How Effectively Are You Using Your Voice?

As two gals who consider ourselves great communicators, it’ll come as no surprise to you that we really care about how Good Egg interacts with its audience.

Our biz is an extension of ourselves (I, Sophie, actually said “Good Egg is life” on mine and Hol’s call this week cringeeee), so it stands to reason that we’d want our professional persona to communicate in a way that represents us well. That being said, it took us a good long while to actually get around to doing anything about that.

Good Egg is life... cringe, but it makes us happy

Confession: It Took Us Four Years To Write Our Voice Guidelines

Despite clear communication being Good Egg’s love language, we didn’t actually sit down to write our brand tone of voice guidelines until 2024 — almost four years after we originally launched.

The main reason for this glacial pace is that we both settled into speaking like ourselves in our marketing. I’d use my voice, Hol would use hers, and we plodded along thinking we’d nailed the way we were speaking to our audience.

It actually took the launch of our tone of voice development service to give us the nudge we needed to find the time to work on our own. And when we did, we realised just how much we could have done with those guidelines all along.

Spoiler, maybe you could do with some guidelines, too ;)

We’re famously similar, but our voices are still unique AF

Our Top Five Tone Of Voice Tips

If you know your brand voice needs some work and fancy tackling it yourself, these are our top five tone of voice tips to give you a helping hand along the way.

1. Be Your Best ✨Authentic✨ Self

Playing a character is exhausting, so your tone of voice should feel adjacent to your own personal way of communicating.

If your business is already up and running, a great place to start figuring this out is by looking at emails, DMs, or any other written communication with your clients. Note down any common phrases or tonal similarities that you spot.

These observations will come in super handy for pinning down that all-important authenticity that every strong brand voice is built on.

2. Know Your Competition

Knowing who your competition is will help you in so many areas of your business, and tone of voice development is one of them. Identify your top 2-3 competitors, then check out their web copy/social media posts to see what they’re saying and how they’re saying it.

This isn’t about trying to replicate any other business’s tone of voice — yours should be unique — but about having a strong idea of what works (and what doesn’t). You don’t need to reinvent the wheel; you just need to add your own personal pizzazz to it.

3. Centre Your Audience

Ok, so now you know how you speak and what your competition is saying. But what about your target audience? Think about how they speak, either when they’ve communicated with you or how they post on socials. Chances are, they’ll respond best to a tone of voice that aligns with their own.

Buyer personas (BP) and ideal customer profiles (ICP) are two must-have tools for understanding your target audience — and the better we understand our audiences, the better we can meet their needs. If you don’t have these docs in your branding kit yet, this blog is a handy resource for learning how to create your BPs and ICPs for your biz.

4. Be Consistent In Your Comms

Hol and I are super similar in lots of ways, but we obviously have our own unique voices. So, we first needed to find a voice that felt consistent no matter which of us is writing on behalf of Good Egg.

Just as Hol and I needed to find a common ground to speak from, you should aim to do the same with co-founders, freelancers, and anyone else who writes for your biz. Once you’ve got your guidelines, circulate them far and wide, and be sure to stick to them across all your comms.

5. Get Help From A Pro

If you feeling stuck, don’t worry! There’s a Good Egg that can help (it’s me, Sophie). Identifying your tone of voice can be super tricky, so getting help with it can save you loads of time and brainpower. We offer three levels of tone of voice development (including a free one):

• The Free One – get in touch to book a free 15-minute call to pick our brains on tone of voice development (or anything else web/copy related that you’re feeling stuck on)

• The DIY One – download our tone of voice workbook that’ll guide you through creating tone of voice guidelines in six easy steps

• The Done For You One – we save you the headache of developing your tone of voice on your own by creating guidelines for you

Actual footage of us working on your tone of voice guidelines (ok not really, but you get the picture 😍)

Our tone of voice has been a big focus for us. What areas of your business have you been investing your time and energy in lately? Pop us a comment to let us know 🧡

Sophie & Holly x
(The Good Eggs)