Raise your hand if you’ve ever been personally victimized by your own brand confusion. 

Listen, we know all too well how muddled a brand (or lack thereof) can get! It’s really difficult to understand who you are, what your brand represents and what your brand means to your clients – especially when you’re trying to RUN your business. 

So, as you navigate the tricky road that is establishing your brand and understanding how brand tone comes into play, let’s take a look at what this really entails.

What is a brand?

To begin establishing brand tone, it’s imperative to understand what a brand truly means. 

A brand consists of distinguishing factors that set one business apart from the next. This goes beyond logos and color palettes (not to discount this part of a brand – these are still very important!) However, a brand is composed of visual elements as well as vocabulary, tone, and emotions.

What is brand tone?

The brand tone is how your business communicates with anyone outside of your company. Social media, website copy, comments, and responses online, all of it forms your brand tone. 

Some great examples of this are larger brands that will craft really tailored websites and carry this messaging out onto social media through posts, comments, and responses to other large brands! For larger companies, the brand tone is especially important since it really helps customers and clients to form a bond and relationship with the business. 

Brand Tone For Your Small Business

So you may be wondering, how do you cultivate a brand tone for your own business? 

It’s important to remember that it all begins and ends with the customer. The end goal of brand tone is to create and deepen relationships with your customers. Oftentimes the best place to begin is by hearing from them what your company is to them, through reviews, testimonials or something similar. 

A plus side to being a small business is that you are generally closer to your customers, often having direct contact with them. This is a great way to continue building relationships and echo your brand tone. 

Read More: 5 Tips to Personalize Your Brand

How to establish brand tone?

If you haven’t paid much attention to your brand tone in the past, don’t worry, it’s never too late to work on it! 

When we work with clients on website messaging and brand voice, we look at a few things:

• Who is the end user and what do they value?
• What are our clients’ values, goals, and mission?
• How can we communicate the necessary information in a way that is true to our client?

Essentially, for us in the web design industry, it is our goal to gather all of the information that we need to include on our clients websites and reword it in such a way that we tell our clients story in an effective way that not only easily provides the information at hand – but also carries the businesses personality deeper than the surface level. 

A website is one of the most important places to nail down brand tone and build relationships with potential clients. 

If you need help crafting brand identity and tone of voice, please shoot us a message! We’d love to help you nail down your message.