Read a stack of holiday messages from local businesses and most of them could have been written by the same person. Warmest wishes this season. Thank you for a wonderful year. Don't miss our biggest sale. The words are friendly enough, but nothing in them tells you which business sent them, and a message that could come from anyone is easy to skim past.
It happens for an understandable reason. Holiday copy gets written in a hurry, often by whoever has a spare half hour, and the safest thing to reach for is the phrasing everyone else uses. The result is a business that sounds like itself for eleven months and like a greeting card for the twelfth.
Start from how you already sound
Your brand voice is not something to invent for the season. It is already there in the way you answer the phone, the way you reply to reviews and the way you describe your work on your own pages. Pull a few examples that feel most like you and look at what they have in common. Are you plainspoken or playful? Do you use first names? Do you explain things, or keep it short?
If you already have a brand guide, this is the moment it pays for itself. If you do not, a one-page brand guide your team will use is a good weekend's work, and the holiday season is a good reason to finally write it.
Set a few seasonal voice rules
You do not need a long document. A short list of rules that everyone writing holiday copy can follow is enough:
- Phrases you will not use, such as the stock seasonal lines every business reaches for.
- How you greet people, and whether you name a specific holiday or keep it general.
- How you talk about the offer: plainly, with the price and the dates, or not at all.
- One or two details that are specific to you, like your town, your team or the work you do.
- Who signs off, and whether it comes from the business or from a named person.
The details in that fourth point do most of the work. A thank-you that mentions the jobs you did this year, the street you are on or the people who answer the phone sounds like it came from a real business. A thank-you with none of that sounds like a template.
If your holiday message would read the same with a competitor's name on it, it is not saying anything yet.
Keep the voice the same in every channel
Holiday messages go out in many places at once: the website banner, the posts, the newsletter, the sign on the door and the line staff use when they answer the phone. Customers meet several of these in the same week. If one is formal, another jokey and a third reads like a press release, the brand feels less solid than it is.
Write the core message once, in your voice, then adapt its length for each place rather than rewriting it from scratch. The same goes for the visuals around it. Holiday graphics that still look like your brand covers the design side of the same problem.
Read it out loud before it goes out
The simplest test is to read the message aloud and ask whether you would say it to a regular customer across the counter. If it sounds stiff, cut the formal phrases. If it sounds like an advert, take out the exclamation marks and say what the offer actually is. If it sounds like you, it is ready.
Keeping a consistent voice across every channel is part of what a Vizible marketing expert does for clients, alongside planning and running the work itself. If you would like a plan for your own holiday season, start with a free growth proposal.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a brand voice?
- A brand voice is the consistent way a business sounds when it writes or speaks: its word choices, its level of formality and the kind of detail it includes. It should be recognizable whether a customer reads a post, an email or a review reply.
- Should holiday messages sound different from the rest of the year?
- The topic changes, but the voice should not. A business that is plainspoken all year should stay plainspoken in December, with seasonal details added rather than a new tone.
- How do I avoid generic holiday messages?
- Agree a short list of stock phrases you will not use, and include at least one detail specific to your business in every message, such as your town, your team or the work you did this year.
- Who should write a small business's holiday messages?
- Whoever writes them should work from the same short set of voice rules, so the website, posts, emails and in-store signs all sound like one business.