Eight Tips for Rolling Out Your Corporate Tone of Voice

Here at Acrolinx, we love talking about tone of voice! We’ve written about the reasons why you should care about it and how to define it. And now we’re helping you roll out your tone of voice across your enterprise. Because using a consistent brand tone of voice at all customer touchpoints is essential to creating unified customer experiences.

Let’s say you’ve finally defined your tone of voice and now you need to put it into practice. Creating a PDF guide is great, but if it doesn’t get used it won’t add any value to your enterprise. So here are eight tips for making sure your tone of voice becomes part of your day-to-day content creation throughout your organization!

Tip 1: Appoint a Terminology council

To make sure your tone of voice is being actively managed and monitored, consider appointing a terminology council. If it’s everybody’s job to monitor tone, it often ends up being nobody’s. Bear in mind that not everyone on your terminology council should be a writer — to tell you the truth it might be better if they’re not. That way you’ll have a variety of perspectives, and be less likely to get bogged down in whether it’s a good piece of writing or not. 

A terminology council should also champion your brand values, after all, that’s the foundation of your tone of voice. It’s important they have an interest in analytics too. Because if you adopt a content improvement software, you’ll be able to measure and score the tone of your content. You’ll be able to collect metrics and gain insight into whether your tone resonates with your audience.

Tip 2: Offer Some Training

Once you’ve done the work to define your tone of voice, it’s vital that you make sure everyone in your organization knows about it! The most obvious way to teach people about your new brand tone of voice is to train them. 

Hopefully, everyone affected by tone of voice was involved from the beginning, so get all stakeholders to go back and share tone guidelines with their teams. Or you could start a company-wide initiative, whereby all employees are briefed by your new terminology council about the details and sound of your changed brand tone. 

And don’t be fooled — almost everyone at your company creates content for your brand. From content marketing and support articles, to product content and website copy. And all of that content needs to be written in your brand tone of voice if you want to create unified experiences for your customers. 

Also, remember that more recent recruits may not be aware of your tone guidelines. So you can offer refresher lessons and a carefully crafted one pager or well-designed poster to help onboard new employees. Of course, a content improvement software is also great for this, as it can guide writers to meet your tone of voice guidelines. Through automated checking of your content, it can make suggestions to writers to help keep their content on-brand from the first draft. 

Tip 3: Build Processes

You’ll already have a content creation process in place — but how efficient is that process? 

Often editorial processes are drawn out, as many companies don’t use automation and AI to fuel efficiencies. Content improvement software provides immediate feedback to content creators, in their favorite authoring tools, to keep content on-brand. This means checking your content for consistent tone doesn’t create another unnecessary loop in the editorial process.

Using an automated solution to help roll out and follow company guidelines across the content workflow reduces costly editorial cycles for burdensome quality checks. Automation also means that this can be done at scale, streamlining the editorial process and speeding up time to publication. 

Tip 4: Schedule Regular Health Checks

To understand how the roll out of your tone of voice is coming along, regularly review your content and metrics. And it’s a great opportunity to see what’s resonating with your customers. Content fuels the customer journey, and can make or break customer experience. And the worst part is that content is often overlooked when it comes to delivering great customer experience. 

Yet, with regular content health checks, you can gauge how your target audience is responding and engaging with your content. Essentially, you can see how effective your content is and how well your tone is being received by customers! If you want to know more about how to build a content operation that delivers great customer experiences, download our eBook. 

Tip 5: Fix Your Pain Points

Regardless of whether you’re creating new content or updating existing content to meet your brand voice guidelines, you should start rolling out your new tone where you need it most. 

Perhaps your website needs a refresh to match your new tone of voice, or there’s a particular product web page that has a high bounce rate? Whatever it is, you need to identify your pain points and focus efforts there. It’s an awesome opportunity to show off the positive impacts of your new, well-defined tone of voice too!

Tip 6: Don’t Be Afraid

Every company has important documents that everyone sees — that set the tone for the whole organization. They might be everyday things like sign-in screens, or highly visible, like annual reports. But by finding and changing them, you show everyone that your tone of voice has changed. It also sets the standard for how you want your tone of voice to be applied. 

Tip 7: Share Success Stories

If someone has written something outstanding in your tone of voice, share it throughout the company. Maybe they found a clever way to communicate a complicated idea, or they developed a great content piece in your tone that’s performing really well. Whatever it is, it can show people that your new tone of voice is delivering real results, while also giving them another concrete example of how it can work. 

When developing examples, remember that there could already be wisdom in your organization, waiting to be unlocked. For example, customer-service teams may already be using very effective language that’s never been written down. If you capture and codify it, others can use it too.

Tip 8: Adopt an Enterprise-Wide Solution

Content improvement and governance software provides immediate feedback to content creators, wherever they work, to keep content on-brand. This means checking your content for consistent tone doesn’t create another unnecessary loop in the editorial process. At global companies, writers might not be creating content in their native language, so being guided to use preferred terminology and aligning content to your tone of voice maintains consistency. 

You can also measure and score the tone of your content. So you’ll be able to collect metrics and gain insight into whether your tone resonates with your audience. In turn, this encourages a customer-centric approach to content, one that prioritizes the customer experience. 

Now You Have to Maintain It!

Rolling out our tone of voice isn’t easy. But using content improvement software makes it a breeze. You no longer need to check PDFs for tone of voice guidelines, but can be guided through immediate feedback, powered by AI and automation. 

Acrolinx gives your writers immediate in-depth feedback on the clarity and style of their writing — making sure it’s aligned to your brand. This means that large teams, with different language skills, across different locations, can be guided to meet your content strategy and goals. Automation carries the burden of time-consuming editity for quality control, and integrates into your content creation process to deliver automatic alignment. And this fuels efficiency.

Want to learn how Acrolinx can help roll out your tone of voice? Download our eBook Watch Your Tone! Why Your Company’s Tone of Voice Matters and How to Get it Right or Let’s talk.