Branding
Finding a brand voice that sounds like you, not a brochure.
If your website sounds like a corporate brochure and your captions sound like a different person entirely, you are not alone. Most small business owners write in a voice that isn't theirs because they think "professional" means stiff. Learning how to find your brand voice is really just learning to sound like yourself on purpose, consistently, everywhere a customer meets you.
Voice is one of those things that feels fluffy until you sit down to write a caption at 9pm and stare at the blinking cursor for twenty minutes. A clear voice fills that gap. It is less about clever lines and more about a set of decisions you make once, then lean on every time you write.
Voice stays the same, tone shifts
People muddle these two constantly, so let's pull them apart. Your voice is your personality on the page. It does not change — it is the same whether you are announcing a price rise or thanking a regular. Your tone is how that voice flexes to suit the moment.
Think of a good friend who is funny, warm and direct. That is their voice, and it holds up whether they are at a birthday or a funeral. But their tone at the funeral is gentler and slower. Same person. Different setting.
Voice is who you are. Tone is how you read the room.
Write the way you actually talk to a good customer
Here is the most useful shortcut for finding your voice: picture one real, lovely customer — the one you would happily have a coffee with. Now imagine explaining your service to them across a cafe table in Brunswick. You would not say "we leverage bespoke solutions to optimise outcomes." You would say something like "we sort out the messy bits so you can get back to the actual work."
That second sentence is your voice. It is already there in how you speak. The trick is to stop translating it into business-speak the moment your fingers hit the keyboard.
A simple exercise: record a voice memo of yourself describing what you do and why you care about it. Talk for two minutes with no script. Play it back and write down the phrases that sound like you. They go straight into the next thing you write.
Build a small word bank
You do not need a forty-page brand guideline. You need a short, honest word bank you will actually open. Make two columns: on one side, the words and phrases you genuinely use; on the other, the words you want to avoid because they sound like everyone else.
- Words we use: "sort out", "handy", "have a crack", "no fuss", "let's get into it", "honestly".
- Words we avoid: "synergy", "leverage", "world-class", "passionate", "game-changing", "reach out".
Yours will look nothing like this list, and that is the point. A tradie's word bank reads differently from a florist's, which reads differently from a bookkeeper's. The words you ban matter as much as the ones you keep, because they are usually the autopilot phrases that creep in when you are tired.
Open your last five captions and your homepage. Highlight every phrase that sounds like you and every one that sounds borrowed. That highlight pass is half your word bank already done.
The read-it-aloud test
This is the single most reliable check you have, and it costs nothing. Before anything goes live, read it out loud. Not in your head — actually out loud, ideally to the wall or the dog.
If you stumble, the sentence is too long or too tangled. If you feel a bit embarrassed by a phrase, it is probably not yours. If you would never say it to that customer at the cafe, cut it. Your ear catches things your eye skims straight past.
Pin down three or four voice traits
Settle your voice into three or four traits, each with a quick "do this, not that" so it is something you can act on rather than admire. Here is a worked example you can adapt:
- Warm, not gushing. Do: "Lovely to have you here, let's make a start." Don't: "We are SO thrilled and beyond excited to welcome you!!!"
- Plain, not dumbed down. Do: "This stops your site loading slowly." Don't: "This facilitates enhanced performance optimisation."
- Confident, not boastful. Do: "We know websites, and we will steer you right." Don't: "We are the number one award-winning industry leaders."
- Lightly dry, not jokey. Do: "Yes, there's a form. We'll keep it short." Don't: "BUCKLE UP because this form is about to BLOW YOUR MIND."
Three or four is the sweet spot. Fewer and the voice is thin. More and you will never remember them, which means you will never use them. The "don't" examples do a lot of the work here, because they show your team and your future self exactly where the line sits.
Once your voice and your colours and fonts agree with each other, the whole brand starts to feel like one thing rather than three. If you are sorting the visual side too, our notes on choosing brand colours and fonts pair neatly with this.
Keeping it consistent across all your channels
A voice only earns its keep when it shows up everywhere. The most common slip is sounding polished on the website and oddly casual in a caption, or strangely formal in an email. Same business, three strangers.
Consistency does not mean every channel sounds identical. A caption can be looser and shorter than a homepage. But the personality, the word bank and the traits should carry across all of them. A reader should be able to cover the logo and still know it is you. Good website copy that converts starts with a voice the rest of your channels can follow.
A defined voice also speeds up writing. Most of the time you spend "writing" is really you deciding who to be on the page. Settle that once and those decisions disappear — a caption goes from a twenty-minute agonise to a two-minute draft.
Finding your voice is not a one-off project. It is a few small decisions you keep close and reuse. Start with the voice memo, build the word bank, and run the read-it-aloud test on your next post. If you would like a hand pinning it all down and getting it consistent across everything, book a relaxed strategy session and we will work it out together.
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