How to run a brand voice audit before taking on a new client

The brief looked straightforward. Write three blog posts for a wellness brand launching a new supplement line. The scope was clear, the deadline reasonable, the rate fair. Then you spent four hours on their website and couldn't figure out whether they were speaking to tired new mothers or CrossFit athletes recovering from competition.

That ambiguity wasn't going to resolve itself during the writing process. It was going to multiply.

Running a brand voice audit before taking on a new client isn't about being cautious — it's about knowing what you're actually signing up for. Some brands have clear voices that just need translating. Others have a tangle of contradictions that will turn every revision into a negotiation. The audit tells you which one you're looking at before you've committed hours to the project.

What a brand voice audit actually involves

The term sounds formal, like something requiring a spreadsheet and a week of analysis. In practice, it's a structured read-through of existing content with specific questions in mind. You're not evaluating whether their content is good. You're determining whether it's consistent enough to write against.

Start with their website copy. Read the homepage, the about page, and at least three product or service pages. Then check their blog if they have one — the last five published pieces will tell you more than their marketing pages. Finally, look at whatever they've posted on social media in the past month.

You're looking for patterns. Does the same personality show up across all these places? Or does the homepage sound corporate while the blog sounds casual and their Instagram captions sound like a completely different company?

The four questions that reveal everything

Every brand voice assessment comes down to four things. Answer these, and you know whether you can write for them confidently.

Do they use first person, and if so, which one? Some brands say "we" throughout. Others avoid it entirely. A few switch between "I" and "we" seemingly at random. The random ones are harder to write for because there's no stable perspective to adopt.

What's their sentence rhythm? Short and punchy? Longer and explanatory? A mix? Read three paragraphs aloud and you'll hear it. If every paragraph sounds different from the last, they don't have a defined style — which means you'll be inventing one and hoping they like it.

How do they handle technical language? Do they explain terms or assume familiarity? Do they use industry jargon to sound credible or avoid it to sound accessible? This tells you who they think they're talking to.

Where do they land on the formal-to-casual spectrum? Contractions or no contractions? Sentence fragments allowed? Humour attempted? The answer isn't always obvious from a single page, which is why you need to read several.

What consistency actually looks like

A brand with strong consistency won't pass every test perfectly. What they will have is a recognisable throughline — something that stays true even when the content type changes.

Their blog might be warmer than their product pages. That's normal. But both should feel like the same company speaking. The personality traits should carry over even when the formality level shifts.

When you analyse a brand's website before writing, you're essentially building a profile. The brands that make good clients are the ones where that profile emerges clearly. The difficult ones are where you're left guessing.

Red flags worth catching early

Some patterns predict trouble. Not always, but often enough that they're worth noticing.

If their website uses one voice and their social media uses another completely different one, ask which is accurate. Sometimes brands experiment on social and want their website voice applied everywhere. Sometimes they genuinely don't know what they sound like. The second type requires more handholding.

If they have a style guide but their published content doesn't follow it, the style guide is aspirational — not operational. You'll write to the guide and get feedback based on what they actually do.

If they've worked with multiple writers and each piece sounds completely different, they haven't been enforcing consistency. Either they don't notice or they don't prioritise it. Both make revision rounds unpredictable.

When there's no clear voice to find

Sometimes the audit reveals an absence. The brand has content, but it doesn't add up to a personality. Every page sounds like it could belong to any competitor in the space.

This isn't necessarily a reason to decline the project. But it changes the scope. You're not just writing content — you're helping establish voice, whether that's explicit in the contract or not.

Knowing this upfront lets you price accordingly and set the right expectations. When you need to write in a brand's voice without a style guide, you're doing interpretive work. That takes longer and deserves acknowledgment.

Turning the audit into usable notes

The point isn't to write a report nobody reads. It's to create something you can reference while writing — and share with the client if they ask how you nailed their voice.

Keep it to one page. Document the first-person usage pattern, three to five vocabulary choices that feel distinctively theirs, any phrases they repeat, and where they sit on formality. Include one or two sentences you could point to as examples of their voice working well.

That's your reference document. It takes maybe twenty minutes to create once you've done the reading, and it saves hours of uncertainty during the actual writing.

This is exactly the kind of pre-project analysis that BrandDraft AI automates — it reads the client's website before generating anything, pulling terminology, product names, and tone patterns so the output sounds like their business from the first draft.

The question worth asking yourself

After the audit, you should be able to complete this sentence: "This brand sounds like someone who _____."

If you can finish it confidently — "sounds like someone who takes their craft seriously but doesn't take themselves too seriously" or "sounds like someone explaining something technical to a friend" — you're ready to write for them.

If you can't finish it, you're either going to spend the project guessing, or you're going to need a conversation with the client before starting. Neither is wrong. But the audit tells you which one you're walking into, which is better than discovering it three drafts in.