5 ways to create a strong brand voice for your health system

When it comes to connecting with patients, the community and other key audiences, it’s not just what you say that’s important. It’s how you say it. Creating a strong brand voice builds connections with patients and sets you apart from your competitors.

Strong brands always have a unique voice. Ideally, yours resonates with what consumers know about your brand. At WG Content, we talk a lot about our brand and how we express it in the content we produce, on our website and in our interactions with clients. I recently asked ChatGPT what it “thinks” our brand is, and I was pleasantly surprised by its response based on our online presence. My query results indicated that we are communicating our brand effectively.

What is brand voice?

Brand voice is the consistent expression of your organization’s personality. Word choice, sentence length, tone, photography and even the type of content you create can help patients anticipate what it would be like to interact with people in your organization.
Tone is how your organization expresses that voice. It’s more flexible and varies depending on the audience, channel or situation. For example, a statement of work has a very different tone than a LinkedIn post. But your organization’s authentic brand voice should always shine through.

5 steps to creating a brand voice for your hospital or health system

Creating a strong brand voice is essential for an effective content marketing strategy. However, not every company prioritizes brand voice the way it should. Brand voice allows your organization to:

• Build trust and strengthen connections to your organization
• Convey empathy and show you understand what patients need
• Stand out from the crowd

Here are five steps to creating a strong brand voice for your organization.

1. Start with your organization’s mission, vision and values

A compelling brand voice should reflect your organization’s culture, beliefs and mission.
For example, if your organization is passionate about researching and discovering breakthrough therapies, let that energy and confidence come alive in your written materials.

Similarly, if it’s important to your organization that you support and guide patients and their families through their healthcare journey, your marketing materials should convey the same reassurance, warmth and comfort patients would experience in person.

In 2024, I was part of the WG Content rebrand — the first in our company’s more than 20-year history. This significant undertaking involved developing a new web content strategy, website, marketing collateral and much more. Central to our work was creating a 65-page brand guide. It includes a section that explains why a consistent brand voice and tone are so important to fulfilling our mission, which is “building relationships one word at a time.”

“A consistent voice unifies what we write, say and do,” says WGC Content Director Carol Williams. “Because each message coalesces around our genuine, insightful, creative, supportive voice, there’s no doubt it’s us. Even though our tone may shift based on the audience, medium or subject matter, what doesn’t change is presenting our authentic voice and personality in every communication. It’s so vital to building our relationships.”

Watch our rebrand launch video.

2. Develop detailed brand voice guidance

Once your team establishes your organization’s brand voice, it’s time to develop best practices. These can help writers create content that sounds just right.
Brand voice and tone are only one small (albeit important) section in our brand guide. The guide also includes detailed information about a variety of related topics, such as:

• Brand platform, personality and essence
• Messaging
• Our slogan
• Plain language and health literacy guidelines
• A checklist when writing for WG Content
• Design assets (logo, our logomark, etc.)

University of Utah Health publishes a brand and style guide for staff and the world to see on its website. We like how the brand copy section:

• Defines U of U Health’s voice: direct, confident and optimistic
• Includes seven “tone words” to guide communication. These include words like “caring,” “unconventional” and “leading edge.”
• Shows how to adjust tone for different audiences
• Gives examples of on-brand sentences.

Brand guidance like this is invaluable for anyone who writes for U of U Health. And it helps ensure consistency across all of the organization’s communication channels.

3. Provide a mini-workshop to train writers on brand voice

Developing a brand voice is a critical step. Training your team to use it is just as important. Online conferencing platforms like Zoom and Teams make it easy. Everyone can gather for a presentation, and a simple slide deck is perfect for training (and review). You can screen-share to showcase websites with a strong brand voice or highlight pages on your organization’s website that may fall short.

If your brand’s voice guidelines are complex or nuanced, consider training key employees and empowering them to be ambassadors for your brand.

A large academic medical center recently asked WG Content to create a brand workshop for its marketing and media relations departments — about 50 employees. A pre-workshop survey revealed that many participants were unfamiliar with the organization’s brand and editorial style guide. Without that familiarity, it’s impossible to communicate in a consistent brand voice to patients, their families, the community and colleagues.

Fellow Senior Writer and Editor Hannah Barker and I created and presented the four-hour training session. Feedback was so positive that the client is considering a second workshop for its freelance content creators and team members who couldn’t attend the first time.

4. Aim for consistency across all communication platforms

Creating a strong brand voice isn’t something you do on select platforms. It should be a priority everywhere your organization has a presence, including:

• Websites, microsites and blogs
• Social media accounts
• Patient information handouts and forms
• Billboards and banners

Every communication is an opportunity to share your organization’s unique brand voice. That includes physician bios and patient stories.

For the past three years, WG Content has been writing provider bios for Cincinnati Children’s — 2,217 and counting. Along with highlighting the provider’s education and training, each doctor bio includes a quote about their philosophy of care and personal interests. This helps caregivers picture what it would be like to meet the provider in person. And it’s how they learn that pediatric urologist Michael Daugherty, MD, played competitive badminton in college, and pediatric gastroenterologist Amy Taylor, MD, loves to knit.

This practice is consistent with a core tenet of the Cincinnati Children’s brand, which is to connect head and heart with a simple, bold and emotional tone of voice. It’s an effective way to communicate brand voice (and build provider practices).

5. Make sure brand voice is baked into your editorial process

Once you’ve established your organization’s brand voice, it’s time to make it stick. Make sure your team:

• Prioritizes brand voice during the proofreading process — brand voice is just as important as proper grammar and punctuation.
• Understands the importance of brand voice and supports it. Those refresher mini-workshops can help, especially when new employees come on board.
• Feels empowered to flag “brand voice violations” and recommend changes to website content or other communications.

Consistency is key. It helps consumers recognize your brand when they see it. Many companies, healthcare-related and otherwise, are masters of brand voice. One example is Amazon, your friendly neighborhood online retailing juggernaut. Whether you’re ordering toilet paper or scheduling a virtual visit on Amazon One Medical, everything looks, feels and sounds just like Amazon, reflecting a brand voice that is customer-oriented, reliable and efficient.

What does AI say your brand voice is?

Wondering how the marketplace perceives your organization’s brand? You could ask a consumer focus group for their impressions. Or for a quick check-in, you can ask ChatGPT. That’s what we did.

Prompt: “What is the brand voice for WG Content? Do not refer to our brand guide.”
Result: The brand voice for WG Content is warm, sharp and trustworthy — with a clear emphasis on clarity, confidence and human connection. It balances professional polish with an approachable tone, making complex ideas accessible without dumbing them down. WG Content speaks like a smart friend who’s here to help: direct, insightful and never puffed up with jargon or fluff.

Now you try it!

Take our brand voice quiz

Match the brand to the brand voice.

Answers: 1D, 2F, 3A, 4E, 5B, 6C 

We can help you find your brand voice

Brand voice is essential to your organization’s unique marketing and brand strategy. WG Content’s team of writers, editors and strategists can help you create a strong brand voice for your organization so you can better connect with patients and consumers. Drop us a line anytime to learn more.

Editor’s note: This blog was updated on May 09, 2025. It was originally published in November 2021.

More advice on finding brand voice:

Leigh Wilkins

Leigh graduated from Northwestern with a journalism degree in her…

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