What’s your brand message? Even if you don’t have a brand message written out on your ‘inspirational whiteboard’, you’re doing brand messaging already. You are doing it in your content, your sales brochures, your website and in your social promotion. It’s in flyers, sales pitches, and ads. Brand messaging is in your bio, your contact information, and your words as you tell people about your company.
The above checklist explains the important aspects that surround an ideal brand message. To learn more about each of these requirements and recommendations, just keep reading. How do you make that a effective brand message? Let us explain…
How To Create Your Brand Message
Seize control. Now that you’ve realized that brand messaging leaks out of every aspect of your business, it’s time that you called your crew together to talk about your brand message. So, pull everyone into the conference room and begin asking these questions…
Customers: What Resonates With Your Target Audience?
If it weren’t for your customers, you would have no reason to brand your company in a specific way. At least, that’s really how it should work. The attitudes, preferences, interests, lifestyle, motivations, expectations, and decision making paradigms of your customers are crucial elements of determining any branding message.
A branding message that represents your business is excellent in and of itself, but if it doesn’t resonate with your customers, you’ll be hard pressed to draw them into feeling any level of brand loyalty. Your brand message has to speak directly to your customers in order to be effective.
Questions to ask your team:
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What are our customers’ values?
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What catches our customers’ interest?
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What motivates our customers?
Business: How Can You Represent Yourself Best?
After you’ve established your target audience and the needs, wants, desires, habits, and problems that they have, you must now determine how to specifically communicate the way in which your business products or services are valuable to them. In what ways does your business create value that is interesting to your customers, applicable to their lives, and worthy of their attention? Notice that, even though your brand message is about your company, it’s really focused on your customer. Your business is merely the messenger – a channel by which value is provided to your customer.
Many businesses orient their brand message around what they, as the value provider, believe are the most important aspects of their company offerings. Assuming that your target customers will agree with you is a mistake. Smart brand messages are created with the customer in mind, as the value receiver, and resonate with their needs and desires.
Questions to ask your team:
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How do we create value that our customers want?
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Is the current message of of our business geared to attract customers, or is it simply a reflection of our self-image?
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What needs to change in our messaging to be able to correctly target our customer?
Competitors: What Makes You Obviously Different?
Only one brand can own a specific message or position in the competitive marketplace. It’s important to niche yourself with a message that is applicable to your business, relevant to you customers, and distinct from your competition. Strong messages that do all three of these things can eventually “own” that segment of the market, thriving on the unique message that their branding communicates. Distinguishing yourself is the most basic component of developing brand loyalty. You want your customers to have a reason to keep coming back. If your brand message is the same as the next guy’s, you don’t give your customers a good reason to chose you instead of them.
Now, not only do you want a unique brand message amid the array of other competitors in the marketplace, you also want a message that you can leverage against your competitors. While yours may be different, yes, what about it communicates that you’re better? Your brand message should communicate both of these aspects – A) why you’re different, and B) why you’re better.
Questions to ask your team:
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How are we different from our competitors and how can we incorporate that into a brand message?
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What unique niche do we want to occupy in the marketplace?
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In what ways are we better than our competitors and how can we create a message to leverage that competitive edge?
All the Best Brand Messages Should…
Stay Consistent and Current
Consistency of voice is vital in a good brand message. With the quantity of material that is reflecting your brand message (site content, email signatures, press releases, interviews, branded videos, ads, and so forth), it’s important that all departments are aware of the message and are communicating it consistently. If your message isn’t unified throughout your company, it will confuse your customer. A confused customer goes somewhere else for their desired product or service.
Be Authentic
Stay authentic in your voice. While you want to present your company in a way that is attractive to your customers, it is also important that you don’t lose your own voice. For example, if you’re a manufacturing company that focuses on producing sustainable and recycled products and you have a passion for caring for the environment, ensure that your brand message relays that. This can be accomplished through the insertion of key and current words that indicate ‘going green’ or by stating your passion bluntly. Simply make sure it’s always still presented for the customer, not just for you. Customers trust and love authenticity.
Use Snazzy Words
Refrain from choosing generic words for your brand messages. Communicate with words that are unique, trendy, and incite enthusiasm. Take into consideration that the words that you choose will need to be consistent with your audience’s age range, perceptions, temperament, gender, and lifestyle. This is especially important while interacting on social media.
Try to avoid using buzz words, however. These words are usually in line with modern trends and the current audience is most likely desensitized to its effects. Words such as “epic,” “mompreneur,” “sustainable,” “eco-friendly,” and “local” are excellent words, but are becoming overused in marketing messages.
Stay on Target
Remember the exact buyer persona that you are targeting. You don’t need to create a brand message that targets the entire world. Casting a broad net can work in some cases, but you’ll often find that your ROI (return on investment) doesn’t make it worth your while. Casting a smaller net over the customers that are attracted to your ‘bait’ will produce better results with less budget output.
Let Benefits Drive the Message
It’s easy for businesses to become focused on the features of their product or service, explaining the various practical services that they offer – as opposed to communicating the benefits that the customer will realize as a result. Make sure that you’re constantly communicating your benefits before you mention the features of your company offering. The value that you offer is communicated to the customer through the benefits that you provide, so listing features without explaining benefits does little for communication of value.
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