Ask most business owners about their tone of voice and you’ll get one of two responses. Either a confident answer that doesn’t quite match what’s on their website, or a slightly sheepish ‘I’ve never really thought about it.’

Both are fine, by the way. Most businesses haven’t thought about it consciously. They’ve written their website, posted on LinkedIn, sent their emails, and somewhere along the way developed a voice by accident rather than by design. Sometimes that works out. Quite often it doesn’t, and the content ends up sounding like a slightly different person every time.

The good news is that your tone of voice already exists. You just need to find it, write it down, and start using it on purpose. Here’s how.

Start with the feeling, not the words

Before you think about how your brand sounds, think about how you want people to feel when they read your content. This is the bit most people skip, and it’s actually the most important.

Do you want someone to feel reassured? Like they’ve found the right person at last and everything is going to be fine? Or do you want them to feel energised, ready to get going, a bit fired up? Maybe you want them to feel understood – like you genuinely get the problem they’re sitting with.

Pick one. Possibly two. Your tone of voice is the vehicle that creates that feeling, so you need to know where you’re headed before you start driving.

Rule out what you’re definitely not

Sometimes it’s easier to work backwards. Rather than trying to describe your ideal voice from scratch, start by crossing things off the list.

Are you definitely not the formal, buttoned-up type? Good. Cross that off. Would corporate buzzwords feel completely wrong coming from your brand? Also useful. Would overly casual slang feel a bit try-hard? Worth knowing.

By the time you’ve ruled out everything that makes you wince, what’s left is usually a pretty accurate picture of who you actually are. It sounds simple, but it works remarkably well.

Listen to yourself talking

Here’s something I’ve noticed after years of working with small businesses: the way people explain their work to someone they know is almost always better than what ends up on their website.

Next time you’re explaining what you do to a friend, a family member, or someone you’ve just met at an event – pay attention. What words do you use? What phrases keep coming up? How long are your sentences? Do you use analogies? Are you quite direct, or do you build up to the point?

That’s your voice. The one you’ve been leaving at the door every time you sit down to write something for your business.

Do the read-aloud test

This is my favourite exercise, and I recommend it to every client I work with. Print out your homepage. Sit somewhere quiet. Read it out loud, as if you’re saying it to a real person.

If it sounds natural – like something you’d actually say – you’re in good shape. If you find yourself stumbling over the sentences, if it sounds stiff or overly formal, or if you get to the end and think ‘I would never actually say any of that,’ then you’ve got your answer.

The gap between how you speak and how your website reads is roughly the size of the problem. And the fix is usually less complicated than people expect.

Write it down before you forget it

Once you’ve got a feel for your voice, write it down. Not a forty-page brand guidelines document. Just a page. Two or three words that describe how your brand sounds, a couple of sentences that capture the feeling you’re going for, and a short list of things you’d never say.

That last bit is important. ‘We would never use the word synergy’ or ‘we don’t do corporate jargon’ is just as useful as knowing what you do. Possibly more so, because the temptation to slip into that language is always there, especially if you’re ever asking someone else to write for you.

Keep it somewhere accessible. Refer to it. It’ll save you an enormous amount of time second-guessing yourself every time something needs writing.

What it looks like when it clicks

I worked with a solicitor once who had a website full of phrases like ‘robust legal frameworks’ and ‘comprehensive due diligence processes.’ In person, she was warm, funny, and brilliant at explaining complicated things in plain English. The website sounded nothing like her.

We rewrote it in the voice she actually uses. Nothing fancy – just clear, direct sentences that sounded like a real person who happens to be very good at law. Her enquiries went up. More importantly, the people who contacted her already felt like they knew her a bit, which meant the first conversation was easy rather than awkward.

I’ve seen the same thing happen with a builders merchant who ditched the trade catalogue language and started writing like someone who actually enjoys talking about materials. And an estate agent who stopped describing every property as ‘deceptively spacious’ and started writing descriptions that made people genuinely want to go and look.

In every case, nothing changed except the words. That’s how much tone of voice matters.

One last thing

Your tone of voice isn’t a style you invent. It’s a style you discover. It’s already in there – in the way you talk, the things you find funny, the words you reach for when you’re not trying to sound professional.

The job is just to get it onto the page consistently, so that every piece of content you put out sounds like it came from the same person. Because it did.

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If you’ve done the read-aloud test and your homepage made you cringe, or if you’ve been winging your tone of voice for years and you’re ready to pin it down properly, I can help. A tone-of-voice session takes about an hour and gives you something concrete to work with.

What does your homepage sound like when you read it out loud?