There's a particular kind of chaos that greets you on Day 1 of a content leadership role. Not the loud, dramatic kind — the quiet kind. You ask to see the brand guidelines and someone sends you a Notion doc with three adjectives and a logo. You ask about tone of voice and the response is some version of "professional but approachable." You ask what content has worked in the past and they show you a blog post from 2021 with 47 views.
You're not starting from scratch. You're starting from nothing, which is worse. Scratch has potential energy. Nothing has a void that everyone's already learned to live with.
And now you have to build something in it.
I've been here more than once. The first time, I waited too long for permission that was never coming. I kept expecting someone — a founder, a CMO, a brand agency — to hand me the finished voice so I could just "operationalise" it. Instead I spent months tiptoeing around content that felt inconsistent and undefined because I didn't want to build on the wrong foundation. The second time, I stopped waiting. And the work got done.
Here's what I actually know about building a content strategy when the brand voice is either nonexistent, vague, or contested.
First, Understand Why It Doesn't Exist
The brand voice doesn't exist for a reason. Before you try to create it, figure out which reason you're dealing with — because they require different responses.
Reason 1: The company is early-stage and no one got to it yet. This one's actually fine. There's no wrong voice to undo. You have full latitude. The challenge is resisting the urge to make it too generic just because you're not sure what the company wants to be.
Reason 2: Multiple people have been writing in their own voices for years. This one's messy. The audience has been absorbing inconsistency without realising it. There's brand equity tied up in content that doesn't agree with itself. You can't throw it out — you have to reconcile it.
Reason 3: Someone tried to define the voice before and it didn't stick. This one requires archaeology. There's usually a brand doc buried somewhere, and there's usually a reason no one uses it. It was either too abstract ("bold, human, innovative"), too restrictive, or not championed by anyone who had actual influence over the content.
Reason 4: There's internal disagreement about what the brand should be. This is the one people don't want to admit. The founder wants casual and punchy. The VP of Sales wants corporate and credible. The CMO wants something in between. The content team is caught in the middle producing work that satisfies no one. If this is your situation, no amount of clever strategy solves it without someone with authority making a decision.
Know which problem you're solving. Don't apply a framework that assumes a blank slate when you're actually dealing with a political standoff.
Don't Write the Voice Document First
Everyone thinks voice development looks like: run workshops → document everything → create guidelines → publish content. In my experience, that sequence is backwards.
Voice documents that are written before anyone's actually published anything in that voice are almost always theoretical. They're lists of attributes that sound good in a boardroom and mean nothing to a writer on deadline. "Confident but not arrogant. Warm but not casual. Expert but accessible." Cool. Now write me a LinkedIn post about our new product integration.
What actually works: publish first, codify second.
Pick a content format — ideally one with a short production cycle and direct audience feedback, like email newsletters, LinkedIn content, or short blog posts — and start producing. Make editorial calls in the moment. Develop instincts about what sounds right. Then look back at what you've built and describe it. That description becomes your voice guide.
This approach has a few things going for it. One, it's grounded in real work that real people responded to. Two, it forces you to commit to decisions instead of endlessly workshopping adjectives. Three, it gives you actual examples to put in the brand guide, which makes it a hundred times more useful than a document full of abstract descriptors.
I know this sounds like chaos. It's not. It's iterative, which is different.
Use Audience Research to Anchor the Voice
Here's what brands that lack a defined voice actually have: a defined audience. Or at minimum, an intended one. Before you write a word of strategy, do the following:
Read everything your audience is already reading. If you're in B2B SaaS, find the newsletters, the LinkedIn accounts, the Slack communities your buyers actually engage with. Notice what language they use. Notice what they're tired of. Notice what gets engagement and what gets ignored.
Listen to how customers talk about the problem. Pull sales call recordings if you can get them. Read support tickets. Look at reviews — not on your product but on competitors' products, because people are more honest when they're not trying to be polite. How do customers describe their own frustration? What words do they use? Those words belong in your content.
Find the gap between how the industry talks and how the audience actually thinks. Most B2B content is written in a language that only insiders understand, full of jargon that signals expertise but creates distance. The voice that cuts through is usually the one that speaks at a human level without dumbing down the substance.
Audience research isn't just a strategy input. It's a voice input. It tells you the register, the vocabulary, the emotional tone that will land — and that's information no brand workshop can give you.
Build a Voice from Behaviour, Not Description
Here's the real framework I use. Not for voice workshops. For actually making editorial decisions when the brand voice is unclear.
What does this brand say yes to? Think about specific choices. Long-form or punchy? Data-heavy or story-driven? First person or third? Humour or straight-faced? These aren't abstract. They're the decisions that come up every single week.
What does this brand say no to? This is the more useful question. It's easier to define a voice through what it avoids. No jargon without explanation. No passive voice. No hedging. No content that exists to look busy rather than say something. When your writers know what's off-limits, they make better calls without you.
What does this brand argue for? The brands with the strongest voices have a point of view on their industry. Not just what they do, but what they think. What's broken in the market? What does the audience deserve that they're not getting? Content that takes a position is content people remember.
What does consistency actually look like in practice? This is the part the brand docs always miss. Consistency isn't about using the same adjectives. It's about your audience being able to read a piece of content and know it came from you — even without the logo. That takes time to develop. It's worth thinking about what that feels like for your specific brand, not just what it looks like on paper.
Build Stakeholder Buy-In Without Waiting for It
One of the biggest blockers to establishing a content voice is the approval loop. You develop something, it goes up the chain, the CEO edits it to sound like an academic paper, and you're back to square one. You can't eliminate this entirely. But you can reduce it.
Build a small wins file early. Every piece of content that performs — high open rates, shares, comments, leads — goes in the file. You're building evidence that your editorial instincts work. This is your currency for the conversations where someone higher up wants to sand down your edges.
Create opt-in, not opt-out. Share your voice direction before you've finalised it and ask for input. Don't send a finished document and wait to see if someone objects. People defend what they helped build.
Make the guide practical, not aspirational. When you do write a voice guide, put real examples in it. Don't just say "we write conversationally" — show two versions of the same paragraph and explain why the conversational one is better. Real examples get used. Abstract guidelines get filed and forgotten.
Frame the voice in terms of audience outcomes, not aesthetic preferences. Not "we want to sound warm" but "our audience is time-poor and sceptical of marketing speak, so we write in plain language that gets to the point fast." This reframe matters. It's the difference between a stylistic preference that someone can override and a strategic decision with a business rationale.
On the Real Cost of Not Having a Voice
I want to name something that doesn't get said enough.
When a content team operates without a defined voice, the most experienced writer in the room becomes the de facto style guide. Their personal preferences — the way they structure sentences, the words they reach for under pressure — become the brand default. When they leave, the brand voice goes with them.
This is a structural vulnerability. And it's one of the reasons brands sound inconsistent at scale. It's not that no one cares. It's that no one ever made the voice explicit enough to transfer.
The other cost is creative debt. Every piece of content produced in an undefined voice is a piece of content that either contradicts something published before, or gets watered down to avoid contradiction. You spend more time in review, more time in revision, and more time managing feedback that's really just competing personal preferences dressed up as brand feedback.
A defined voice isn't a creative constraint. It's what makes speed possible.
When You're the One Who Has to Define It
If you've landed here, in a role where defining the voice is part of your mandate and no one else is going to do it — that's actually a gift, even when it doesn't feel like one. It means you get to shape something real. You get to make decisions that will outlast your tenure. You get to be the reason the brand has a point of view.
But it also means you have to be honest about what you need to do it well. You need access to customers. You need to understand what the business is trying to say and what it's afraid to say. You need enough psychological safety to publish something that might not land perfectly the first time.
If you're missing any of those things, that's the conversation to have before you start writing brand guidelines. Because a voice that's built without real inputs isn't a brand voice. It's a placeholder — and you've already seen what those look like.
Start with what you know. Publish. Look back. Describe what you built. Iterate. That's it. That's the strategy. Everything else is documentation.
Ifeoma Chukwuemeka is a Senior Content Marketing Manager and founder of She Leads Content. Connect on LinkedIn.