What Is a Brand Voice? How to Develop One
(A Nova Strategic Special Report)
On this page:
- What Is a Brand Voice?
- Why Brand Voice Matters
- The Elements That Shape a Brand Voice
- How to Develop Your Brand Voice (Step-by-Step)
- Building Consistency Across Platforms
- Brand Voice Examples That Work
- Documenting and Training Your Voice
- The Brand Voice ChatGPT Prompt: Discover and Develop Your Voice
- Mistakes to Avoid
- The Payoff: How Brand Voice Builds Trust, Traffic, and Conversion
- Best Brand Voice Resources
Introduction: Why This Matters More Than Ever
In a world where most websites and social media posts sound almost identical, your brand voice is what makes you recognisable, trustworthy, and unforgettable.
A strong brand voice helps you communicate with clarity, confidence, and consistency — the three ingredients that make potential clients think: “I know exactly who they are, what they stand for, and why I’d work with them.”
At Nova Strategic, we see it every day: businesses with solid offerings and good design still struggle to connect because their content sounds generic. The words don’t sound like them.
Fixing that changes everything.
What Is a Brand Voice?
Your brand voice is the personality of your business expressed through words, rhythm, and tone. It’s how your brand “sounds” to your audience, whether they’re reading your homepage, scrolling through your posts, or opening your emails.
It’s not just what you say — it’s how you say it.
If your business were a person, your brand voice would be its conversational style. Confident? Reassuring? Practical? Energetic? Calmly authoritative? That combination of traits becomes the throughline of your marketing, creating familiarity and trust.
Why Brand Voice Matters
A distinct brand voice:
- Builds trust — people buy from businesses they feel they know.
- Increases engagement — clear, consistent tone keeps readers’ attention longer.
- Improves conversion — messaging that resonates emotionally makes it easier for clients to say “yes.”
- Strengthens your SEO — a recognisable voice with topic authority helps your content perform better and get shared more.
When your words sound like you, your marketing finally feels natural — and that’s what moves people to act.
The Elements That Shape a Brand Voice
There are four layers to every brand voice:
- Personality: the emotional core (friendly, confident, witty, authoritative).
- Tone: how the voice adapts in different contexts (blog vs. service page).
- Language: vocabulary, phrasing, and style (simple vs. technical, direct vs. descriptive).
- Pace & Rhythm: sentence length, flow, and punctuation style that make the voice distinct.
Most businesses overlook rhythm — but it’s one of the easiest ways to differentiate your voice. The cadence of your words tells readers whether your brand feels formal, relaxed, or dynamic.
How to Develop Your Brand Voice (Step-by-Step)
- Define your audience clearly.
Understand their needs, values, and expectations. Are they time-poor professionals, small business owners, or creative entrepreneurs? - Identify your brand personality traits.
Choose 3–5 that describe your tone: approachable, confident, analytical, empathetic, etc. - Audit your existing content.
Look for patterns in your writing that already work — and inconsistencies that confuse. - Find your “voice anchors.”
These are words, phrases, and expressions that always feel true to your brand. - Create a brand voice chart.
Example: TraitSounds LikeDoesn’t Sound LikeConfidentClear, assured, professionalArrogant, pushyWarmHuman, supportive, relatableOverly casual or forcedDirectEfficient, helpful, plain EnglishCorporate or vague - Test and refine.
Try rewriting a paragraph from your website in different tones until one feels authentically you.
Building Consistency Across Platforms
Your brand voice should flex — not break — across different contexts.
- Website: Balanced tone, confident and clear.
- Emails: Personal, conversational, slightly softer.
- Social media: Energetic, interactive, more playful.
- Presentations: Inspirational, concise, rhythmic.
Consistency isn’t about sounding identical — it’s about always sounding recognisably you.
Brand Voice Examples That Work
- Nova Strategic: confident, empathetic, and grounded — clarity meets professionalism.
- Mailchimp: witty but supportive; they make marketing sound human.
- Apple: minimalist, assured, emotionally intelligent.
- Atlassian: clear and inclusive, ideal for professional collaboration.
Each of these brands communicates certainty through simplicity. Their words do the heavy lifting of trust.
Documenting and Training Your Voice
Once you’ve defined your voice, document it in a Brand Voice Guide.
Include tone rules, sample phrases, and “do/don’t” examples. This helps everyone on your team — and future copywriters — stay consistent.
Your guide should include:
- Core personality traits
- Tone examples for each platform
- Vocabulary to use and avoid
- Short examples of voice in action
- Notes on punctuation, rhythm, and sentence style
When shared with clarity, your voice becomes a training tool — not just a guideline.
The Brand Voice ChatGPT Prompt: Discover and Develop Your Voice
AI tools like ChatGPT can accelerate your brand voice discovery — but only if you guide them with clarity.
Most people ask AI to “write in our brand voice,” before they’ve defined what that voice is. The result? Generic, surface-level language that sounds like everyone else.
The real magic comes when you use AI to help you think, not just write for you.
Here’s a proven prompt we use with clients to extract the language, tone, and rhythm that truly reflect their business personality.
The Brand Voice Discovery Prompt
*** Copy this into ChatGPT and replace the bracketed parts with your own details:
Prompt:
You are an expert brand strategist and conversion copywriter. I want you to help me define and document my business’s unique brand voice.
Here’s what you need to know about my business:
- Business name: [Your business name]
- What we do: [Brief description of products/services]
- Who we serve: [Describe your ideal customers — their goals, frustrations, and industries]
- Our core purpose or mission: [What drives your work — why your business exists]
- Our personality traits: [E.g., bold, calm, confident, warm, professional, humorous, analytical]
- Competitors we want to sound different from: [List 2–3 examples]
- Words we love using: [e.g., clarity, courage, growth]
- Words or phrases we want to avoid: [e.g., hustle, cheap, game-changer]
Using this information, please:
- Define the Brand Voice Overview — the personality and communication style that represents our business.
- Create a Tone Guide — how our voice should adapt across contexts (website, emails, social media, blogs).
- Write three short paragraphs showing how this voice sounds when used on:
- A homepage hero section
- A service page introduction
- A social media post promoting a new offer
- Summarise the “Voice Guardrails” (what to always do, and what to avoid) in bullet points.
- Suggest five keywords or phrases that naturally reflect our brand tone for SEO use.
Please write in a natural, professional, and human voice — not robotic or exaggerated — and format the output clearly.
💡 How to Use This Prompt Effectively
- Be specific, not vague. The more detail you give, the more authentic your results.
- Iterate. Ask for refinements like “Make this sound more confident.”
- Test intuitively. If it feels like your best self — you’ve nailed it.
- Document it. Add the final version to your Brand Voice Guide.
Nova Tip: Use AI as Your Mirror, Not Your Megaphone
AI can’t define who you are — but it can reflect you back with clarity.
Used thoughtfully, it helps you articulate your true tone faster and more confidently.
That’s how you keep your message consistent and unmistakably yours.
Mistakes to Avoid
- Writing in trends instead of truth.
- Overcomplicating your tone — simple, human language always wins.
- Forgetting to teach your team the voice rules.
- Changing tone too often — inconsistency kills trust.
The Payoff: How Brand Voice Builds Trust, Traffic, and Conversion
A clear brand voice creates an emotional shortcut. It lets readers skip past confusion and straight into connection.
When your tone feels right, people don’t just read your content — they remember it, trust it, and act on it.
That’s the quiet power behind every effective website Nova Strategic builds.
Best Brand Voice Resources
- Everybody Writes by Ann Handley
- The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier
- Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath
- Words That Work by Dr. Frank Luntz
✅ Want help defining your voice and turning it into conversion-driven website content?
Book a 30-minute growth session with Nova Strategic — and let’s make your website sound unmistakably you.