- What brand voice is (and isn’t)
- Why brand voice matters for accountants
- What’s included in your brand voice summary
- How it actually works (the driving metaphor)
- What happens when you skip it
- But can’t ChatGPT just do it?
- Why this matters to you and your clients (and your marketing results)
- You get better content, faster
- How we do it
- You might still be wondering…
You’re considering working with PF and having us create content for you. You believe it’ll help things go faster, save you time, be more efficient — and all of that is true. That is exactly what we do. Let’s go!
And then we tell you: before we write anything, we need to work on your brand voice.
Your initial thought is probably something like:
Do I really need this? Can’t you just write the blogs? Can’t ChatGPT figure it out? Isn’t this just another fluffy marketing thing that slows everything down and costs more than it should?
We hear you. And we’re writing this blog for exactly that reason — to explain what brand voice really is, why it’s the very first thing we start with before we write a single word for you, and why skipping it leads to wasted time, off-brand content, and clients who don’t quite connect.
Let’s dig in.
1. What brand voice is (and isn’t)
Brand voice — also known as tone of voice — is how your firm sounds when it communicates. It’s the personality behind the words. The “you-ness” of what you say. Most of all, it’s the feelings you want your ideal clients to have, before they ever start working with you.
It connects your marketing to reality.
When people read content on your website, in a social post, in a email, they get a certain impression about who you are and how you communicate. Not just you, but your entire team. They get a sense, a vibe.
Then when they meet you in person, they’re (even subconsciously) wondering if that vibe will match. Are you for real? Do you sound like the same person? Or was your website just some fluffy words or professional-sounding words and now they’re getting to know the real you.
Ideally, your “voice”, the way you speak and write and communicate, matches every single part of the client relationship.
So your brand voice sits at the base of every piece of content you create (unless it’s purely visual, which is rare).
If you’re writing everything yourself, it’s probably not something you’ve had to explain. You just sound like you. But if you want someone else to write content for you — like PF, or a team member, or even AI — they need to understand how you write, how you speak, and most importantly: how you want your clients to feel when they read what you write.
2. Why brand voice matters for accountants
Your brand voice doesn’t exist for you — it exists for your ideal client. The people you love working with, and want more of.
We often hear accountants say, “If I can just get someone in a meeting, I can win them over.” But what if your content could do that before they meet you? What if they booked the meeting because your website, blogs, and emails already sounded like you?
Brand voice speeds up the buying journey. It builds trust before you ever speak to someone. And it means when they show up, they say, “You’re exactly like I thought you’d be.”
(A quick test is to ask yourself if any of your recent clients said something like “Wow, this is so much more helpful than I imagined” or “You’re nothing like I thought” once they meet you. This could be a warning sign that your brand voice isn’t quite right yet.)
Having the right brand voice is critical to helping your content ‘land’ – which is a fancy way of saying they will read your messages and think, “I really need to sign up” – for whatever. The free download, the event, the monthly services.
Brand voice is directly tied to the success of your marketing efforts.
3. What’s included in your brand voice summary
This isn’t vague or fluffy. There’s a structure, and it works. When we deliver your brand voice guide, here’s what it will include:
- Tone summary: what your voice is and isn’t. This usually includes 2–6 distinct tone qualities that match your brand (e.g. “calm, curious, no-nonsense” or “bold, clever, approachable”).
- Style guide: Includes writing preferences like:
- Contractions or no contractions (we’re vs we are)
- Use of emojis (when and how)
- Form of address (do you say “we”, “I”, or switch based on context?)
- How casual or formal you are (and in what settings)
- List structures, formatting quirks, punctuation, capitalisation, italics, underlining, hashtags
- Word bank: phrases and terminology you love, use sparingly, or want to avoid completely. This can include:
- Preferred metaphors or references
- Words you never want used (“empower”, “synergy”, “it screams”, etc.)
- Client descriptors (e.g. “ambitious business owner” vs “entrepreneur” vs “CEO”)
- Examples in action: You get a few full paragraphs written in your voice, on topics like “why we do what we do” or “what makes a great client”. These aren’t just samples — they’re a practical reference you and your team can use.
- Optional deep dive — for firms with years of content or public-facing materials (podcasts, LinkedIn, newsletters), we can go further. One client had a 13-page brand voice summary plus a 20-page appendix with formulas for writing content, audience notes, style shifts for different platforms, objection handling tone, and more.
This document becomes your firm’s guide for all future marketing: blogs, website content, captions, internal comms, onboarding emails, everything. Yes, it’s useful for us and our team when we are creating content on your behalf: but it’s also useful for everyone involved in marketing, both now and in the future. You’re investing in good marketing, and it starts here.
4. How it actually works (the driving metaphor)
This is like driving. You’ve been doing it so long, you don’t even think about it.
You get in the car and arrive half an hour later wondering, “Did I stop at those lights?” You’ve learned the timing, the roads, how your car sounds when it’s not happy. You instinctively know how to speed up, when to change lanes, how to parallel park.
Now imagine someone else getting in the car to drive — and you’re in the passenger seat. Suddenly you’re hyper aware. “Brake!” “You missed the turn!” “Oh there’s a horrible pothole on this road – watch out!”
That’s what it’s like when someone else tries to write for you without knowing your brand voice.
To you, content writing feels natural. You’re writing as yourself. You don’t even think about why you choose certain words, why your emails end a certain way, or how your tone changes when you’re writing for clients vs your team.
But we have to learn that. We’ve driven a lot of cars, but not yours. And your car is different. It might be older, or electric, or only goes in reverse on Thursdays. It matters.
This is also why it’s hard to explain what “doesn’t feel like me”, because you don’t notice the micro decisions you make while writing. We’re learning to notice those so we can replicate them. So you don’t have to keep saying, “No, not quite” and rewriting it yourself.
With brand voice defined, your content becomes easier to write, easier to read, and far more powerful.
5. What happens when you skip it
Here’s what happens when someone else writes content for you and you don’t have a brand voice defined:
- You read it and think, “This isn’t quite right… but I can’t explain why.”
- You spend hours rewriting things you paid someone else to write.
- You start to lose trust in the process — and maybe even in your own voice.
Or you push it out anyway, and it doesn’t feel like you. It feels a bit like… everyone else. No one really resonates with it. You aren’t getting likes or comments or engagement. No one is reading your website pages – or they are, but then they ask you the same questions later.
Brand voice is like a map. Without it, you might get somewhere eventually, but with wrong turns, wasted time, and a lot of second guessing.
With it, you can hand someone the keys and say, “Go there.” And they do.
We worked with an accountant who initially didn’t understand why brand voice mattered. But she trusted us, so she said yes. When we delivered her voice guide, her whole perspective shifted.
She said:
“I love it forever. I just think it helps me understand what we’re doing. It’s very hard for me to understand the abstract concept of marketing… but then I read it and I’m like, oh, because that sounds like me. Now I see my website sounds like… not me. It made sense because there were only like two words in the whole thing that I didn’t like. The rest was exactly what I sound like — or even better.”
Her next request was, “Can you rewrite my entire website using this tone of voice? Because i LOVE it, and now I can see how boring my existing website is, and how it’s literally turning people away.”
6. But can’t ChatGPT just do it?
Technically, yes. Practically, no.
ChatGPT is trained on billions of voices — but none of them are yours. Not unless you’ve explicitly taught it.
If you ask ChatGPT to “write a homepage for my accounting firm website”, you’ll get something bland. Generic. Safe. It strips away the personality unless you force it to keep it.
Its job is to amalgamate, gather, and summarise. The number of times I’ve needed to say, “Stop summarising what I’m saying and use my EXACT words. Literally word for word what I just said” – despite hours and days and months of using ChatGPT and thinking it knew me by now.
If you already have a solid brand voice and know how to prompt well, it can help. But most people don’t feed in the strategy. They just presume it’s pulling it together somehow — and that leads to trouble.
We’ve seen this firsthand. One of our clients wrote their values using ChatGPT. Then we spent time with them, digging into what they actually believed and how they talked about it. The final version — written by us, guided by their tone and approach — was unrecognisable. Better in every way.
Here’s where their values started: (as you can see, extremely generic and sounds like Any Accounting Firm Ever And Also None):
And here’s what we developed together, which sounds like them and is much more human:
ChatGPT is a tool. Brand voice is the human strategy that makes the tool work for you.
7. Why this matters to you and your clients (and your marketing results)
We’re not here to make content for the sake of it. Our job is to help you attract the right clients, faster. The ones you love working with.
When we write content without a defined brand voice, it takes longer. There’s more back and forth. More questions. More revisions. More second guessing.
But with a voice guide:
- We write faster.
- You approve faster.
- The content performs better.
- You attract more of the right people.
And yes, it also saves us the awkward moment where you say no to brand voice in the proposal, and we have to explain (again) why it’s non-negotiable.
8. You get better content, faster
Tone and voice are the hardest things to “fix” in content. If the tone is off, it doesn’t matter how good the facts are. You’ll read it and think, “That’s not me.” And then you won’t use it.
With a brand voice guide in place:
- We spend less time going in circles
- You feel more confident delegating content
- We can turn around blogs, webpages, or emails in days (sometimes even hours)
It’s like cleaning up someone’s bookkeeping system before you start the monthly bookkeeping. It’s strategic. It saves time and money long term. And it gives you a foundation you can build on.
9. How we do it
Our process is collaborative. We don’t sit in a dark room trying to “crack” your brand.
Here’s what happens:
- We start with a workshop session with one of our strategists and a senior content writer.
- You do some prep beforehand — reviewing past content, answering questions, thinking about your favourite clients.
- If you have existing content (blogs, social posts, podcasts, videos), we ask you to share your favourites – the ones which sound most like you
- We dig deep into how you think, how you talk, and how you want your clients to feel.
- We then create your guide — including tone, style, examples, and references.
- We review it together, talk about what’s a fit and what isn’t. We make updates until it’s right
- Then it’s yours to use (and ours to follow).
This isn’t just helpful for PF. It’s for your whole team. Your operations manager can write onboarding emails. Your new hire can post to LinkedIn. Your junior accountant can reply to emails.
Because now they know how your firm sounds.
10. You might still be wondering…
You’ve read this far, and it’s starting to make sense. But you might still have that uncertainty. That slight hesitation. That feeling of, “Yes, but…”
Let’s go through some of the most common ones:
“I just want to get started writing.”
We know — and we will. But without this foundation, we’ll be rewriting and second-guessing everything. This is what lets us write content for you that sounds like you the first time.
“Isn’t this a bit fluffy?”
It’s strategic. It’s psychological. It’s messaging. (To be fair, some of our clients do end up saying “that was a bit like business therapy!”, because we dug deep into who you are and why you communicate the way you do.)
“What if it’s wrong?”
It won’t be. And even if it’s not perfect at first, we refine it together. Once we’ve done the initial rounds, we’re able to move incredibly fast — sometimes turning around content in days because we know your voice so well.
“Money’s tight. Shouldn’t I spend it on content itself?”
This is spending on content. You’re building the system that makes all future content better. It’s like sorting out someone’s bookkeeping system before you sort out the monthly bookkeeping itself. If you don’t, you’ll just go round in circles repeating the same errors.
“I can just use AI.”
Only if you want generic content that sounds like everyone else. AI can’t create personality — not unless you give it something real to work from. That “something real” is your brand voice.
“What if I don’t like it?”
Then we revise it. With your input. It’s collaborative. Our goal is for you to read it and go, “That’s exactly how I sound — or even better.”
Final thoughts
Listen. We know you can get a freelancer or use an AI tool to throw some words together for cheap.
But that’s not who we are. And if you’re honest, you’ll recognise that’s why you’re hiring us. Because we’re a strategic marketing company. Because we ask better questions. Because we go deeper.
We’re reassuringly expensive — because we do it right. We get the foundations in place so your marketing actually works. Not just today, but for the long term.
We’re not in this to fling out a few blogs and disappear. We’re here to help you build a brand that lasts. A brand your best clients resonate with. A brand that sells before you say a word.
And that starts with your voice.
If you’re thinking about content, start here instead: fill out our discovery form. It’s the first step to helping us learn about you, your firm, and how your brand voice will guide everything we write together.
We’re excited to help you define who you are – and how you’re different from other accountants your prospective clients are considering working with! Let’s go!