Brand voice and style guides: Is longer always better?
If you’re familiar with brand style guides, you’ll know they vary greatly in detail and length.
Usually, they’re weighted toward the design element.
Some are 1-pagers that list your pantone colours and fonts and others are 93-page behemoths that dive into every pixel, colour treatment, image choice and logo placement.
If you’re not a designer, you’d likely prefer the easy-peasy one-sheeter and call it a day.
But if you’re a designer?
Those extra rules and guidelines ensure you know EXACTLY how to stay on brand. And if you’re the one who has to approve all their work, you’ll be glad they have the rules.
The case for lengthy visual style guides doesn’t need to be won.
But, when it comes to voice, most guidelines are loose and general. They’re the equivalent of giving your designer the instructions of “make it pretty and be sure it has plenty of yellow in it.”
Or saying, “I don’t know what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it.”
(Please never do this to your designers, by the way. It makes them tetchy.)
But here’s what I’d like you to keep in mind…
As the demand for brand voice guides creeps steadily upward, so do the number of copywriters adding them to their stash of services.
And, like any visual style guide, a brand voice style guide will range in depth, strategy and complexity depending on your business and needs.
(Ideally, you’d develop your voice guide jointly with your visual guide, although that’s not the rule of thumb, and not always possible.)
So how do you know what exactly you’re investing in?
Is it going to make a difference to your sales and bottom line?
Will it really take a hefty wedge out of your writing time?
Or—a sore point for some—will it get shoved into a folder, buried and forgotten amid the masses of brand, marketing, and strategy documents you already have?
Time for a moment of truth:
If you opt for the one-pager, it’s destined for the dusty back folder filled with all those downloaded opt-ins you have, never to be seen again.
On the flip side?
A comprehensive brand voice guide will become your BFF when it comes to writing anything business-related.
It’s a working document that evolves as your business evolves, and you’d assign someone to update it when new discoveries emerge (or DIY if you’re a sole operator).
A grandiose voice guide is your compass for creative confidence and a go-to resource for writing original, on-brand copy.
Whether you outsource, write your own material, or have writers in-house, a well-detailed voice guide offers laser clarity when it comes to writing anything for any channel.
That includes your all-important internal channels—which is where brand building begins. (Your voice would differ for an internal audience, and this would be explained and demonstrated in a guide built for teams.)
It’s a directional tool that gets writers back on track if they’ve wandered into ‘word wilderness’ and veered off-brand.
This is a good thing because it means:
No back-and-forth edits.
No more treading on eggshells when you have to give less-than-glowing feedback to your writers.
And no more vague “I don’t know, I just don’t like it” comments. (Another thing that makes creatives tetchy.)
In fact, with such a clear guide to writing for your brand, it’ll spark their creative flames, keep them on track, and they’ll blossom with bountiful ideas to boot.
That enviable company culture you’re trying to build?
Your voice acts as a cultivator of brand integrity. The way you articulate every aspect of your business has a powerful ripple effect on everyone.
It’s an on-hand reference for what to do, what not to do, why, and how to get it right.
Better drafts, the first time.
A voice that sings the heart and soul of your business, every time.
When shorter wins
Small, solo, or startup businesses won’t always have the need or budget for a bells-and-whistles voice guide.
And that’s absolutely OK.
That said, I’d like to mention a few other cases for ‘shorter’ and highlight the importance of evolving your voice guide as your business grows.
Your fledgling brand isn’t yet sure of its direction, so why invest when it could all take a turn?
Great point—and I agree, BUT…
Even though you’re finding your wings, you’d likely know what your core motivators are (even if you don’t yet have them documented):
- Reason for being in business
- Vision for the future
- Decisions made based on your values
- Your origin story
- The people you most want to attract
And behind these are the traits that define your character, all of which are the foundations for your voice guide.
Bringing the fundamentals together to create the beginnings of your guide isn’t only smart, it’s vital. Sure, things might change depending on how your market receives your offering, but voice guides are never set in stone and these diversions only give you greater clarity through time.
A starter voice guide will help you test the waters and refine as you go while your voice archetype anchors you into a distinctive style (your voice archetype generally won’t change through time—it’s the ‘magnetic’ element your ideal audience intuitively leans into).
You’d rather trial a starter guide before you go all-in
Great! A starter guide offers a strong foundation for your voice’s blueprint (such as brand personality, archetype, brand voice pillars, and a light-on summary of cadence, tone, and language).
It’ll be enough to be clear about the fundamentals, and you’ll soon discover by using the guide where more parameters need to be added.
You have a brand strategy with a summary of your tone of voice—that’ll do for now
Now here’s where I’m going to send you back up the page. 
A sketchy one-page voice ‘explainer’ placed into a brand strategy comes with high risk.
There’s good reason I trained in building voice guides that genuinely work, and it’s because I’ve had to write from one-pagers more times than I’d have liked.
Like designers who need everything specified and demonstrated in their visual style guides to be set up for success, writers too need the same for voice.
At the very least, consider a starter guide (which can be added to your brand document). In this case, when you’ve already had considerable work done, a shorter guide is enough to be helpful, but ‘shortest’ (your one-pager) leaves too much on the table for individual interpretation.
You have long-standing writers who already ‘get’ your voice
Glory days!
A couple of things to think about:
Are you planning on scaling your business?
If so, you’ll naturally be scaling content production. This could mean bringing more writers in or adding workload to your current writers. It’s the ideal scenario to dig deeper on your voice, document the detail, and craft a voice that can’t be cloned.
Even if you’re not scaling your business:
It’s so refreshing for writers to have crystal clarity on voice as they embark on a new project. It fuels new ideas and eases them into the all-important creative flow.
If they’re working from an older version of a voice guide, consider revisiting and building on what’s there. You’d be surprised what can come out of spending a couple of hours in a Voicefinder session, for example.
Ultimately, you’ll get more written in less time with less edits (and budget). And it ensures every written piece will sound just like you want it to before it hits your desk.
It’s a surefire recipe for building success (and smiles) into your content production team.