auditing your brand voice.

brand voice is easy to define once and impossible to maintain by accident. across different people, platforms and months, it drifts — a bit more corporate here, a bit off there — until your content no longer sounds like one brand. a periodic voice audit catches that and pulls everything back into line.

— 01gather and read it all

pull a broad sample of recent content across every platform and read it together. does it sound like one consistent brand, or several? reading it in one sitting reveals drift, inconsistency and off-key moments that you'd never notice post by post.

pull three months of everything — posts, captions, emails, replies, the website, a sales proposal — and read it in one sitting.

reading it together is the whole method. individually each piece looks fine; in sequence the inconsistency becomes obvious.

and include the replies. a brand that writes formally and answers dms in slang has two voices, and the audience notices.

— 02check consistency, fit and distinctiveness

• consistency — does the voice hold across platforms and posts?
• fit — does it match your brand and audience?
• distinctiveness — could a competitor have posted this, or is it unmistakably you?

the third is the one most brands fail — generic voice is invisible voice.

consistency: does it sound like one person. fit: does it sound like the customer's own language. distinctiveness: could a competitor have published it unchanged.

the third question is the one that finds the real problem. most brand voices are competent and interchangeable.

and check the register against the audience rather than against your own taste. a voice that flatters the founder and alienates the buyer is a common outcome.

— 03define and realign

use what you find to sharpen your voice definition — clear principles, do's and don'ts, real examples — and realign everyone who creates against it. a voice audit isn't a one-off; revisit it periodically to catch drift before it becomes the new normal.

replace adjectives with dials — formal to casual, plain to technical, warm to direct — and mark where you sit on each.

then write three sentences you would say and three you never would. that pair does more work than any amount of description.

and re-edit the highest-traffic pages first. the voice document only matters where people actually read you.

— 04the test that matters

hand the document to someone new and ask them to write a week of captions. if they can produce something publishable on the first afternoon, it works.

if they cannot, it is still a description of an aspiration rather than a set of instructions.

more on this: audit the page before the ads, how to do a social media audit, run your own marketing audit.