So, I got into a conversation recently with a copywriter who said they weren’t sure whether they wanted to ‘get into’ tone of voice work. This was interesting for me, because usually if I’m ‘making the case’ for tone of voice, it’s to brands, not copywriters. This, in a nutshell, was what I said. (Except of course it was a bit more rambling, and I didn’t use subheads in speech. Although that could totally be a thing, couldn’t it. Like ‘air quotes’. There could be a little hand signal for ‘THIS BIT IN BOLD’ maybe? But I digress.
Being a practitioner of tone of voice – by which I mean not just being a writer who can flex your writing instinctively to write in different voices, but being a writer who can help other people think about and create distinctive voices – is great for you and your copywriting business for five big reasons:
Tone of voice skills are more strategic
OK, so ‘strategic’ is one of those vague words that sometimes just means ‘fancier’. Specifically I mean that talking about brand tone of voice is a bigger picture conversation. It’s something that needs to happen before getting stuck into any writing, and is independent of specific channels (web, social, packaging, whatever.)
(If you want a particularly fancy way to say this to clients, say: ‘your tone of voice is how your strategy shows up in every sentence’. Mic drop.
Which tends to mean talking to more senior (‘strategic’) people
The people who are thinking about and commissioning tone of voice projects are usually the bosses (or bosses bosses) of the people bringing in copywriters for one-off projects.
Which usually means higher copywriting fees
You’re giving people something that delivers value over and over, not just once. You know the phrase ‘give a man a paragraph of copy about a fish, and he’ll read it for a day, but teach a man to write in the tone of voice of a fish and he’ll create his own fish-based content forever’? That.
It makes the writing bit go smoother
The process of creating a tone of voice helps everyone discuss and agree all sorts of things (not just tone) that means any subsequent copywriting projects have much greater, ahem, stakeholder alignment, right from the off. This vastly reduces the chances of those ‘brief changes halfway through’ or ‘sign-off hell’ type of jobs.
It broadens your creative chops
So those first three things were about status and money. Which is not unimportant. But it’s not everything. One of the reasons I love working with tone of voice is that it regularly stretches me creatively. I can’t just think ‘how would I write this?’. I can’t even think ‘what’s a different way of saying this?’ – I have to actively create several different voices, each good in their own way, but different. This sharpens your creative attention, broadens your sense of where you might find inspiration, and keeps you on your creative toes.
You get out and meet people!
OK for some people this is a reason not to do it. I get it. I have a strong introverted streak, and I like sitting in my studio, alone. But running tone of voice workshops gets you into client’s offices, involved in their culture, and creatively interacting with other humans. This is good for your soul.
Which also widens your network!
I have found that running tone of voice workshops is the single best way to meet potential new clients within organisations. And it doesn’t involve you ‘selling yourself’. You just do your thing.
Voicebox can help you with the scary parts
So, the copywriter I mentioned at the start of this blog eventually admitted to me that they did like the idea of tone of voice work – it was just that they felt overwhelmed by how to go about it: how to manage the process, how to guide the client through exploring and deciding on a brand voice.
The good news is – Voicebox can help you with all of that. It contains the processes and frameworks, games and examples you need to successfully run a whole tone of voice project, from initially ‘strategic meeting’, to creative workshops, to producing guidelines and even rolling out a tone of voice programme.
This means you’ve got a proven approach (Voicebox is used by over 150 users, from freelancers and copywriters to global agencies – all over the world), which you can use as much or little of as you want, leaving you free to do what you’re best at: being the expert in voice and writing.