How to define your brand voice
Define a brand voice by writing down four things you can check a draft against: the audience you are speaking to, three tone attributes with an explicit opposite for each, a vocabulary list of words you use and words you refuse, and two or three recurring points of view — anything vaguer than that cannot be applied to a sentence.
- Four components: audience, three tone attributes with opposites, vocabulary rules, two to three points of view.
- Every attribute needs an explicit opposite, or it excludes nothing and changes no drafts.
- Keep it to one page; longer guides are never opened while writing.
- Register shifts between YouTube and LinkedIn; voice does not.
"Authentic and approachable" is not a voice; it is a mood board. A usable voice definition is operational: given a draft paragraph, it tells you which words to cut. This matters most when reusing an outlier's structure, because a borrowed pattern filled with borrowed phrasing produces content that sounds like the source channel rather than yours.
Published July 29, 2026 · Updated July 29, 2026
How to write the definition
- Collect five pieces you have published that felt natural to write.
- Highlight the sentences you would not change and look for what they share.
- Write three tone attributes in "X, not Y" form from those shared traits.
- List ten words you use deliberately and ten you refuse.
- Name the person you are writing for and the decision they face this week.
- State two or three positions you will repeat across topics, and keep the page open while drafting.
The four components
Each component answers a question a draft can be tested against, which is what separates a voice definition from a brand adjective list.
- Audience: one named person with a decision to make this week, not a demographic.
- Tone attributes: three, each written as "X, not Y" — for example "direct, not blunt".
- Vocabulary: ten words you use deliberately, ten you refuse.
- Points of view: two or three positions you will defend repeatedly across topics.
Why voice matters more once you work from outliers
Reverse-engineering gives you someone else's structure. Without a defined voice, the phrasing arrives with the structure and the output reads as an imitation of the source channel — which is both obvious to viewers and useless for building a distinct audience.
A voice definition is the filter that converts a borrowed pattern into your own piece: same beats, different sentences, different positions.
Voice is discovered, not invented
The fastest route is extraction rather than aspiration. Take five things you have already published that felt easy to write, mark the sentences you would not change, and derive the attributes from those. Voices invented from ambition are abandoned within a month because they are exhausting to sustain.
Worked examples
Turning an adjective into a rule
"Approachable" produced no changes to any draft. Rewritten as "plain, not casual — no slang, no exclamation marks, contractions allowed", it immediately cut three sentences from the next script and settled an ongoing argument about emoji in LinkedIn posts.
Using the definition in production
Apply it at the editing pass rather than the drafting pass. Writing while filtering produces stiff copy; drafting fast and then filtering against the page produces work that sounds like you and still gets finished.
Feed the same definition to any assistant or template you use, so generated drafts start inside your constraints rather than needing to be rewritten out of a generic register.
Frequently asked questions
Related reading inside Outlieo
Where the voice filter fits in the scripting pass.
The topics your points of view are expressed through.
Voice at the sentence level, where it is most visible.
Ship a week of content, not a to-do list.
Join the Outlieo waitlist. Track the outliers, script in your voice, and repurpose to LinkedIn.