A Startup's Guide to Defining Your Brand Voice for Growth

Key Takeaways

• Establishing clear brand voice guidelines early on is crucial for long-term content quality, consistency, and efficiency as startups scale.
• Without a defined brand voice, startups risk wasted time and effort on constantly revising off-brand content.
• Effective brand voice guidelines cover three levels: the overarching personality and values, the specific communication strategies and audience insights, and the tactical style and syntax standards.
• As AI content tools become prevalent, a distinctive, well-defined brand voice is an even greater competitive differentiator.
• Brand voice should evolve alongside the startup, with regular assessment and adaptation based on data, feedback, and company direction.

The Case for Prioritizing Brand Voice as a Startup

By the time startups are at the point of going through branding exercises, they may not realize just how much content production is about to descend upon them. Sales assets, blog posts, website copy refreshes, social posts, email copy, newsletters, video, and the list goes on.

Oh, and all of it has to be unique, but somehow also recognizable, too. And, while you're at it, be sure to do some edits and updates of the existing content that was slapped together "at some point" by "someone" (which may or may not even have the right colors on it).

There are many discussions about what types of content are good now (as well as where, when, and how you release them). But no matter where you put your content strategy, the point is the same: you'll need a lot of great content, always in your voice, done well, and able to do more quickly.

These changes all happen fast, but taking the time to establish a brand voice as a startup is a time investment that pays itself back in dividends. There's a catch, though: you'll have to take the time to do it.

We've been at startups where marketing budgets are tight and the deadlines are even tighter. It's often not a matter of triaging a crisis over long-term project work, it's more a matter of triaging multiple crises against each other all the time. This is why when it comes down to deciding which meeting to scrap, the "brand voice discussions" is usually one of the first to go.

I've heard a lot of reasons why people punt the brand voice exercise, such as:

• It seems too high-level and vague to be worth doing
• It seems too granular and detailed (despite that being contradictory, many people do give both this and the prior excuse in the same breath)
• Feels a bit "woo-woo"
• Feels a bit too "brass tacks" (also often weirdly said in the same sentence as the one before)
• It's "too early" to have these types of discussions
• We can just "plug it into AI later" (it's my strong inclination you probably shouldn't take anything this person says about AI to heart)

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There's a saying from the U.S. Navy SEALs: "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast." If you go too fast, you'll end up back where you started. You'll have to do it all over again and take more time to fix your old mistakes. 

Without taking the time to establish a brand voice, here are just a few ways you will rob your future marketing team of time and effort, limiting their ability to run as fast as they need to as the company scales:

• Auditing old sales assets and updating ones with inconsistent voice and messaging (and the longer you go, the more assets you'll have to revise)
• Edits and revisions from future content writers and freelancers who were unclear on how to capture the brand voice
• Sales deck overhauls
• Social media post revamps
• Email marketing edits and re-tests
• Onboarding woes as the voice isn't replicable
• Partner training updates
• AI toolset re-training and configurations

Of course, all content will eventually need updating, refreshing, and auditing as your startup and brand evolves. However, those revisions will take *much* less time when your starting points and revisions are all consistent. Finally, as you start to implement AI tools for your marketing efforts, establishing a clear brand voice will lead to the best and fastest results there, too.

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Let's talk about some other factors to consider before heading into a brand voice exercise.

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Brand Voice is a Key Differentiator in this New Age of AI

One of the most pivotal and foundational exercises startups go through is product differentiation. How is the offering different from the competitors? Why is this a better value?

The importance of product differentiation cannot be overstated. But just as important as product differentiation is *how you explain it* once you've defined it. This has become especially true as more and more of us adopt AI into our toolsets.

There's a phrase going around lately in marketing circles that is some variation of, "everyone wants to generate content with AI, but nobody wants to consume AI-generated content." Audiences were already starting to tire of generic corporate content, but the public adoption of LLMs finalized their rejection of it. They will no longer tolerate content that doesn't have a point of view or something valuable to offer them.

There are some great AI tools to help create content in your brand's voice. You will first have to teach them with good rules and materials done correctly.

One of the oldest brand voice exercises is to think about what your brand would be like at a party. Unfortunately, many brand voice guidelines are not very helpful. They often just say to be "friendly" and "approachable" while also being an authority in the industry.

And of course that's what comes out of that exercise! Who wouldn't want to be the friendly, understanding, trusted friend to all at a social gathering? Unfortunately, these desirable but generic adjectives don't actually give useful information to the people you're trusting to be the brand's voice in the future. They have many different definitions for each person (and tool).

Define the Big, Medium, and Small Pictures of Your Brand Voice

To make sure your brand voice is one you can build on and adapt successfully, you'll need to go a little deeper than, "professional yet approachable." The new rule of thumb (made popular by Chris West in his book "Strong Language") in defining brand voice is to define three levels of your brand voice: the 10,000-foot view, the 1,000-foot view, and the ground level view.

The 10,000-foot view

Think of this as the overarching goals and personality of the brand. You also need to define the core values of the brand here. What do you want to achieve? What problems are you solving? How do you want to be viewed in the space? This is where that "party personality" exercise usually comes into play.

1,000-foot view

This is the *strategy* powering how you'll deliver the message of the 10,000-foot view. Will you use humor? Formal language? Memes? What kinds of vocabulary will you use? How technical? What kinds of speech patterns will you use in your posts, blogs, and assets? Who are you speaking to, exactly?

Audience research is crucial here to help you answer these questions. To do this, you need to go where your audience is talking about the space, and not where your competition is. Find out what type of marketing and language they respond to, but also what marketing tactics they complain about.

And while this might sound specific, these guidelines shouldn't hinder creativity within them. Your content creators should be able to understand how they can best express the consistent messaging in the correct tones without feeling overly restricted. This also ensures that not one single person is solely capable of producing the correct voice, either.

Ground-level view

Finally, the boots-on-the-ground details about style and syntax. These decisions will make everything easier to create, review, and edit because the mental load of questions such as capitalization rules or parenthetical usage have already been answered and standardized. 

These "little things" really take brand voice consistency to its best level and make first drafts, revisions, and edits much faster, too.

Best Practices for Executing Brand Voice with AI

As AI-powered writing tools like GPT-3 become more prevalent, startups have an exciting opportunity to streamline on-brand content creation at scale. However, without proper brand voice training, AI outputs can end up sounding generic or misaligned.

To harness AI's potential while staying true to your distinctive brand voice:

1. Train AI models on a substantial library of content that exemplifies your brand voice across various formats (web copy, blogs, social posts, etc.). The more high-quality examples you provide, the better the AI can learn your unique patterns and preferences.

2. Develop detailed prompt templates that clearly articulate your brand voice guidelines at multiple levels (personality, tone, style, syntax, etc.). Provide these to your team to ensure consistency in the instructions given to the AI.

3. Always include a human review and editing step in your AI-assisted content workflows. AI can generate on-brand drafts, but human judgment is still needed to refine the output and catch any off-brand or nonsensical passages.

4. Continually feed new AI-generated content that has undergone human review back into your training data. This will help your AI models get smarter over time and adapt as your brand voice evolves.

By combining clear brand voice definitions with AI tools and human oversight, startups can achieve the best of both worlds - the speed and scale of machine-generated content, with the nuanced consistency of a carefully crafted brand voice.

Expect and Plan to Adapt Your Brand Voice

Just like everything else at a startup, the brand's voice will grow, adapt, and possibly even pivot. This should not discourage you from leaning into this exercise. Instead, brand voice positioning and governance should be part of the product positioning process. This will make sure that the audience personas are not only defined, but they are being reached in the right ways with the right messages. The brand's voice should only get stronger and more defined as time goes on, never less.

However, this evolution means that you might need to grow into your brand voice and give it time to see what's working and what isn't. This also means you might also need to temper your dreams of going viral, since the algorithms have started shifting against us once again.

And if you're afraid of missing the mark on brand voice, I'd like to leave you with a now-classic illustration by artist Alex Krokus that perfectly encapsulates the brand voice struggle. The key is always to take every data point as an opportunity to learn, adapt, and grow. Integrating brand voice into the process just makes that growth less painful.

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