Tone and voice: what you need to know as a B2B content writer

I was exceptionally foolish when I started out as a writer. This was more than just the foolishness of youth, although there was that too. It was rather that I saw every copy assignment as a greedily blank canvas on which to disgorge the entirety of my craft, or what passed for it. 

Thankfully, I was lucky enough to work with some very, very cranky editors and direct marketers early in my career, and they rigorously disabused me of the notion that I had any responsibility other than driving hard toward a CTA.

In long-form B2B writing, you need that same level of dedication, except that in most cases your highest responsibility is not to a CTA, but to the creation of a compelling asset within a larger content strategy.

That strategy relies on a coherent tone and voice throughout the execution, but it’s not always clear to tech companies what tone and voice actually mean.

Today we’ll cover the fundamentals and explain what’s at stake.

What is a brand voice?

Poke around the internet a bit, and you’ll see many sources referring to a brand’s voice as an expression of its personality. That’s a little problematic, not least because now you’re wondering what your damn personality is. 

Your brand’s voice is an expression of your values, your intent, your mission, and your vision. It dictates choice of words, choice of sentence structure, and choice of content structure for any given piece of content (e.g., social media, blog post, case study …).

As the human voice is a reflection of how vocal cords resonate, so your brand voice is a reflection of how your content resonates with your audience. It dictates word choice and content structure at all levels. It’s how your audience recognizes you.

With no defined brand voice, there are two likely outcomes, neither of them good. Either your content is flat and unengaging, and your audience tunes out, or else your voice is all over the map, ranging from stilted to inappropriately enthusiastic – which feels disconnected and unprofessional. 

Examples of brand voices in action

If your brand voice is an expression of your values and intent, it should be coherent with the sentiments encompassed in your vision and mission statements.

To put it another way, if you can sum up your mission and vision in a single word, that word is a likely best candidate for your brand voice. 

Some examples of brand voice candidates: 

• Compassionate / Empathetic / Reliable

• Collaborative / Inclusive / Trustworthy

• Expert / Authoritative / Technical

• Disruptive / Leading / Inventive

I present to you now the distressed child of a mission statement generator: 

"At FWFL Inc., our mission is to empower businesses with smart technology solutions that help them find efficiencies and optimize their operations for success."

Of course this is commodity copy, with no voice and no color. Let’s render this out in a few different voices: 

Compassionate voice

“When you’re so focused on executing, it can be tough to find efficiencies. We help uncover them with smart technology solutions that go to work for you.”

• Here, the focus is squarely on the target audience and their business pains. The phrases “it can be tough” and “we help” soften the voice.

Authoritative voice

“We deploy smart technology solutions to help businesses succeed by surfacing their latent efficiencies … and not just the obvious ones.”

• Leading with the simple present tense is the way to go for an authoritative voice … as is concluding with the suggestion that the speaker is in possession of some advanced degree of knowledge.

Inventive voice

“We built it first. We launched it first. Smart tech that surfaces business efficiencies and puts your success first.”

• Both casual and enthusiastic, this is the rhythm and voice of a passionate, possibly slightly breathless inventor.

Ultimately, there is no single expression for any given voice, and no single voice for any given mission statement – which is all the more reason to conduct the exercise of identifying and fine-tuning your own. 

Brand voice vs tone

People often confuse voice with tone of voice. It’s important to identify and distinguish between them both.

If your brand voice is a reflection of your values and intent, tone of voice is more akin to mood. It is an expression of the emotional context of your content. For instance, you will likely use a different tone on social media than you will in a case study. 

The Nielsen Norman Group defines four “dimensions” or continuums of tone, along with highly instructive examples of the kinds of error messages you might associate with each continuum.

1) Formal - Casual

2) Respectful - Funny

3) Serious - Irreverent

4) Matter-of-fact - Enthusiastic

I’d like to propose a fifth cousin to the fourth, which is perhaps more pertinent now that social media tends to be, ahem, more cluttered with noise:

5) Direct - Conversational

I won’t repeat the Nielsen Norman examples here, instead leaving it as a thought exercise for you to identify where your current social media content falls along each dimension.

As a larger exercise, chart your location on the continuum of each dimension for given content types (say, social media vs website copy vs case studies vs blog posts).

DON’T locate yourself in the middle – the middle point might as well be labeled “meh” in all cases. DO bear in mind that tone must be coherent with voice.

Once you’ve finalized this chart, rejoice. And stick to it. Apply it to all content and tape it over your desk. Get an on-brand tattoo. Or off-brand, whatever, it’s your body.

The point is, this is far more than a pretty marketing exercise. It’s the oxygen that gives amplitude and volume to all your marketing and corporate communications.

A last word on personality

I shied away earlier from associating brand voice with notions of personality, because personality “definitions” typically resemble disorders rather than actionable characteristics.

This is especially true of narcissism, which is the one personality type that will jeopardize your content more surely than any other, and it’s where so much content goes wrong. 

Of course it is natural for an inventive tech company to be self-regarding to an extent, but the faster it sheds the “build it and they will come” mentality, the better.

Need coaching? Get in touch.