Copy examples are real, written demonstrations of your brand’s tone of voice applied to specific formats — a social post, an email subject line, a web headline, a customer service response. They show writers what good looks like rather than just describing it.
Most projects produce 20 to 50 examples across a range of formats. The aim is to cover enough scenarios to give writers a confident sense of the voice across the contexts they work in most frequently.
No. They complement them. Guidelines explain the principles; examples demonstrate them in practice. Both are necessary — principles without examples are abstract, and examples without principles are hard to extrapolate from.
They’re designed as inspiration and reference, not templates to be copied verbatim. Their value is in showing the style, rhythm and vocabulary of the brand voice in practice, not in providing content to be reused.
They should be entirely specific — written about your actual products, services, audiences and scenarios. Generic copy examples are much less useful than those that reflect the real contexts in which your team writes.
Yes, and you should. New products, new audiences and new channels will create new writing scenarios. Encouraging team members to submit new examples for review and approval keeps the bank growing and current.
Yes, significantly. Annotations that explain why a particular phrase, structure or word choice reflects the brand voice turn examples into teaching tools. Writers can apply the same logic to new situations rather than just copying the example.
The most useful examples cover the formats your team actually writes in: email subject lines and body copy, social media captions, web page headlines and introductions, calls to action, customer service responses and sales proposals.
As part of the tone of voice guidelines, in a separate reference document, or in an online resource that writers can search by format or scenario. Accessibility matters — if examples are hard to find, they won’t be used.
A facilitated workshop that walks through the examples, explains the reasoning behind them and gives team members a chance to practise applying the principles to their own writing is significantly more effective than simply sharing a document.