Most brand voice guidelines are written with care and then filed away. A team spends weeks agreeing on voice characteristics, tone by situation, and the words to use and avoid. The guide works well in the meeting where everyone helped write it.
It breaks down when people sit down to write. A sales rep responds to a prospect in Gmail, a support lead posts in the customer community, and a freelancer drafts a product page, and none of them have the PDF open. The voice drifts one message at a time.
The fix is to put your brand voice guidelines where people type. Below you’ll find what a good guide includes, real brand voice examples, a template to build your own, and how to turn the approved lines into shared Snippets, so a 30-person marketing team or a five-person business sounds like itself everywhere.
Key takeaways
- Brand voice guidelines describe how you sound; Snippets make it happen. The guide sets the rules, and shared Snippets put the approved words in front of people as they write.
- Start with core values, audience, and three or four voice characteristics. A brand voice chart that shows “this, not that” is easier to follow than a list of adjectives.
- Lock the lines that shouldn’t change. Taglines, product descriptions, boilerplate, and legal lines belong in shared Snippets, with Fill-ins for the parts that should change.
- Correct voice slips automatically. Correction Snippets fix brand-name misspellings and swap off-brand words as people type.
- Update once, change everywhere. When marketing edits a shared Snippet, every signature, reply, and post uses the new version.
What are brand voice guidelines?
Brand voice guidelines are a short document that describes how your brand sounds in writing and how that sound adapts to different situations. They turn your brand personality into rules people can apply, so a reader gets the same voice from your website, an email from sales, and a reply from support. Your broader brand guidelines cover logos and colors; the voice section covers words.
Most guides cover the same key elements:
- Voice characteristics. Three or four personality traits that describe your brand, each with a short explanation.
- Tone guidelines. How the brand tone shifts by situation, such as a launch announcement, an apology, or a billing question.
- Words to use and avoid. Preferred terms, banned words, and product names with the correct spelling and capitalization.
- Real world examples. Before-and-after lines that show the voice in action.
- Mechanics. Writing choices like active voice, sentence length, and whether you use contractions.
Brand voice vs. tone of voice
Voice is your brand’s consistent personality. Tone is how that personality adjusts to the moment. Mailchimp’s content style guide puts it simply: “You have the same voice all the time, but your tone changes.” A customer celebrating a milestone and a customer locked out of their account should hear the same brand in different tones. The goal isn’t a consistent tone everywhere; it’s a consistent voice with the right tone of voice for each moment.
Brand voice examples
A few public guides show what clear brand voice guidelines look like in practice:
- Mailchimp. Its voice and tone guide names four traits (plainspoken, genuine, translators of complex topics, and a dry sense of humor) and explains each one in a sentence or two.
- Atlassian. The Atlassian Design System ties tone to what people need in the moment, with principles like “Inform to build trust” and “Satisfy by meeting expectations.”
- Fernbrook Outdoor (fictional). The made-up gear brand we’ll use throughout this guide sounds friendly, expert, and outdoorsy. “Friendly” means writing like a guide at the trailhead, not a salesperson at the counter.
A strong brand voice comes from specificity. Each trait comes with guidance a writer can act on, which is what turns a unique brand voice into a consistent brand voice.
Why brand voice matters, and why guidelines still go unused
A well-defined brand voice makes a brand more memorable and helps customers know what to expect, which supports brand recognition, brand recall, and customer loyalty over time. It also gives every writer the same core identity to work from, instead of reinventing the company’s personality in every message.
Inconsistent messaging does the opposite. When every email sounds different, customers can’t tell what the brand stands for, and the brand identity blurs. A consistent voice builds deeper connections, because readers come to recognize the same people behind every message. Even good guidelines often fail in daily work, though, for three reasons:
- They live in a document, and writing happens everywhere else. Writing happens across different channels. Email, chat, social media posts, help centers, CRMs, and CMS fields all have their own editors, and none of them shows the guide.
- They describe the voice but don’t supply the words. Knowing your brand sounds “confident but warm” doesn’t tell a new hire how to describe the product in 50 words.
- They go stale. Taglines change, products get renamed, and old versions keep circulating in personal templates and saved replies.
Jacob Moore, Product Manager at CloseKnit Health, described the same problem across his team’s systems:
We have all of these different systems, and we wanted to have a unified voice when we talk to patients. Athena has macros, but we can’t use those in other systems.
Jacob Moore, Product Manager, CloseKnit Health
Saved replies and macros help inside one tool. Voice consistency across different platforms needs the approved words available in every app your team uses.
How to create brand voice guidelines
If you don’t have a guide yet, or yours is a slide deck nobody opens, these steps produce a short, usable one. Keep the first version to one or two pages. You can add detailed guidelines later. When creating guidelines, aim for something a new hire can read in ten minutes and apply the same day.
1. Start with your brand identity, values, and positioning
Your voice should sound like what your brand stands for. List your brand’s core values and the promise you make to customers, then ask what each one implies for how you write. A brand that values transparency should explain pricing plainly. A brand built on expertise should teach, not hype. Some teams take a story-driven approach, writing a short brand story about who they serve and why they exist, then pulling the voice traits from it. Either way, the voice should reflect your brand positioning, the space you want to own in your target market.
2. Describe your target audience
Write down who reads your content and what they expect from you. Audience expectations shape your communication style. A developer audience may want precise, technical language, while small-business owners may want plain answers in a warmer, conversational voice. If you serve several audience segments, note where the tone should shift for each. Pull actual language from customer calls, reviews, and support tickets, so the guide reflects how your actual customers talk. If you write for several markets, check that idioms and humor translate, since cultural relevance changes what sounds friendly.
3. Turn your brand personality into three or four voice characteristics
Pick a small set of personality traits and define each one. Then decide who you are not, a step HubSpot’s brand voice guide also recommends. “Confident, not arrogant” and “friendly, not goofy” give writers a boundary they can check a sentence against. Your own brand voice should be specific enough that a competitor couldn’t borrow it. A unique personality is what makes a memorable brand. Luxury brands often choose restraint and polish, while a gear brand like Fernbrook can use a warmer, more relatable voice. Both work when the traits are specific.
4. Build a brand voice chart
A brand voice chart, sometimes called a voice characteristic matrix, turns those traits into a table with four columns: the trait, what it means, do, and don’t. It’s often the most useful page in a guide because a writer can scan it in seconds before sending a message. Mapping each trait to real lines is what keeps the voice consistent, no matter who’s writing.
Notice that every “do” and “don’t” is a real sentence. Real lines teach the brand tone faster than adjectives, and they give reviewers something concrete to point to.
5. Set brand tone guidelines by situation
This part of the guide is sometimes called a tone variation guide. List the moments where your tone changes, such as product launches, onboarding emails, outage updates, refunds, and social media replies. For each, describe the appropriate tone in a line and add an example. Positive language fits launches and onboarding, while an outage update needs plain facts first. The same voice can be upbeat in a launch email and calm and direct in an apology; using the same tone for both would sound tone-deaf. Choosing the right tone for each moment is what keeps different tones from sounding like different brands.
Channels need small adjustments too. A LinkedIn post, a support email, and a chat reply can each take a slightly different tone while keeping the same identity. Mailchimp’s style guide, for example, has separate sections for email newsletters, social media, and legal content.
6. Add brand messaging, word lists, and before-and-after examples
Include the actual language you want people to use: preferred terms, banned words, product names with correct capitalization, and short rewrites that show a sentence before and after it was edited for voice. This is where you craft messaging that’s specific enough for anyone to copy. Lines that name the customer’s real problem carry more emotional resonance than slogans.
7. Decide where each part of your brand guidelines will live
This is the step most teams skip. The principles can stay in a shared voice document. The exact lines people repeat every day, like the tagline, boilerplate, product descriptions, and sign-offs, should live where people write. That’s what the next section covers.
Brand voice template
Copy this brand voice template into a doc to draft your first version, or save it as a Snippet so it’s ready whenever a new product line or client needs one:
;voiceguide
Brand voice guidelines: {Fill-in: brand name}
Who we are: {Fill-in: one-sentence positioning}
Core values: {Fill-in: three values}
Who we write for: {Fill-in: audience}
Voice characteristics
1. {Fill-in: trait}, not {Fill-in: opposite}. What it means: {Fill-in: one line}
2. {Fill-in: trait}, not {Fill-in: opposite}. What it means: {Fill-in: one line}
3. {Fill-in: trait}, not {Fill-in: opposite}. What it means: {Fill-in: one line}
Tone by situation
Launches: {Fill-in: tone}
Support replies: {Fill-in: tone}
Apologies: {Fill-in: tone}
Words we use: {Fill-in: list}
Words we avoid: {Fill-in: list}
Product names: {Fill-in: correct spelling and capitalization}
Example rewrite
Before: {Fill-in: off-brand line}
After: {Fill-in: on-brand line}
Once the guide is drafted, test it with a few people who write every day, like sales, support, and social media. If they can’t apply a rule to a real message, rewrite the rule until they can.
Turn your brand voice guidelines into Snippets
A Snippet is saved text you insert by typing a short abbreviation, like ;tagline. TextExpander expands it in any app where you type, including Gmail, Outlook, Slack, LinkedIn, Google Docs, your CRM, and your CMS. Shared Snippets turn the lines your guide approves into something people use without opening the guide, across content creation, customer interactions, and marketing campaigns.
Start with the lines that repeat most. This map shows where each part of a typical guide ends up:
The examples below use Fernbrook Outdoor, our fictional brand. Each one is a starting point you can customize with your own words.
1. Taglines, positioning, and boilerplate
Your tagline and company boilerplate should read the same in press releases, partner emails, and LinkedIn bios. Save one Snippet per approved version, including a short and a long boilerplate, so nobody trims or rewrites them on the fly.
;tagline
Fernbrook Outdoor. Gear for the long way around.
;boiler50
Fernbrook Outdoor makes durable, repairable gear for hikers and campers who would rather fix it than replace it. Every pack and shelter is designed to last a decade of weekends, and every one comes with free lifetime repairs.
Add a ;boiler100 version for press releases and partner pages that need more detail.
2. Product descriptions
Product descriptions drift fast when everyone writes their own. Save an approved short and long version of each, built from the copy on your website, and update them when the product changes. The short version suits chat and social media posts; the long version suits emails and proposals.
;prodshort
The Ridgeline 40 is a 40-liter pack that carries like a day pack and holds a weekend’s worth of gear.
3. Greetings and sign-offs with approved choices
Your guide might approve a few greetings and sign-offs, not just one. A Pop-up Menu Fill-in lets writers pick from the approved options, so they keep some personality without drifting off-brand.
;greet
{Pop-up menu: Hi / Hello / Hey there} {Fill-in: first name},
;thanks
{Pop-up menu: Thanks / Thanks so much / Talk soon},
{Fill-in: your name}
To build one, open a Snippet, choose Fill-ins > Pop-Up Menu from the editing bar, name the menu, and add each approved option. The Pop-up Menu Fill-in guide walks through it.
4. Email signatures with a nested marketing line
Email signatures are one of the easiest places to share a campaign message, and one of the hardest to keep current. Our own team’s fix is to put the marketing line in its own Snippet and nest it inside everyone’s signature.
Marketing owns ;promo, a one-line message about the current campaign. Each person’s ;sig Snippet includes it with the code %snippet:;promo%. When marketing updates ;promo, every signature expanded afterward uses the new line, and people who can only expand the group can’t change it.
;sig
Maya Torres
Customer Success, Fernbrook Outdoor
%snippet:;promo%
;promo
New this spring: our lightest pack yet. See it at fernbrook.example/ridgeline
The same pattern works anywhere a message repeats inside other messages: a current offer in support replies, a webinar invite in sales follow-ups, or a legal line in every quote.
5. Voice corrections for brand names and off-brand words
Correction Snippets catch voice slips as people type. Set the abbreviation to the common mistake and the content to the fix. At TextExpander, a shared group changes “Textexpander” to “TextExpander” automatically, so even a rushed message spells the name right.
The same approach can handle off-brand words in a narrow context. If your guide says sign-offs end with “Thanks,” a Snippet can change “Cheers,” to “Thanks,” as people close an email. Keep corrections to words that only appear in that one context, so the Snippet never changes a sentence it shouldn’t.
Set each correction Snippet to Case Sensitive in the Snippet editor so it fires only on the exact misspelling. Ignore Case would also trigger on other capitalizations. The case options are covered in TextExpander’s expansion settings.
6. Brand colors and reusable HTML
Brand voice is about words, but brand identity includes visual assets too. Save hex codes under a shared prefix, like co.blue and co.sand, so designers and developers type a name instead of hunting for a code. Use the same approach for the HTML blocks your email and web teams reuse, like buttons, headers, and footers.
Prefixes and groups also make the library easy to maintain as it grows. Chou Y., Product Content and Brand Marketing Manager at mabl, described why that matters:
TextExpander is super easy to set up and maintain. I can save my snippets to the cloud so I can have it across multiple devices, and being able to organize the types of snippets into different folders makes it easy for me to find the snippet I need to make updates to. I use TextExpander every day to save formulas, email templates, even code snippets, but I also use it ad-hoc for personal needs which is really convenient.
Chou Y., Product Content and Brand Marketing Manager, mabl
Most brand libraries start small. A tagline, two boilerplates, a few product descriptions, approved greetings, a signature, and a handful of corrections cover much of what people type every day.
Try four of them below to see how a shared format keeps every message on-brand, whoever writes it:
Share your brand voice with the team (or just yourself)
Shared Snippet Groups are where brand voice guidelines become a team habit. Create a group for each kind of approved copy, such as Brand basics, Product descriptions, and Corrections, and share it with the people who write for your brand.
Permissions decide who changes what. Group permissions come in three levels: Can expand lets someone use the Snippets, Can edit lets them create and change Snippets in the group, and Can manage adds control of access and settings. Most teams give marketing Can edit or Can manage on brand groups and give everyone else Can expand, so the approved lines stay approved.
Name an owner for each group. When the tagline, a product name, or the campaign message changes, the owner updates one Snippet and the change reaches everyone who uses it. A short review each quarter keeps old lines from piling up, and Snippet Activity shows which lines people actually use.
For small businesses
You don’t need a marketing department for this to pay off. A small business owner who writes every email, quote, and social post can save the same lines for themselves, then share the group when a helper or freelancer joins. The Free plan is free forever, so starting with five or ten Snippets costs nothing.
Tamaryn T., an agency owner in public relations, described what that looks like day to day:
I love that the templates follow you wherever you go. Meaning, they’re not app-specific. It integrates seamlessly with most of my apps. I love that you can have multiple types (from sales to single-line shortcuts for those hard-to-spell names). This really was a game-changer for productivity. Generally, customer support has been great when it’s been needed. I use TextExpander daily, probably hourly. It’s so easy to set up and use.
Tamaryn T., Agency Owner, Public Relations and Communications
If your team already keeps saved replies in several tools, our guide to managing saved replies across tools shows how to bring them into one shared library.
Keep AI drafts on-brand too
Many teams now use ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot for content creation. An AI assistant can only match your brand voice if the voice is in the prompt, and retyping it every time is where consistency slips. Save a short version of your voice guidelines as a Snippet, like ;brandvoice, and nest it at the top of any prompt.
;brandvoice
Write in Fernbrook Outdoor’s voice: friendly, expert, and outdoorsy. Use short sentences, active voice, and plain words. Avoid hype, exclamation points, and jargon. Spell product names exactly: Ridgeline 40, Basecamp Shelter.
Then review the draft against your guide before it goes out. For ready-made prompts, see our AI prompt templates for work, and for where people should check AI output, see human-in-the-loop AI workflows.
From guide to keyboard
Brand voice guidelines earn their keep when the words show up in the work. Write a short guide built on your core values, your audience, and a brand voice chart. Then move the lines people repeat into shared Snippets, with Fill-ins for what should change and an owner for each group. The next time your tagline or campaign message changes, you’ll update it once, and every email, reply, and post will use it from then on, wherever your brand communicates.
For more on how teams keep their wording aligned, read how TextExpander customers stopped sending five versions of the same answer.
Put your brand voice where your team types
Save your tagline, boilerplate, product descriptions, and sign-offs as shared Snippets. Fill-ins handle the details, and one update reaches everyone who writes for your brand.
Free forever, no credit card required.
Frequently asked questions
What should brand voice guidelines include?
Brand voice guidelines should include three or four voice characteristics with definitions, tone guidelines for common situations, words to use and avoid, product names and spelling, and before-and-after examples. Many guides also add a brand voice chart and writing choices like active voice and sentence length. Keep the first version to one or two pages.
What is a brand voice example?
Mailchimp is a well-known brand voice example. Its content style guide describes a voice that is plainspoken, genuine, and dryly funny, and explains how the tone shifts by situation. Atlassian's design system is another, with tone principles like "Inform to build trust" that tell writers what each moment needs.
What is the difference between brand voice and tone?
Brand voice is your brand's consistent personality, the way it always sounds. Tone is how that voice adapts to a situation or audience. Your voice stays the same in a launch email and an apology, but the tone shifts from upbeat in one to calm and direct in the other.
How do you determine your brand voice?
Start with your core values and positioning, then look at your target audience and your best-performing content. Choose three or four personality traits, define each with a "this, not that" pair, and test them on real messages. If writers can't apply a trait, make it more specific.
How can marketing teams keep brand voice consistent across everyone who writes copy?
A consistent brand voice depends on making the approved words easier to use than to rewrite. Keep the guide short, add it to onboarding, and save the lines people repeat, like taglines, boilerplate, and sign-offs, as shared Snippets in the apps they already use. Give each shared group an owner who keeps it current.
What's the best way to store and reuse approved brand messaging?
Store approved brand messaging in a shared Snippet library instead of a document or slide deck. With TextExpander, marketing can edit a group while everyone else can only expand it, and the same Snippets work in email, chat, social media tools, and your CMS. Updates reach everyone as soon as they sync.
How do small businesses keep messaging consistent?
Small businesses can keep messaging consistent with a small Snippet library for the lines that repeat, like the business description, service details, pricing language, greetings, and sign-offs. Start with the five to ten messages you send most, then share the group when you add staff or freelancers.
Can Snippets fix brand-name misspellings automatically?
Yes. Create a Snippet whose abbreviation is the common misspelling, like Textexpander, and whose content is the correct spelling. Set it to Case Sensitive so it only fires on that exact typo. A shared correction group fixes brand names for everyone on the team.
