All About Brand Voice and Messaging Guides

Discover what’s in a brand voice and messaging guide and why you might need one.

 

Your Brand

 

Brand voice and messaging guides are one of the most useful tools a business can have when it comes to marketing. It captures the voice, tone and essence of your business and gives anyone who represents your business a guide to follow. I used to create these quite frequently when I worked in ad agencies and always enjoyed the projects. I just finally began offering it to my own clients – not sure what took me so long – but I just did one for a client and it turned out great! I’m going to go through how to create these here. I’ll tell you what exactly a brand voice and messaging guide is, what’s involved with it, and who it can be useful for. 

 

What is a Brand Voice and Messaging Guide?

 

Let’s begin with what a brand voice and messaging guide is. Usually these are multi-page pdfs or whatever file type you want to create, but pdf seems to be the fave. They can be a few pages up to 100 pages. Usually the bigger agencies and companies will have the bandwidth to create huge brand and messaging guides full of data and research because they have teams to collect all that data and research. But the ones I create are generally about 20-30 pages depending on the client, their needs and what the brand is.

 

What are the elements of it?

 

Inside the guide, it will have everything that you would want to know about the brand. This would include the brand story, catch phrases, voice and tone. And the bigger guides would have design elements as well, such as logos, how to use the logos, how to never use the logos, brand colors, etc. These are all things you can include in a smaller guide as well. 

 

The purpose of brand voice and messaging guides is to keep everything consistent throughout the brand. Once you are having multiple people touch content for your brand, you want to make sure it is all consistent and accurate and these guides are perfect for that. 

 

It’s also great for clarification for content creators to reference. So instead of reaching out to you with questions, they can just reference this handy dandy guide that will hopefully be able to answer those questions and save everyone some time and energy. I like to call it the Brand Bible. And – hot tip – if you are a copywriter or marketer of some type, and are thinking of adding these to your services, Brand Bible is a nice catchy phrase that tends to perk client’s ears up when they hear it.

 

Who is it for?

 

These guides are for anyone that touches the brand. Content creators, copywriters, designers, administrators, and anyone on your team or staff really can benefit from going through this guide, studying it and getting familiar with it. This would include freelancers and any contractors, so since it is made up of your personal trademarked content, it’s also a good idea to go ahead and have your people sign an NDA if that makes you feel more comfortable. 

 

What is inside of it?

 

So what is in the guts of the actual guide? Some of the things that I include are:

 

• Brand Story
• Brand Promise
• Brand Pillars
• Brand Voice
• Brand Tone
• Brand Buzzwords
• Audience Persona
• Elevator Pitch
• Social Media Bio
• Strategic Hashtags
• Headlines
• Email Subject Lines
• Content Buckets
• Pull Quotes
• How to Use This Guide

 

The guide I recently created is not just their particular brand guide but also a way to help me possibly pitch future services to them. So I am priming the pump with things like Email Subject Lines, in case my client might want me to write emails for them in the future or headlines, etc. I am currently doing a website project with this particular client so that allows me to get a feel for how she likes the headlines I provided in the guide, and adjust accordingly. It’s all very customizable depending on the client’s needs, what your bandwidth is, what your interests are, etc. If you are not interested in social media then you probably wouldn’t include the Strategic Hashtags, and so forth, although this particular client was very grateful for those, so you just never know. And doing a quick little research on Instagram of what hashtags would be best for her business didn’t take much work at all. But overall providing a well rounded guide can definitely benefit you and your client and open some more doors of opportunity. Spend the time to really customize it, make it your own, use your own lingo and catch phrases for what each of these sections are called. This is an opportunity to show your brand and voice as well.

 

To finish it off, I sent my copy off to a designer and had her design it using the client’s brand, logo, colors and all that and then included my logo watermark in the lower right hand corner. That is something you can do to finish it off nicely.

 

Voice and Tone

 

Another important element is the difference between voice and tone. These are part of the guide, in fact, sometimes these guides are even called Voice and Tone Guides. Voice is your personality and tone is how you conduct yourself in different places. So I have a voice that is my personality, but I’m going to have a different tone when I am speaking on a podcast versus when I’m talking to my husband while having a glass of wine. Just like my tone would be different talking to my in-laws versus talking to my best friend. It’s still my personality but there are different tones. So that brand is going to have an overarching voice that you are going to summarize in the guide and then the tone is going to apply to the different outlets. So in the case of the guide I just created, the brand has a voice but there is a different tone for the website content, social media content and email content. If you think about how you would present yourself in different situations, that is the difference between voice and tone. That can be a little confusing at times but when I was first tasked with creating a voice and tone guide I googled it and found Mailchimp’s guide. They have an excellent voice and tone guide you can reference. If you are a copywriter and are thinking of including these as one of your services in your business, this a great example to look at. And if you are a business considering having one of these created for you, this is still a great example to look at to see how much information they have in there and how helpful it is for people who are working on the brand. It reduces questions, uncertainty and revisions and any creative knows that revisions can get out of control at times. 

 

Who can benefit?

 

Most brands, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, small entities would really benefit from these. I don’t even know if everyone knows what they are but it is something to look into if you are a solopreneur or entrepreneur, if you plan on outsourcing soon or building a team. It’s a really great way to keep everything all in one place. It’s also just rewarding to see and tell your brand story and it really provides an emotional connection between you and your content creators if they know the emotion, story and history of your brand and where it came from. Because it came from you. It came from a passion, a vision, or a download you had. And that’s really important. It’s important for people who are working with you and for you to know that. 

 

While it’s really beneficial for brands, it’s also important and useful for copywriters to familiarize themselves with these guides. It’s a great starting off point for pretty much any project, especially bigger scope projects like website copy. If you are going to be writing an entire website for someone, you are going to want to make sure you know that brand inside and out. It could maybe even be a requirement that before someone jumps on a website project with you, they have to complete one of these brand and voice messaging guides, just so that you really have a grasp on their brand. And then you can move forward more confidently creating content for them. It will also help reduce rounds of revisions. If you are really clear on the brand itself, you are going to write it as if you are that person and it’s just going to be easier for everyone.

 

Brand Bible

 

Brand Bibles – everybody needs them! Having a brand voice and messaging guide with everything about the brand in one clean place can make all the difference for organizing creative content from every angle of a business. Capturing the essence of a brand takes work but it can be extremely beneficial and can not only help streamline so many areas of content creation but also keep a brand true to itself. Brand Bibles can align business owners and copywriters to help create the perfect content for any project. 

 

If you are interested in more copywriting tips and info, my What a Week email newsletter drops every friday. It includes a copywriting tip and some more recommendations for resources I like, and a little recap of what’s going on with me. If you are interested in that you can send me a message and I’ll get you on the list.

 

You can also come and join The Copywriting Girls Club on Facebook! HERE. This is an awesome place to connect with other writers and business owners and ask questions or get feedback on your own writing.

 

I highly recommend you check out the Manifestation Babe Podcast – I’ve been listening to it for a few years now and she’s so great! She talks about general mindset and manifestation stuff that you can apply to your life and your business. I’m really getting back into studying manifestation and transforming my thoughts to help me accomplish some big goals that I have and she has been a great resource for me.

 

Come connect with me on Instagram too @amyleisner HERE.  – especially if you want to see my sweet little Cece girl!!

And just one more thing – I’m a strong “repurpose your content” advocate. It saves SO MUCH time and effort when creating all the social media posts, emails, landing pages, email funnels, etc. for your business and helps with those SEO rankings. I made this “Spread Your Magic” Free Guide that gives you 20+ Ways to Repurpose Your Soul-Driven Content. YOUR words deserve to be read by more people, on more places and platforms. Grab your copy HERE.

 

Want to connect with other passionate female copywriters, grow your network to get new leads, improve your craft as a writer, and have a safe space to vent about clients? Join us in the Copywriting Girls Club! It’s our private girl gang on Facebook, and we would love to have you in there to share your zone of genius.