How to write a brand voice guide
What to include in a one-page brand voice guide that your team and your AI tools can follow.
If your team often rewrites captions because they "don't sound like the brand", a brand voice guide can help. It doesn't need to be long. A one-page guide that your team uses every day is more useful than a long brand book that nobody reads.
Here's what to include.
The audience
Describe the audience in two or three sentences: who they are, what they care about and what they already know. The more specific you are, the better the writing. "Young professionals" is too broad. "First-time business owners who are short on time and wary of marketing hype" gives a writer something to work with.
How the brand sounds
Choose three or four traits and explain each one with a "this, not that" line. For example:
- Confident, not arrogant.
- Friendly, not overly casual.
- Clear, not clever.
The second half of each line matters. Without it, traits like "friendly" are too vague to guide anyone.
Words to use and words to avoid
List the words the brand uses: product names, how it refers to customers and phrases it repeats. Then list words it never uses, such as jargon, competitors' terms and phrases the client dislikes. This list does a lot to keep writing consistent.
Example posts
Include three posts that sound exactly right. If you can, add one that sounds wrong, with a note explaining why. Examples help new writers, and AI tools, understand the voice quickly.
Practical rules
Decide on the details once and write them down. Do you use emoji? Sentence case or title case? British or American spelling? How many hashtags?
Review the guide regularly
Review the guide every three months. Add new words, remove rules nobody follows and update the examples with recent posts that worked well. Keep older versions, so you know which guide each post was written against.
How Ogasocial stores brand voice
In Ogasocial, each client has brand guidelines covering voice, audience, vocabulary, colours, fonts and logos. Every change is saved as a new version, and AI Studio only uses the version you've approved.
