How to Build Your Brand By Talking to It

With markets generally overflowing with choice and variety today, how can your brand make sure that you're standing out? How do you avoid being confused with the competition?

The answer, some might argue, would be a strongly defined tone of voice. For example, let's say your company sells unique t-shirts, made from organic materials with responsible sources. While your t-shirts have interesting designs on their own, you know that your competition also has this feature. So how do you differentiate yourself?

One answer is to play to your strengths, and then use them to define yourself in your space. Is everyone else making cool designs with organic materials? Maybe, but this is where a strong tone of voice comes in.

Everyone Needs a "Thing"

While you may not want to be known as the "Something" guy around the office (we all remember "Fire Guy" from The Office), but when it comes to your brand, you certainly want to be known for what makes your brand different from the rest.

Not only does defining your tone help clarify who you are, it can also be helpful in narrowing the focus on who your target audience is. This can also open the door to making your brand more approachable than the rest.

Like in the t-shirt example above, we can assume that if you're using organic materials for your product, you likely have an interest in sustainability or responsible products. It's also likely that your target consumers have similar interests, giving you the perfect excuse to engage them about topics you both enjoy. Having a strongly defined tone of voice here is key, so you can speak to what your consumer is interested in, while still being conversational and allowing them to get to know you.

Tone of voice can give you an edge by not only defining who you are for potential consumers, but also defining who your potential consumers might be.

How We Use Tone of Voice

At Electric Enjin, we try to tailor our voice to talk to our friends and followers about what we love: innovative tech and how it can help our clients in their marketing pursuits.

We also know that tone of voice isn't necessarily limited to how your brand speaks to your audience. By defining your tone of voice, this can seep into all other aspects of your brand, including imagery, online presence and social media postings.

This can be exemplified by a recent project we worked on, a website redesign for the organic candy company YumEarth. Yum came to us with a brand defined by being fun and friendly, but also one that cared about what ingredients go into their organic candy. That left our team to design an entire website around this specific tone of voice, something that would have been far more challenging if everyone wasn't on the same page about who the brand was. If you want to check this out for yourself, check out yumearth.com.

If you ever want to chat about tone of voice, or defining a brand, we'd love to hear from you! Feel free to contact any of the Electric Enjin team, send us a note at [email protected].