How to make brand voice your secret sales weapon

Many founders can explain their business brilliantly in a conversation.

Then they try to put it into writing.

The message becomes flatter. The website does not quite capture the idea. The sales outreach receives little response. The founder still has to approve every piece of marketing because nobody else can make it sound right.

Then AI produces something “usable-ish”, but rewriting it takes longer than starting from scratch.

These can look like separate marketing problems.

Often, they have the same cause.

The business has not yet developed a brand voice robust enough to work without the founder.

During a recent workshop for the Focused Founders community, Focused For Business mentor Elle Connolly, founder of 23 Wise Words, explored how startups can turn brand voice into a genuine commercial advantage.

Elle is a conversion-focused copywriter and message strategist who combines behavioural psychology with practical marketing execution. Her work spans landing pages, email sequences, funnels, advertising and other conversion copy, supported by customer research and audience insight.

Her argument was clear:

Brand voice should not be treated as decoration.

Used properly, it can help customers recognise themselves in your message, make your business more memorable, protect what makes the brand distinctive as the team grows and influence more people to take action.

Brand voice is more than a list of adjectives

Ask a business to describe its brand voice and the answer often sounds something like this:

Warm.
Friendly.
Professional.
Authentic.
Quirky.

Those words are not necessarily wrong.

But they are rarely enough to guide meaningful marketing decisions.

“Warm and friendly” can mean something completely different to a founder, a freelance copywriter, a marketing agency and an AI tool. It gives everyone room to interpret the voice in their own way.

The result is inconsistency.

Elle encouraged founders to think of brand voice more broadly.

It includes the language the business uses and avoids. It covers the ideas and messages repeated until customers remember them. It communicates why the company is different and why people should choose it.

Most importantly, it should include the words customers already use when talking about their problems, hesitations and ambitions.

Brand voice is therefore not simply how the business sounds.

It is the bridge between the business and the people it wants to reach.

It sits underneath customer trust, investor confidence and conversion. Elle also cited research suggesting that consistent brand presentation can increase revenue by 23%, reinforcing the commercial value of saying the right things in a recognisable way.

Why brand voice becomes a founder bottleneck

At the beginning of a startup’s life, the founder usually is the brand voice.

They know why the business exists. They understand the customer problem. They have the stories, frustrations and personal experiences that shaped the original idea.

That can work very well while the founder is writing every post, sales email, web page and pitch deck.

It becomes less sustainable as the business grows.

New team members become involved. A freelancer writes the website. An agency creates a campaign. AI is introduced to increase output.

Gradually, the message begins to change.

Sometimes the founder responds by holding on even more tightly.

Every piece of copy comes back for approval. Marketing cannot move until the founder has reviewed it. The founder becomes responsible for maintaining a voice that exists mainly inside their own head.

At that point, brand voice is no longer protecting the business.

It is trapping the founder inside the marketing function.

The answer is not to remove the founder’s influence.

It is to capture it well enough that other people can reproduce it.

The three layers of a commercially useful brand voice

Elle calls her framework the Voice Print method.

Rather than defining brand voice through personality adjectives alone, the framework brings together three layers:

Empathy, which reflects the customer’s language and closes the gap between the business and its audience.

Identity, which preserves the company’s values, beliefs and distinctive point of view as it grows.

Influence, which applies behavioural science and ethical persuasion to help people act.

Together, those layers turn brand voice from a static branding exercise into something that can support sales, marketing and revenue.

Empathy: use the language customers already use

The first layer is also the one many businesses skip.

When founders create messaging, they often start inside the business.

They think about what the company wants to say.

Elle starts outside it.

She looks at how customers describe the problem, what they want to change, why they hesitate and what outcome they are trying to reach.

The aim is not to copy customers mindlessly.

It is to recognise the language that already feels natural and familiar to them.

When people see their own words and experiences reflected in your marketing, they are more likely to feel that the business understands them.

Elle linked this to two behavioural principles.

The first is mirroring. Just as mirroring body language can build rapport in conversation, reflecting someone’s language can create connection in copy.

The second is familiarity. People tend to trust things that feel recognisable. That includes the words used to describe their situation.

A founder may talk about “optimising operational efficiency”.

Their customer may say, “I’m spending half my week fixing the same problem.”

Both could be describing the same thing.

Only one sounds as though it belongs to the customer.

Where to find the voice of your customer

Elle calls this process voice of customer research, sometimes known as word mining.

Useful language can be found across:

• customer interviews and discovery calls;
• sales conversations and email exchanges;
• testimonials, reviews and support messages;
• relevant online communities and Reddit discussions;
• competitor or adjacent product reviews;
• books people buy to help solve the same problem.

Early-stage founders sometimes assume they cannot do this because they do not yet have enough customers.

That does not have to stop the research.

If a competitor serves a similar audience, its reviews may reveal how those people describe the problem. A founder offering a service can look at reviews of books bought by people trying to solve the same issue. A SaaS business can examine relevant product review platforms or industry discussions.

The objective is to collect exact words and phrases, then organise them around themes such as:

• the problem before purchase;
• reasons for hesitation;
• desired outcomes;
• alternatives already tried;
• the moment that prompted action.

This provides more than better wording.

It also gives founders ideas for posts, email subject lines, landing page hooks and sales messages.

Instead of starting with a blank page, the founder starts with evidence of what the customer already cares about.

Identity: keep the soul of the brand as you grow

Customer language should shape the message.

But it should not erase the business behind it.

That is where identity comes in.

Elle recommends anchoring the brand voice to the company’s underlying values and philosophies, rather than inventing a separate personality for it.

Why was the company created?

What does it believe should change?

What standards will it not compromise?

How does it want people to feel when interacting with it?

These questions produce a much more useful benchmark than “friendly” or “professional”.

A team member can ask whether a message reflects the company’s belief in simplicity, challenge, accessibility or care.

An AI tool can be given examples of how those values affect language and decision-making.

An agency can understand not only how the copy should sound, but why it should sound that way.

This makes the voice less subjective.

It also gives the founder more confidence to hand work over without fearing that the essence of the business will disappear.

As Elle explained, when the voice follows the values, the company can scale while preserving what made it distinctive in the first place.

Influence: turn brand voice into action

Empathy helps customers feel understood.

Identity makes the business distinctive.

Influence helps people act.

This is where Elle introduces behavioural psychology and conversion copywriting.

The aim is not to trick somebody into buying something they do not need.

It is to help the right person recognise the relevance of the offer, understand the value and take the next step.

That might involve curiosity, social proof, appropriate urgency or future pacing, which asks the reader to imagine a future in which the problem has been solved.

Copywriting structures can also help.

For example, a message might introduce one clear problem, deepen the reader’s recognition of its impact, present the solution and describe the outcome.

The important word is one.

Trying to explain every problem a product solves in the same message usually weakens the copy. A stronger piece focuses on the problem most relevant to that audience and takes the reader through a clear journey.

Because brand voice ultimately appears in real copy, its impact can also be measured.

Founders can examine clicks, replies, bookings, sign-ups and conversions rather than treating brand voice as something that lives beyond commercial accountability.

As Elle put it:

“It cannot be a secret weapon if it lives in a PDF”.

Your core message should remain consistent

Founders sometimes worry that repeating the same message will become boring.

Usually, the founder gets bored long before the audience remembers it.

People do not see every post, presentation or email. It can take repeated exposure before an idea becomes associated with the business.

During the workshop, Focused For Business’ own fundraising message provided a useful example.

A phrase used regularly in workshops had eventually been repeated back by somebody attending another session. That was the point at which the message had clearly stuck.

Consistency does not mean sending the same copy everywhere.

The detail should still reflect the audience and context.

An investor deck will emphasise different evidence from a customer landing page. B2B and B2C content may address different priorities.

But the narrative thread should remain recognisable.

One participant asked whether a business serving both B2B and B2C audiences should use the same messaging. Elle’s advice was to preserve the core brand messages while adapting the surrounding content to the specific audience.

The voice stays recognisable.

The emphasis changes.

Trying to reinvent the company’s core story for every investor, buyer or channel can create confusion both externally and inside the business.

Use behavioural science ethically

Founders can sometimes feel uncomfortable with persuasion techniques.

They do not want marketing to become manipulative.

That concern is reasonable.

The distinction lies in who the message is reaching and what it asks them to do.

If the product genuinely helps solve the audience’s problem, good copy helps the right person understand that connection.

It makes the decision clearer.

One practical example from the workshop was priming.

Before sending an important request, a business can send a brief message telling the recipient what is coming.

Rather than unexpectedly asking a past customer to complete a survey, the business might first say:

“I’m going to send you a short question tomorrow and would really value your input.”

The recipient is then more prepared when the request arrives.

In one example shared by Elle, this approach helped a client receive responses from 13 or 14 of the 16 people contacted.

The same principle could be tested in customer research, testimonials, investor communication or other outreach.

It is not pressure.

It is preparation.

Brand voice matters to investors too

Brand voice is often treated as a customer-marketing issue.

For startups, it also shapes investor perception.

Investors need to understand what the company does, why the problem matters and why this team is equipped to solve it.

They are also likely to encounter the business in several places: a deck, LinkedIn profile, website, email update, application form or live pitch.

If each version tells a different story, confidence can fall.

A clear brand voice makes the opportunity easier to recognise across those touchpoints.

It also helps the founder communicate with conviction.

The deck may be tailored to a particular investor, but the core narrative should not change every time. Otherwise, the founder risks diluting the very insight and belief that made the business compelling.

Consistency makes the company easier to remember.

And in fundraising, being remembered matters.

Why AI creates “brand voice slop”

AI can help startups create content faster.

It can also make them sound like everybody else.

Elle described much generic AI output as “beige and miles off brand”.

That does not mean founders should stop using it.

It means AI needs better inputs.

A simple prompt asking for a friendly LinkedIn post is unlikely to reproduce the nuance of the founder’s thinking.

A more useful system gives AI:

• real customer language and stories;
• the company’s values and beliefs;
• messages the business wants to reinforce;
• phrases it would never use;
• examples of successful existing copy;
• the purpose of the piece and the action required.

Elle’s point was that AI should be taught how the business thinks, not simply told to imitate a copywriter.

When the Voice Print layers are included, the output is more likely to feel relevant, distinctive and persuasive.

Without those foundations, faster content production may simply create more material that the founder has to rewrite.

A 15-minute brand voice experiment

Founders do not need to create a complete brand voice strategy before improving their messaging.

Elle suggested a simple test-and-tweak exercise.

Set aside 15 minutes for voice of customer research.

Choose one useful source:

A customer review.
A sales-call transcript.
A Reddit discussion.
A competitor’s Trustpilot page.
Reviews of a relevant product or book.

Look for a phrase that describes the problem, hesitation or desired outcome differently from the way the business currently describes it.

Then replace one word or phrase in an existing piece of marketing.

That might be a website headline, outreach message, email subject line or LinkedIn post.

Publish or send it.

Watch what happens.

This is small enough to complete without creating another large marketing project, but meaningful enough to reveal whether customer language improves response.

Brand voice becomes useful when it is applied, tested and refined.

Not when it remains untouched in a strategy document.

Make the voice work without losing the founder

Through 23 Wise Words, Elle helps founders and small marketing teams develop voices that can support revenue and remain consistent across people, platforms and AI.

That reflects the deeper problem discussed throughout the workshop.

At first, the founder’s personal understanding gives the marketing its energy.

Over time, relying entirely on that founder becomes a constraint.

The answer is not to remove their personality, experience or beliefs.

It is to translate those qualities into something the rest of the business can use.

A strong brand voice allows customers to recognise themselves in the message.

It helps team members communicate consistently.

It gives AI better material to work with.

It makes the business easier for investors to understand and remember.

And it helps the founder step away from approving every word without watching the company’s identity disappear.

That is how brand voice becomes more than a marketing exercise.

It becomes a business asset.

Want practical support applying ideas like this?

Focused Founders is a community bringing together ambitious startup founders and experienced startup mentors to share knowledge, tackle challenges and focus on businesses growth.

Meeting online every fortnight, nembers hear from experienced specialists, bring real challenges into a supportive founder environment and stay accountable for taking practical action between workshops.

Find out more about Focused Founders.

FAQs – Brand voice