A Brand Voice That Changes With Whoever Posts

One business, three voices

The website was written by the owner when the business opened: careful, formal, committed to providing a safe and enjoyable experience for guests of all ages.

The Facebook page is run by whoever on staff enjoys it, in capitals, exclamation marks and in-jokes. The newsletter comes from the manager and reads like the waiver.

A customer who meets all three in a week could be forgiven for wondering whether they are dealing with the same business.

Where the voice splits

• The website, written once, often years ago, by the owner.
• Facebook and Instagram, written daily by whoever has a minute.
• The newsletter, written monthly by a manager on a deadline.
• Message replies, from whoever is on shift.
• Signs and printed rules around the premises.
• The voicemail greeting, recorded once and forgotten.

The fourth is the one customers notice most. Ask the same question on two different days, get a cheerful paragraph one time and a single word the next, and the business seems to change its mind.

Why it matters more than style

Voice is how a customer judges a business they have not met. A parent booking a child's party wants to feel it will be fun and that someone careful is in charge.

Mixed voices make a business look disorganised. Worse, the voices tend to carry different facts: one says socks are included, another says they are four dollars.

A voice guide fixes the tone and, almost by accident, the facts.

What a voice guide contains

One page, not a brand book. Most of it fits under three headings.

First, four words describing how the business sounds, each with an example of what that looks like and what it does not: friendly, not silly; clear, not curt.

Second, words to use and words to avoid: the phrases that sound like the business, and the ones that never should, such as cheap or no worries.

Third, how to write the details that recur: prices, times, ages and dates, so the same fact looks the same everywhere.

Standard answers to common questions

The most useful part of the guide is a short set of answers to the questions the business hears every week, written once, in the house voice.

Whoever is replying can adapt them rather than invent a new answer each time. A new staff member sounds like the business from their first shift.

Keep them short enough to paste into a message, and change them the moment a price or rule changes.

Call things by one name

Inconsistent names cause more confusion than inconsistent tone. If the website sells an open jump, Facebook advertises jump time and the till prints Jump Pass, customers ask whether those are three different things.

Pick one name for every session, package and product, and use it on the website, in posts, on signs, in the booking system and on receipts.

Customers then ask for things by name, and staff know exactly what they mean.

A worked example

A trampoline park in a converted warehouse had a website written by its owner in the language of a safety brochure, and a Facebook page run by two front desk staff who loved puns.

The monthly email came from the general manager, mostly rules in long paragraphs. Nobody had ever read the three side by side.

Then a parent asked on Messenger whether toddlers could jump during open sessions. One shift replied yes, of course. The website said under-fives only in the toddler hour on weekday mornings.

The owner, the manager and both staff wrote a one-page guide in an afternoon: four voice words, a word list, and answers to the twelve most common questions.

The website's home page was rewritten first, in the warmer voice of the Facebook page at its best, with the rules stated just as plainly as before.

Whose voice should win

Not necessarily the owner's original one. The voice that suits customers is often closer to how the best front desk staff talk than to the formal website.

The guide describes the business at its best on a good day, and asks everyone to write like that. That usually means warmer than the website and calmer than the Facebook page.

The small details carry it

Much of a voice lives in small, repeatable choices: whether messages are signed with a name, how prices are written, whether the business says we or the park.

Settle each once and write it down. Consistent small details make different writers sound like one business even before their tone matches.

A quick test before posting

The four voice words work as a test. Before a post or reply goes out, the writer reads it once and asks whether it sounds like each of them.

Anything that would embarrass the business if read aloud at the front desk gets rewritten. That one rule catches most sarcasm, most jargon and most replies sent in a hurry.

Making it stick

Put the guide where people write: printed beside the front desk computer, saved in the shared folder, and handed to new staff with the keys.

Give it to everyone outside the business who writes for it too, from the web company to whoever designs the next poster.

Read a few recent posts and replies against it once a month. Drift is gradual, and a monthly glance catches it early.

The counter-case

An owner who writes everything personally already has one voice, and a written guide matters less until a second person starts writing.

Some variation is healthy, too. A Facebook post can be lighter than the terms of a booking, as long as both sound like the same business.

But once three people are writing, one page that says how the business sounds is the cheapest consistency there is.

Writing the guide

1. Collect one recent example from each channel.
2. Read them aloud side by side.
3. Choose four words for how you sound.
4. List the words to use and avoid.
5. Write standard answers to common questions.
6. Give the page to everyone who writes.
7. Rewrite the oldest page on the website first.

Step two does the persuading. Read side by side, out loud, the three voices are obvious to everyone in the room, and the case for a guide makes itself.

Everyone writing on the page should also hold a proper role on it, as covered in a Facebook page only one person can manage.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.