Your Brand Voice Is Whatever Your Last Contractor

You have brand voice guidelines for your small business. Or you think you do. What you have is a sentence in a brand guide that says “friendly and professional,” which is the business equivalent of describing your personality as “nice.” It’s not wrong, it’s not useful, and it will not prevent the next person who writes for you from sounding nothing like you.

This is how it goes. You write all your own copy for the first year, maybe two. Your website, your emails, your social posts, everything comes from you, and it sounds like you because it is you. You don’t think about voice because you don’t have to. Your voice is the one you use when you’re talking to a client, slightly adjusted for the screen, and it works because it’s consistent in the way only a single person’s writing can be.

Then you get busy. You hire someone to do your social media, or you bring on a VA to handle your emails, or you start working with a marketing contractor who writes your blog posts. You show them your website, maybe your brand guide if you have one, and they go off and start producing content. The content is competent. It’s spelled correctly, the grammar is fine, the topics make sense. And something about it makes you wince.

You can’t point to what’s wrong because nothing is wrong. The words are correct. The tone is appropriate. But the rhythm is off. They use exclamation points where you’d use a period. They open with a question where you’d open with an observation. They write “we’re thrilled to announce” where you’d write “here’s what’s new.” The individual choices are defensible, each one, but the accumulation of them produces something that doesn’t sound like your business and you can’t figure out how to fix it without rewriting everything yourself, which defeats the purpose of hiring someone.

So you rewrite it. Or you approve it with a low-grade discomfort that becomes the new normal. And your brand voice, the thing that made your earliest clients feel like they knew you before they’d ever met you, drifts into a consensus tone that could belong to any small business in any industry in any city. Warm. Friendly. Professional. Forgettable.

The fix is not to find a better contractor. The fix is to give them something better than adjectives.

Brand voice guidelines for a small business need to be specific enough to follow and concrete enough to argue with. Not “we sound confident,” but “we don’t hedge with phrases like ‘we think’ or ‘we believe.’ We state it.” Not “we’re approachable,” but “we use contractions, we address the reader as ‘you,’ and we keep sentences under twenty words when we can.” Not “we use humor sometimes,” but “we use dry understatement, we never use exclamation points to signal excitement, and we avoid puns.”

This level of specificity feels excessive when you’re the one writing. You know you don’t use puns. You know your sentences tend to be long and your paragraphs tend to be short and your CTAs tend to sound like the end of a conversation rather than a billboard. But the person you’re handing your content to doesn’t know any of that, and “friendly and professional” gives them nothing to work with except their own instincts, which are not your instincts.

The same problem compounds when AI enters the picture. If you’re using ChatGPT to draft an email or write product descriptions, the voice defaults to whatever ChatGPT thinks a business should sound like, which is polished and pleasant and sounds like everyone else. Giving it “friendly and professional” as a prompt produces the same result as giving a human contractor “friendly and professional” as direction. Generic output that requires you to rewrite it.

The businesses that sound like themselves, the ones where every email and every post and every page feels like it came from the same mind, are the ones that wrote the rules down in terms someone else could follow. Not a paragraph about their values. Not a list of brand adjectives. A set of choices, specific and arguable and grounded in how the owner speaks when they’re talking to a real person about real work.

If you’ve been rewriting everything your contractors send you, the problem might not be the contractors. How would someone who has never heard you speak know what you sound like?