Most B2B voice guides are just adjectives: conversational, professional, approachable, friendly.
The problem is that nearly any brand can claim those adjectives, and no writer can confidently act on them. There are too many interpretations of what any one adjective means, let alone how to combine them. And without anything beyond adjectives, the writer (or AI) has to guess.
To make matters worse, in B2B there also seems to be a shared idea of what B2B is “supposed to” sound like.
When teams don't have clear voice guidelines to fall back on, it's very easy to start using competitors' patterns without realizing it. We pay attention to what our competitors are doing, and (unintentionally) absorb the marketing around us. In fact, the pattern I regularly see is that within a given product category, cadence and tone tend to converge. The competitive landscape is a sea of sameness.
A functional voice guide, on the other hand, prevents you from sounding like your competitors. It gives you measurable parameters (vocabulary, cadence, tone), plus plenty of additional nuance. For example:
Do we use contractions? Sentence fragments? Parentheses? If so, how? When?
Does our tone change in different channels? If so, how?
When two words are otherwise equal in meaning and clarity, how do we choose which word to use?
When you make many of these micro-decisions about your voice, those intentional choices compound to develop a voice that’s uniquely yours. More importantly, your voice guide becomes specific enough that two different writers can read it and produce copy that sounds on brand.
This level of specificity in your voice guide is also one of the things that makes your marketing team more AI-ready.
A model briefed against adjectives produces generic output. And without a functional voice guide, you have no way to say "this is off-brand" because you haven't defined what on-brand or off-brand looks like.
In a world where AI is writing more marketing than it ever was before, the risk of a “default” brand voice is compounding.
'Til next week,
Carolyn
How I can help you:
Boxcar helps marketing leaders at sales-led B2B tech companies fix their messaging. We start with why it's not working and end with a messaging strategy that actually drives pipeline.
I also work with a small number of clients to operationalize that strategy using AI, building tools their marketing team can actually use to create high-quality, on-brand outputs. (If you’re curious about this, mention it when you reach out.)
Interested in working together? Reach out by filling this form.
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