’ve designed a new tone of voice. What next?
If there is a ‘hard part’, it’s implementation.
This is where our clients often need the most support. Why invest in a process that establishes the most authentic and effective way to speak to customers, and then leave implementation to chance?
With implement support, our team becomes a combination of quality assurance and language advocates, influencing the right people in your organisation and making sure standards remain high.
That can include:
- Tone of voice advocates
- Copywriting training
- Copy reviews
- Copywriting
- Copy editing
Tone of voice design is a standalone process. Implementation support is a retainer-based optional extra for complex organisations that want to maximise the return on their investment.
If you’re feeling optimistic about what our process can do for your organisation, let’s talk.