56: Expand Your Reach & Impact: How to Develop a Brand Voice Guide

As you get maybe 8 or 10 or 25 people or, you know, 100 people in your company or your business, then it's really important that there's consistency across all the different communication channels that are going out.

I'm Bonnie Christine and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. But when I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer.

Fast forward to today.

I I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life

and experience the same success.

I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly proud, profitable.

Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast. I remember when I was a one woman show this feeling of not being able to get any help in my business because I very much cared about everything that went out. Every email, every comment, every reply. However, at the same time, I was finding myself spending, I would say, a full three out of my five work days a week doing nothing but responding to, you know, requests, emails and comments and questions and things like that. And I felt really stuck because for me, my voice is my brand, it is all the same thing. And I care so very deeply about every word that is expressed from my brand. And so I very much thought that part of my success had to do with the fact that I was the one personally responding to every single email, every single comment, every single question until I reached a point to where I very much could not keep up anymore. And I finally realized that I could either spend all of my time responding to the people that I had, or I could get help in responding to everything that was happening and be able to create what I wanted to create that would reach more people and make a bigger impact. And so one of the key things that made this possible was, was our voice guide. And so I'm going to take you through our entire voice guide today and explain to you what it is, what's inside of it, and how to create your own. In fact, the free download for today's episode, I'm really, really thrilled to give you, it is a workbook style version of this voice guide that will draw you into Answering all of the right questions and filling it out to where you will walk away with your own voice guide as well. So let's just start with what is a voice guide? A voice guide is pretty much the same exact thing as a brand guide, except it's for your voice. And so a brand guide you can imagine would be your fonts, your typography, the colors that you use, your logo, any patterns that you have, do's and don'ts. From a very visual standpoint, well, your voice guide is something to where someone can come into your business and reflect your voice. And so it's things that you say, things that you don't say, ways that you address different things. And so we're going to go through all of that. But first, I feel like I want to make sure that you understand that this voice guide is not so that someone can come in and pretend to be you. Right? Everyone is themselves, but. But they are reflective of your brand voice. And so no one's coming in and, and taking on my brand voice and signing it Bonnie if it's not me, right? So I always like everyone to know. If it's signed by me, it means that I am the one who actually wrote it. And then everyone on the team uses their name as well. But we have these guidelines so that we're unified in our voice and so that they can come and speak. Speak almost on behalf of me in the same way that I would, even though it's signed by their name. So this voice guide is. Was one of the most impactful ways that I could feel comfortable handing over my inbox to someone else, handing over students who have questions to a team of experts because they've got my voice guide in hand and they know how would Bonnie respond to this, right? They know they have it in their hand and then we can all move forward. And I can feel really good about getting help in my business. So the overall purpose of having a voice guide in your business is not only so that you can get help, but it's really there to ensure that your brand is consistent across all communication channels. You can imagine as you get one person in your business working alongside of you, maybe you communicate enough to where you know it's all pretty consistent. But as you get maybe 8 or 10 or 25 people or, you know, 100 people in your company or your business, then it's really important that there's consistency across all the different communication channels that are going out. It also really helps set expectations and guidelines for team members. I think that team Members really want to know. They really want to have a guide and a reference to fall back on when they're not serving, certain about how to move forward. And so this just gives them an easy guide to fall back on for any of those questions. And then the flip side to that is that it also creates a really unified experience for your customers or clients or students or anyone who you are serving. And so no matter if you come in my business and you talk to me or Ashley on my customer service team, or Nikita in program management, you're going to have a unified experience because we all come from the same understanding. Now, one thing that I want to just open your eyes to is that you're going to likely feel that you have to really sit down and think about this. But I want to encourage you to use what you've already been doing. You already have a brand voice. So take some examples of what you're doing already. Emails that you're proud of that go out, Instagram captions that are reflective of the way that you want your brand to speak about, Facebook posts or anything like that, lessons or posts or any public communication that you have going out, just take a snapshot of it and you can use that as a starting off point. So the first thing that you need to do is really work to just define your brand voice. I'm gonna guess that the majority of you listening to this are your brand, meaning you and your brand are, you know, the same thing. You can't be separated. And if you have a product where you're not really a part of it, I would encourage you to build your personal brand. I think that showing up and really leaning into your personality through your brand is one of the best ways to differentiate you between anyone else who does anything. In fact, I think now it's more important than ever to build your personal brand, especially as we have, you know, AI on the rise. And then I would also say that this is one of the things that really helps me overcome fear of people copying me. Because even if you copy my work, right, you can't copy my brand personality because I am so infused with it. And so I want to encourage you to build your personal brand. And your personal brand is you. You have a voice, you have a way that you like to respond to people and interact with people. So in the workbook for today's download, you'll have some exercises that help you identify your brand's, like, personality traits. In fact, we have a menu of words that you can go in and kind of search circle the Ones that you identify with. So something like friendly or professional or funny or inspirational. So when it comes down to actually creating your voice guide, this is where we're headed. The key components are going to be a brand overview, your brand personality, your audience, your actual voice, your tone, your language and vocabulary, grammar and formatting, and then some visuals. And so we're going to break that down and go through each of them one by one. So first and foremost is your brand overview. This is really your company mission statement, your company values, and a short summary of what your brand does and who it serves. So this doesn't have to be too long or too difficult. I think it's just a really nice way to put it into a format to where you always have it to rely back on. And so if you want an example, I'll read you our mission. We are an education company for creatives. We help aspiring creative entrepreneurs become professionals so that they can experience time, location and financial freedom doing something that they love. Right. So it's pretty simple, you don't have to overthink it, but it does need to really wrap up what you do and what is your statement. And then values is really important. We have 10 company values and we reference them all the time when different things come up. So ours are being heart driven, having a focus on sharing our secrets, defaulting to generosity, believing that creative success is our success, always putting people first, first, building an intentional margin in our lives and our business, having extreme ownership over what we do, believing that simple is better, promoting collective entrepreneurship and always having integrity. So that is an example of our 10 core values. And then I like to do just a short summary of what it is that you do and who you serve. We don't do a deep dive into audience just yet. But this is just an overview. If someone is coming into your business for the first time, can they understand what it is that you do? So maybe you outline the programs that you have or the products that you offer or things that you sell, how do you make up your business and who are each of those for? So again, that is just a brand overview. Now your brand personality is where it starts to get fun. These are key personality traits that really characterize your brand. And it's really important to say what your brand is and and isn't. And so maybe it's friendly, fun and a little bit childish. Maybe it's professional and inspirational and not childish. Right. And so kind of putting this into words. Again, we've got this download that walks you through all of this to create Your own voice guide, and you'll have a menu to choose from, which I think will be helpful. And then under brand personality, you're also going to want to outline any common themes or models that you reference frequently. And so, for instance, if you've been listening to this podcast for any amount of time, you know that I say certain things over and over again. And so a couple of my models are one thing a day, right? Doing one thing a day towards your goal, having 10 seconds of courage. We reference the weeds and seeds in our business often. We always say there is room for you. And we also always talk about flourishing and being a flourishing artist. And so you likely have little things that you say all the time that's part of your story. And if so, make sure that they go into your voice guide. The next part to your voice guide is an understanding of your audience. I very much like to include a pretty detailed description of who our target audience is, who our ideal customers are. And we have a couple of different target audiences based on what we're talking about. For instance, our audience for this podcast is a little bit different than the audience for my course, the Surface Design Immersion course. Now, there's definitely overlap, but the actual target is just a little bit different. And so if you want to write out your different audiences and think about things like what do they value and what motivates them them and how do they communicate. So we're getting into a little bit of ideal client work here. But again, the worksheet will pull you through some questions to really help you get an understanding of who your audience is.

Okay, picture this. Have you ever spent hours scouring through your video or maybe your podcast content trying to find that one place that you said that one thing? Or if you've forgotten or never found it and you had to re record everything. I've been there. And it's so frustrating and honestly, a huge waste of time. But it hasn't happened to me ever since I started using Searchie. Searchie is the software that I use for all of my videos and all of my podcast content because it not only transcribes it, but it makes it searchable by key word. And so for you to see this in action, I have an example set up for you over on bonniecristine.com resources. Again, that's bonniecristine.com Resources. And you can actually play with Searchie and see how it looks on one of our videos, because once you understand what it does, it's a game changer. I also host all of my workshop and my class, my membership and course material through Searchie as well. So students can search for any question that have and go to the exact time and place where I talked about that one thing. And just imagine this. If I ever do a Q and A and they want to know if I answered their question, all they have to do is search for their name and see if I did or not. It's literally like having your very own personal search engine for your content. So no more wasting time scrubbing through your video or audio to find that one golden nugget. With Searchie, you can easily find what you're looking for in seconds. Just type in a keyword or phrase and Searchie will pull up all the relevant content. It's a game changer for anyone who creates audio or video content. But honestly, that's not all. Searchie's new AI powered transcription and captioning tool makes it easy to create accessible content that everyone can get access to. And with their customizable platform player, you can embed your videos and your podcasts on your website or social media channels in a way that looks and feels so professional. So if you are ready to take your video or your podcast content to the next level, head over to bonniecristine.com forward/resources and just give Searchie a try. It's incredible. I think you're going to love it and I can't wait to see how it revolutionizes the way you create content.

Next up is your brand voice. And so this is a detailed description of your brand voice based on your brand personality and your audience understanding. And so here I just like to put examples of what your brand voice sounds like in action. Just take screenshots of some of your most brand reflective Instagram posts or some of your favorite emails that you've sent out. And don't forget just some of your typical email responses, right? And so take those and put them literally screenshots or copy and paste them into this document so that someone coming into your business for the first time could have some real life examples of how you have responded to different situations and comments. Now the other thing that I love to do here is if you have been playing with ChatGPT in your business, right? If you haven't, then I encourage you to dive on in because it's super fun. One of the ways that I have loved to use Chat GPT is in a reflective way. So for instance, I took one of the longer form pieces of content that I've written that I love that I really feel like is super reflective of me and my mission and my brand and my voice. I copied the entire thing into Chat GPT and I said, can you tell me what my speaking style is? Right? And so immediately it took all of this information that I had compiled that I had written very organically and communicated back to me my own communication style. And so that would be a great thing to put in your voice guide. But here's the trick. Moving forward, anytime you use Chat GPT, you can copy and paste that in as well. So you can say my speaking style is and paste whatever it is that it told you it was. And then moving forward, it will be really reflective of your voice anytime you use Chat GPT. So that's just a little trick that I've been using recently. Now we're moving on to language and vocabulary. And so this first and foremost are things like words that your brand uses and words that they don't use. So we have a pretty strict G rated policy for my brand. And one of the reasons for this is because we invite parents to go through our course with their children. So I think the youngest person we've had come through the immersion course was nine years old. And then I also know that many of you are likely listening to this podcast with children around you or maybe in the car while you drive. So my commitment to you is that you can know with certainty that you can listen to anything that I put out in the world with children around and not worry about them hearing something that you wouldn't want them to hear. So we have a G rated policy in all of our communities and in our communication, then we also have words that we use and kind of words that we don't use. So for instance, we don't use words that are considered to be shrinkers, such as just actually or almost typically in our email responses, we also don't end an email with something like does that make sense? Or am I making sense? Or do you know what I mean? Because that implies we didn't do a good job in explaining it. So instead of that, we say something like let me know if you have any questions or. Or we look forward to hearing your thoughts. We're also really aware of using phrases like a little bit or just a minute or just a sec because that suggests that what we have to say isn't worth taking up the time and space. And so we don't want to give away our power. However, we are kind and thoughtful in all of our responses. So you'll have to just think about Your own communication. How do you handle certain types of situations in your customer service and in your email? For instance, we are always honest in our communication. For instance, no one will say on the team that they've spoken with me about something unless they actually have. And so because integrity is one of our core values, we always have it in all of our communication as well. Something else that you'll want to think about is any industry specific terminology or jargon that you need to use or that you need to avoid. And this is important when you bring on people to help in your customer service. Maybe they're a little bit more advanced and they've got to be careful about the way that they communicate with people who are potentially brand new to the industry. Another example of this is that we have all of these terms that we use internally. For instance, we use ConvertKit for our email service provider and we use Kajabi for our membership and course hub. And so there was this time where some of our customer service people were using that communication, like, oh, your credit card didn't go through in stripe, so we're checking Kajabi to make sure that it's going through and you know, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm like, oh, the customer just doesn't understand or even need to know that back end, behind the scenes terminology. They need to just know what's relevant to them because they're not going to understand what kajabi and stripe and all of that is and they don't need to. So those are the types of things that you want to be specific about in your brand voice guide. Something that we also put here is our sentence case. And so you likely have had to think about this sometimes as well. Like if you're writing an email, well, do you capitalize the first letter of every single word? Or do you use sentence case? Or do you use title case? And then maybe for a podcast, we had to do this recently. How are we going to put this out? Are we going to use sentence case? Title case, capitalize first one of everything. So we just kind of decided what we're going to do and then put, put it in the voice guide so that everyone can remain consistent no matter how we are putting out information. The next one is grammar and formatting. So any grammar rules that you follow or intentionally break. When I was just starting out in the blogging days, I didn't capitalize anything. I wrote everything intentionally in lowercase, which today I find to be so annoying. But I did it for years and I thought that it was something that really made my brand, you know, unique. So do you follow certain grammar rules or do you break any ones in particular? Make sure to put that in the voice guide. This is a great one. What emojis do you use and which ones do you not use? And so there are some that we don't use and there are some that we most typically use. And this goes all the way down to like, what color emojis do we use? When we give a thumbs up or high five, we typically always use the yellow emoji just so that we are relevant no matter who is speaking to who. We have this unified presence. You also want to have a section in here about how your brand uses punctuation or capitalization or abbreviations. In my world, perhaps we abbreviate Adobe Illustrator as AI, but that's getting a little confusing now because artificial intelligence is such a hot topic as well. So we're kind of going back to using Adobe Illustrator. The other one that I think is important is to talk about exclamation points. We do always want to have a tone of happiness and joy, but I think that we can kind of get out of hand with the exclamation points. And so we have in our brand voice guide to try to keep exclamation points to one or two per email. It's so easy to go overboard with these. And so after writing a response, we typically go back and take some out because we only want to have one or two in an entire email. And then the last one to pay attention to for grammar and formatting is how you format lists and bullet points and headings. And so you may have a particular way that you do this. If so, put it in your voice guide. Maybe you always use a particular bullet point, or maybe you never use bullet points, or maybe you number your, your points. Maybe you always bold the, you know, first sentence of a paragraph or something like that. And so if you have a way that you always do something, this is the place to put it. Now, the final part to your voice guide is visual style, because your visuals will carry out your brand voice as well. This is not to be confused with your brand visual guide. This is more so like the visuals that are a part of your voice. So images, GIFs or GIFs, videos or other visual content in your brand communication. So we love to respond to emails with GIFs. I know maybe you say gifs, it doesn't matter. And so we have kind of this list of approved GIFs for using as we respond to different emails like high fives and, you know, funny things to brighten someone's day. But this might be a good example of a place where you really want to personally approve anything like that that goes out until you get to an understanding of what typically you approve and typically you don't approve because again, at the end of the day, when someone is really coming in and speaking on behalf of your brand, you are likely going to want to really kind of have some control over that until all of these guidelines are established. So that's everything that goes into your voice guide. We have about 15 pages for four hours, and the last several pages are examples of emails that we get on a regular basis and how we would respond to that email, which has been a game changer for people on our customer service team. I also have to get a huge shout out to my girl, Tessie Faye Snow, who really formatted this guide for me. She was the first person who came into my business and I felt like really took the time to understand how we communicated and that was huge. And so she really took everything that we did and formulated our first edition of the voice guide, which we will use for years and years to come. So once you have your voice guide, a couple of things that you might want to keep in mind are adapting it for different platforms. For instance, I tend to be a bit more casual on Instagram and a little bit more professional in my emails. It may be the opposite for you, or you may always have the same voice, no matter what the platform is. But if you do change your voice a little bit from platform to platform, you might want to consider adding that to your voice guide. So now once you have it, it's just time to implement it. I think that sometimes it's easy to create these things and then just set them to the side, but once you have it, you have to use it. You'll want to train your team members on it. You'll want to keep it easily referenceable. So we have ours linked in our weekly Momentum meeting, which you can hear more about in a previous episode. And then we also want to regularly review it and update it because our voice will change and evolve over time. And so you want your voice guide to be fairly easy to, to, you know, edit, update and add new things to. Again, I cannot tell you what this opened up for me and my business. We love our voice guide so much and I'm so excited for you to dive into creating your own. So I know we covered so much today from how to create a voice guide and understand what it is to to a deep dive into each component and finally to implementing it in your creative business. Your brand's voice is more than just words. It's truly the heartbeat of your brand and the essence that truly connects with your audience and sets you apart. Just remember, as you step forward in this exciting adventure, your brand's voice guide is not something etched in stone. It's living, breathing and it should evolve with you and your brand. It grows with your business. It shapes itself around your progress and your journey and that is a beautiful thing. I can't wait to see how this shapes your business and the relationships with your customers and opens up new doors for you to find help in your business. Don't forget to download the Brand Voice worksheet to get started. That is over on the show notes for Today's episode@PropriationalCreative.com in the next episode, we are going to continue to explore all the strategies and tools that will help you and your creative business flourish. Until then, remember, create the beauty that you want to see come alive in the world. And remember, there's room for you. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.