If your customers were given a snippet of your content to read, would they know it was you, just from how it sounded? Finding your brand’s tone of voice in today’s noisy marketing world can be challenging.
So, how do you set yourself apart from your rivals while still sounding like you? In this article from Bylaw Media, we look at how to define your legal firm’s tone of voice to help you strengthen your position in your town or city.
Whether you are based in Dallas or Detroit, the same legal marketing rules apply.
What is Tone of Voice?
Tone of voice is the ‘personality’ of a brand or company as communicated through writing. It guides the things you say, and how you say them. The easiest way to consider tone of voice is to ask ‘if our brand was a person, what kind of person would it be?’
By breaking the process down into smaller parts, you can begin to develop a tone that fits your legal firm’s personality and engages with your audience.
Your Personality
What personality traits would your legal firm have if it was human? How would it interact with other people? For example, are your staff easy to talk to, are your attorneys determined? It is important to get those genuine personality traits across in your website copy.
Your Values
When it comes to defining your brand’s values, it can help to dust off the old business plan from way back when. Seeing how you envisioned your values when your legal practise first opened can help you consider your positioning today.
Are your values still the same? If they are, then you know exactly where you stand. If they’re different, how do they fit with how you see yourself in the American legal industry today?
Your core values should define what you stand for as a law firm. For example,
Integrity
To be respectful, trustworthy, ethical and honest in our actions. To honor their commitments and to be accountable for our actions, successes and failures.
Client Focus
To fully understand your clients’ requirements, goals, challenges and pain points
Intellectual Rigor
To be meticulous in your attention to detail. To extract larger meaning from data and information to support that objective.
Once you have your list of personality traits and values, you can then consider how they translate into the language and style of your writing.
Tone of Voice Guidelines
One way to ensure that your language and style is consistent is to create a set of guidelines. Tone of voice guidelines outline what you say, how you say it and why. Essentially, they act as a list of dos and don’ts when it comes to writing for your legal firm.
It doesn’t need to be page upon page of rules. For most small legal businesses, a one page document will be more than enough to see you right.
Key Points
The key tips for creating brand voice guidelines are:
1. Define your legal firm’s brand’s vision, mission and values
2. Identify your audience
3. Examine all your written content to ensure relevance
4. Inspect visual content for consistency and value
5. Carefully select the words that should be used to describe the business, and what should be avoided.
The important step to guaranteeing that the brand voice guidelines are consistently followed is to formally document them and put a process in place for team members to adopt and use.
At Bylaw Media, we ensure that any work we do has a measured result and we’ll always be honest as to whether we think we can provide you with a great return on your investment.
Our approachable staff work to obtain outstanding results that provide long-term value, using the latest approaches and technology.
We’re genuinely passionate about what we do and we aim to build a lasting relationship with every legal client across the United States that requires our digital services.