How to create a brand voice that will bring your marketing to life

This article shares the high level takeaways from a recent webinar run by our CEO and Founder, Matthew Stibbe. You can watch the full recording here.

Brand identity often begins with visuals. A colour palette, typography, a shiny new logo. But while the visuals turn heads, it is the words that build relationships. A clear and consistent brand voice helps you speak with purpose, build trust and stand out in markets where products and services can feel interchangeable.

If you want your marketing to feel confident, recognisable and distinctly yours, you need a brand voice that brings your worldview, personality and values to life.

Here is how to craft a voice that shines on every page.

Start with clarity and readability

Before you think about attitude or style, focus on the fundamentals. Any strong brand voice is built on clarity. Shorter sentences, shorter words, strong verbs and concise explanations are always more effective than jargon and puffery. This is a universal rule across brand voice work.

When writing is clear, scannable and objective, people find it more credible and more trustworthy. That applies whether you are writing a website page, an email or a thought leadership piece.

Once you set readability standards, everything else becomes easier to shape.

Define the attitude behind your voice

Your brand voice is your personality in words. The attitude that sits beneath it shapes how you show up on the page. It influences how you talk about challenges, how you share ideas and how you position yourself in your market.

Most organisations already have the seeds of a voice in their culture or leadership team, but the goal is not to copy one person. It is to capture a shared outlook that reflects the business today and the business you aspire to be.

Aim for a small set of descriptors that guide the way you sound. One to three attitude words are usually enough to set the direction without creating unnecessary creative constraints.

Look outward, not inward

A common pitfall is writing copy that answers internal desires rather than audience needs. Brands talk too much about themselves, their technology, their features or their achievements. This is called ‘the man in the mirror problem’ and it is one of the biggest barriers to effective communication.

A strong brand voice always begins with the reader. It speaks to their world, their challenges and their motivations. It prioritises benefits over features and relevance over self-importance.

One useful practice is to always ask:

• Why does this matter to the reader?
• What problem does it help them solve?
• What outcome does it support?

If the answer is not obvious, the message needs refining.

Understand your audience deeply

Tone of voice and messaging land best when they reflect how your audience truly thinks, not how you imagine they think. Interviews, surveys and real conversations bring nuance and insight to the surface. This kind of research reveals what people care about and what they ignore. It also helps you differentiate between the expert mindset inside your company and the beginner’s mindset many buyers carry.

Tools like SparkToro and on-page behaviour analytics can support this with wider context, such as what people read, search for and share.

The more specific your understanding, the more targeted your voice becomes.

Use internal workshops to shape alignment

Workshops that force people to choose between tone pairs can be incredibly revealing. Serious or whimsical, formal or friendly, bold or reserved. These exercises are less about the words themselves and more about the debate they provoke. That discussion often uncovers blind spots, contradictions and unspoken assumptions.

Alignment does not mean total agreement. It means reaching a shared understanding of how you want to sound and why.

Choose your stance and be willing to stand out

Safe copy is forgettable copy. When brands try to please everyone, they often end up with a smooth pebble voice that sounds identical to competitors. Avoid this at all costs. A strong brand voice requires a point of view, a willingness to take a stance and sometimes even the boldness to pick an enemy.

This does not mean being provocative for the sake of it. It means being clear about what you stand for and what you stand against. That clarity helps the right audience connect with you faster.

Document your voice so it can be used consistently

A brand voice cannot live in one person’s head. It must be captured in a simple, usable document that anyone who writes for your company can follow. This may include:

• A core attitude statement
• Guidelines for sentence structure, vocabulary and style
• Examples of good and bad copy
• Rules for how tone flexes by context

At Articulate, our own guidelines run long, but even a two-page starter guide is better than nothing. Remember that if a voice only exists in leadership’s head or is buried on page 28 of a brand PDF, it is not functioning as a real brand asset.

Once documented, your voice becomes scalable, teachable and repeatable.

Bring your voice to life across every channel

Brand voice does its best work when it is consistent. That means applying it everywhere, not only on hero pages or campaigns.

Every page, every email, every CTA, every nurture sequence, every headline. Consistency builds trust. Trust builds confidence. And confidence drives engagement.

You can also support this with tooling. Experiment with custom GPT models trained on your brand voice to help teams self-check their writing.

This is not a replacement for good copywriting, but it is a useful companion.

Find your voice and win more business

Start with clarity. Set your attitude. Listen to your audience. Be brave enough to have a stance. Document your voice so others can use it. And keep refining it as your brand grows.

If you want to talk to a team who have decades of experience in sharpening brand voices, book a free marketing strategy session and we’ll help you get started.