tone of voice

How to Find Your Unique Brand Voice [with Examples]

The brand voice you use in your marketing is potentially a huge differentiator. It’s also vastly ignored by most companies—especially business-to-business companies. That spells plenty of opportunity for you and your company. “Back up,” you’re thinking. “What’s ‘tone of voice’? That thing I studied in Humanities?” Yes. And also no. Brand voice is how our writing or copy sounds in a reader’s head. You can say the same thing in different ways. If you have an unadorned sausage, for example, you might ask for a condiment by saying… “Hand over that mustard.”“Can you pass me the mustard?”“Pardon me… would you have any Grey Poupon?” The difference between those is the tone of voice you use. Brand voice signals three things: Who we are. Why we do what we do. What we are like to deal with. In marketing, the voice we use when we communicate with our prospects and customers […]

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You Had Me at Pizza: How Omnichannel Marketing Matters

What’s omnichannel mean, exactly? And what does it have to do with the best pizza outside of Naples? And where does lively writing fit into all this? Andris Lagsdin has a small company outside of Boston called Baking Steel that manufacturers and sells ultra-conductive metal baking sheets. Its flagship product is its namesake Baking Steel, a heavy, quarter-inch honed hunk of steel. It doesn’t look like much—it looks like an ordinary piece of metal. But it gives you the best pizza crust outside of Naples. (Ze. Best.) Last spring, Andris ran a contest promoting a new, lighter product called the Mini Griddle. He invited subscribers to comment on his blog post with a recipe idea: What would you make with a Mini Griddle? The best entry would be the winner. I entered the contest on a total whim. My recipe—invented as I sat at my desk one wintry morning in

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5 Keys to Developing a Strong Tone of Voice in Your Content Marketing

One of the biggest branding mistakes that companies can make is to not pay enough attention to their tone of voice. “Voice” sounds high-minded, doesn’t it? More suited for the literary world rather than the business world? But tone of voice just refers to how you sound in your writing. In marketing, your tone of voice can be a significant differentiator. (Along with a few other key things.) It’s a strong advantage, because a lot of companies aren’t yet thinking about it. Businesses often spend a lot of time on their logo and color palette and other things they think of as “branding”—the look and feel of their website, collateral, signage, fonts, and so on. But very few take the time to consider the branding that a unique voice can give a company. A key question is this: Mask the logo on your site. Do you sound different, unique—like yourself?

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