Brand Voice Intake and Style Guide Lock (Onboarding)

Brand Voice Intake and Style Guide Lock (Onboarding)

1. 01

   Collect three to five published client artifacts that the client considers on-voice

   Ask for one long-form piece, one sales or landing page, and one email sequence. Written samples beat verbal descriptions of tone every time.

2. 02

   Extract the voice rules into a one-page style guide with explicit do and do-not pairs

   Capture sentence length targets, person and tense, banned words, contraction policy, and how the client handles product claims. Vague adjectives like 'friendly' or 'professional' are not rules.

3. 03

   Load the style guide into whichever generator the account uses, then test it against a held-back sample

   Tools such as Jasper, Rytr, and WriteRush all accept brand or tone configuration in different forms. The test is whether the output matches the held-back piece without manual rewriting.

4. 04

   Define the claim policy before any drafting starts

   List which claim types require a named source, which require client sign-off, and which are prohibited outright. ContentIQ's approach of discarding unsupported claims is the standard to hold every generator to, not a feature to admire.

5. 05

   Assign a named editor per account and record the review turnaround in the retainer scope

   One editor owns voice decisions for the client. If review time is not in the scope document, it becomes unpaid work inside the first month.

6. 06

   Run a 500-word calibration draft through the full pipeline and send it to the client for sign-off

   Get written approval on the calibration piece before producing volume. This single artifact prevents most revision cycles later in the engagement.

7. 07

   Log the approved style guide version and date in the account file

   Voice drifts when guides are edited informally. Version control makes the next editor's job a lookup instead of a guess.