Tone of voice refers to the way your company engages with your target audience, across all communication channels. It could be funny or serious, formal or informal, everything in between and much more. But how do you go about defining the tone of voice that fits your company perfectly?

If you don’t yet have a document specifying your company’s tone of voice, it is definitely worth considering. It ensures that everyone creating copy for your brand – whether for a blog post, mailing or social media post – will know how it should come across to your target audience; what vibe it should convey.

The aim, of course, is for your tone of voice to reflect your brand’s personality as strongly as possible. Coolblue has made a very clear choice to use humour in its communications, with tongue-in-cheek writing used wherever possible. For instance, they call their communication staff ‘chatterboxes.’ And if you type ‘vibrator’ in the search bar on their website, the website even starts vibrating. Even though they don’t even sell them. They consistently infuse their communications with humour, across all their communications. Like the short, funny descriptions ‘Energy-efficient washing machines. Saves loads.’, ‘Televisions. Crystal clear.’ or ‘ Phone cases. Safety first.’

Where are you on a scale of 1 to 10?

One of the things to think about when you want to define your tone of voice, is where you are or want to be on the spectrum between ‘funny’ and ‘serious.’ To do that, give it a rating on a scale from 1 = super funny to 10 = very serious. And have several other people in your company also provide a rating.

Obviously, this is only one of many polarities. You can do the same exercise with other concept pairs, too. Examples include:

Personal	Professional
Informal	Formal
Spontaneous, enthousiastic	Considered, factual
Modern	Traditional
Funny	Serious
Accessible	Exclusive

Have several people in your company do ratings, or at minimum, the working group that you want to define your tone of voice with. Or have each employee (from your working group) choose from a list the five terms he or she thinks best suit your company. Here’s an example of what such a list might look like:

Light-hearted, funny, clear, direct, understandable, patient, helpful, professional, modern, cool, serious, traditional, self-confident, calm, respectful, formal, informal, playful, opinionated, personal, detached, objective, businesslike, fun, accessible, exclusive, humble and creative.

Naturally, you would also factor in the specific brand identity you want to convey as well as your company’s core values. What does your company stand for? Be sure to factor in the mission and vision statements and see which terms best match them.

How do you apply this in your communications?

What do you do with it, in practical terms? For example, if you know that your main aim is to be accessible, modern and creative – how do you apply that to your communications?

Furthermore, consider what each term applicable to your business will mean for your communications, in terms of content, language and style. A specific example might make things clearer. Let’s say you have concluded that you want to be very accessible in your communication.

Content-wise, this might lead to the following findings:

• We use as few difficult words or complicated constructions as possible. We write short, easy-to-read sentences instead of interminable sentences with sub- and subordinate clauses.
• We also ensure that we divide up content into manageable paragraphs, interspersed with sufficient subheadings and quotes.
• Where more difficult words or concepts are unavoidable, we explain them.
• We avoid passive sentence constructions, wherever possible changing them to the active tense.

Dos and don’ts

It is always useful to give specific examples–of good practices and of things you want to steer clear of, too. You can create a list of dos and don’ts from your examples. It can be very specific, for example, you can compile a list of words and expressions frequently used in your sector and then make your choice among them. Which words do you prefer to use, and which ones would you rather avoid? Does you preference go out to English terms or would you rather try to Dutchify them, where possible?

This brings us to the key question, which is: how long should such a document be? That’s entirely up to you. It can be a very extensive document of dozens of pages with many examples of words or constructions that the content creators may or may not use. Or you can simply list the most important items very briefly, on half a page. Our tip: don’t make it too long, stick to the basics and, above all, provide a guideline that makes things clear for everyone.