How to embed your new tone of voice
Maybe you’ve just had your new tone of voice guidelines delivered and you’re thinking: what next? Or maybe you’re considering a tone of voice change-up but you’re worried about how it’ll go down with your team. Well, depending on the size of your business and the degree to which your voice is pivoting, you’ll need a plan of action to change your tone of voice from top to bottom.
There are four key stages to helping everybody in your organisation understand and use your tone of voice throughout your brand communications.
This guide contains some ideas for how to make the transition as smooth and seamless as possible. Not every point will apply to every business, but you can build your own plan of positive action towards embedding your tone of voice in your organisation.
1. Teach
Put your new guidelines in an easy-to-read deck in your brand colours. Save it on the intranet and make sure it’s easy for everyone to access and find. Be sure to offer accessible versions so that everyone in the organisation can be involved.
Offer training on your new guidelines. Explain the importance of consistent brand voice. Give an overview of the research and exploration that happened to bring them to life. But also, explain in practical terms how your attendees should use them within their day-to-day role. Encourage your team to practise the tone of voice every time they write, even if it’s just an email. It will help make the guidelines second nature.
Support your team by subscribing to tools like Grammarly and Hemingway App. No, they’re not perfect, but when used with care they can be a valuable step in the process of reviewing copy. And if nothing else, they demonstrate how much emphasis you’re placing on writers reviewing and critiquing their own work.
Appoint a change leader to manage the transition and keep an eye on progress. Make sure everyone knows who they are and can approach them with questions or concerns.
2. Remind
Now everyone has met your tone of voice and hopefully they’re starting to use it. Keep it visible, keep it top of mind. Can you display a one-page summary by the printer or next to the coffee cups? Can you pin it to desktops and taskbars? Keep running internal comms to remind your teams that it exists and that they should be checking in with it every time they write.
Start a copy swipe file. Every time someone writes a piece of copy that absolutely nails the brand voice, put it in the file. Give everyone access and you have an instant inspiration bank that can grow every day. Encourage people to visit the file before they put fingers to keyboard.
3. Encourage
Call on your senior leaders and make sure they’re putting the guidelines into practice themselves. Allocate budget to training, coaching, tools and support to show your teams how important this is and how much value you place on it.
Add it to your staff appraisals, create a reward system for writers whose work makes it into the copy bank. List it amongst your KPIs like you would any other goal. Keep an eye on progress. If you notice that one element or focus of the tone of voice is getting lost, hold top-up sessions diving into detail on this particular angle.
4. Wait
Don’t panic. Change doesn’t happen overnight. But if you see gradual improvements then you’re on the right track.
If your new tone of voice is replacing an old one and you’ve got a lot of copy to update, it can feel tempting to want the whole lot done yesterday. But you’ll get a higher quality outcome if you set realistic time frames with your content teams to deliver change stage by stage. Spend the first month updating your website copy, the second month ticking off key pieces of marketing collateral, like pitch decks for example. The third month can be for reviewing case studies. Make updating blog posts and older content an ongoing task for your team.
If you’d like to chat more about developing a new tone of voice for your business or embedding an existing one, I’d love to hear from you.