How to Write Brand Voice Guidelines (With a Template)
Brand voice guidelines are the documented rules that define how your brand sounds in writing: its personality, vocabulary, sentence style, and the specific words it does and doesn't use. They turn an intuitive "we just know when it sounds like us" into something a new hire, a freelancer, or an AI tool can apply on the first try.
Think of them as the operating manual for your brand's personality: a working reference that goes deeper than a mood board or three adjectives on a slide, and tells anyone writing for you exactly what "on-brand" means and how to hit it.
Why a documented guide matters
Most teams carry their voice around in one or two people's heads. That works until you hire a second marketer, brief an agency, or ask a tool to draft copy. The moment more than one person writes for your brand, an undocumented voice fractures into several.
A written guide does real commercial work:
- It keeps you consistent. Consistency is what makes a brand recognizable, and recognition is what builds trust. A guide is how five writers produce one voice instead of five. (We go deeper on this in keeping a consistent brand voice across channels.)
- It speeds everyone up. Writers stop relitigating "does this sound like us?" on every draft. The answer is on the page.
- It survives turnover. When the person who "owns the voice" leaves, the voice doesn't leave with them.
- It makes AI usable. A generic model defaults to the average of the internet. Feed it your guidelines and it has something specific to aim at.
The cost of skipping this is quiet but real: your Instagram sounds witty, your emails sound corporate, your product pages read like a spec sheet, and customers experience three different brands instead of one.
What to include
A guide that nobody can act on is decoration. These are the sections that make it operational. (If you're still nailing down the voice itself first, start with how to define your brand voice.)
Audience
Open by naming who you're writing to. Voice is relative: "plainspoken and direct" means something different to a CFO than to a teenager. A sentence or two on your primary reader, what they care about, and how they talk anchors every decision that follows.
Personality traits
Describe your brand as a person: three or four traits, each with a one-line gloss on what it means in practice. Skip "authentic" floating alone; write "Direct: we make clear claims and skip the hedging." Traits without a definition are adjectives; traits with a definition become rules.
Do / don't word choices
This is the section writers actually use day to day. A simple table of the phrasings you reach for versus the ones you avoid removes more ambiguity than a page of prose:
| We say | We don't say |
|---|---|
| Get started in minutes | Leverage our cutting-edge platform |
| You'll | One will / the user will |
| We built this because | We are excited to announce |
| Here's the catch | Please be advised |
| Talk to a human | Contact our customer success team |
Signature and banned vocabulary
List the words and phrases that are distinctly yours: the terms you want repeated until they're associated with you. Then list the ones that are off-limits: industry jargon, clichés, competitor language, anything that breaks the spell. A clear banned list is one of the easiest things to enforce and one of the highest-leverage.
Tone by channel
Your voice stays constant; your tone flexes with context. (Worth getting the distinction straight; see brand voice vs. tone of voice.) Spell out how the same personality adjusts across surfaces: punchy and playful on social, calm and reassuring in support replies, confident and benefit-led on the landing page. A quick per-channel note on length, formality, and emoji use prevents the most common drift.
Real before / after examples
Rules tell; examples show. For each major content type, include a weak draft and an on-brand rewrite, with a line on what changed and why. These examples teach faster than any rule, and they're what people copy from when they're stuck. A few worked brand voice examples make the whole guide click.
How to write them, step by step
A solid first version takes an afternoon rather than a six-week agency engagement.
- Gather your best copy. Pull 10-15 pieces of writing that felt unmistakably you: a launch email that landed, a page that converted, posts people quoted back. This is more honest than any aspirational adjective.
- Find the patterns. Read them out loud. Mark the recurring phrases, the sentence lengths, the level of formality, the jokes you let yourself make. Your voice is already in there; you're naming it.
- Name the personality. Distill the patterns into three or four traits, each with its practical definition.
- Translate traits into rules. Turn every trait into concrete guidance plus a "we say / we don't say" pairing. "Friendly" becomes "use contractions, address the reader as you, never open with 'We are pleased to.'"
- Build the vocabulary lists. Write your signature terms and your banned list.
- Map tone to channels. One short block per channel covering format, length, and formality.
- Add before/after examples. At least one per content type you publish regularly.
If you'd rather not start from a blank page, the free brand voice guidelines template walks you through each of these sections interactively and outputs a finished document, with nothing to install and no credit card required. There's also a tone of voice generator if you want a fast first draft of the personality before you formalize it.
How to keep them actually used
The graveyard of branding is full of beautiful guidelines nobody opens. A guide only works if it's the path of least resistance. To get there:
- Keep it short and scannable. One page that gets read beats twenty that get bookmarked and forgotten. Lead with the tables and examples, the parts people reference under deadline.
- Put it where the work happens. Link it in your content briefs, your CMS, your onboarding doc. If a writer has to go hunting, they won't.
- Make it a checklist. "Did you use a signature term? Avoid the banned list? Match the channel tone?" is easier to apply than three paragraphs of philosophy.
- Treat it as living. Revisit quarterly. When you write something great that the guide didn't predict, add it. When a rule keeps getting broken because it's wrong, fix the rule.
- Build it into review. The fastest way to make a guide stick is to grade every draft against it.
That last point is where most teams hit a wall. Manual review doesn't scale. One editor can't read every email, post, and product update against a checklist, and the moment volume climbs, the guide gets skipped.
How to enforce them at scale with AI
This is the part guidelines historically couldn't solve. A document is passive: it waits to be read and trusts everyone to comply. At any real publishing volume, that trust breaks down.
This is the problem My Brand Voice is built for. Instead of a static doc, your guidelines become live rules the AI writes by:
- Voice DNA learns your tone, vocabulary, and sentence style straight from the best copy you already have, so generations sound like you rather than a generic model.
- A Brand Score grades every generation 0-100 on how on-brand it is, turning "does this sound like us?" into a number you can see before anything ships.
- Per-channel tone and format rules apply your guidelines automatically, so the same brand reads right whether it's a tweet, a support reply, or a landing page.
- Banned-words enforcement catches the off-limits terms every time, instead of relying on a human to remember the list.
The guidelines move out of a document people forget and into the tool that writes the copy, where they get applied on every draft at whatever volume you publish.
Start with the template
Strong brand voice guidelines are infrastructure: they keep your brand recognizable as you grow, hire, and lean on AI. Write them once, keep them short, and put them where the work happens.
The fastest start is the free brand voice guidelines template: fill in each section and walk away with a finished guide. When you're ready to enforce it on every piece of copy automatically, My Brand Voice trains an AI copywriter on your voice and grades every generation against your rules, free for 7 days with no credit card. See the plans.