Creating a Brand Message That Resonates With Your Audience
Brand Messaging is what ties together every content piece that you make.
It’s not just a slogan or a tagline, or your products and services, although these do form a part of your brand messaging strategy.
Among many other things required to build brand loyalty, it is essential that your brand messaging is consistent, resonates with your audience on an emotional level, and demonstrates your unique brand values.
However, without a solid brand messaging strategy, your values will probably get lost in an ocean of jumbled words.
In this blog, we are going to discuss what brand messaging is, why it is important, how it can help your business grow, and how you can develop one for yourself.
What Is Brand Messaging?
Brand Messaging is how your brand communicates its unique personality and value proposition to your target audience using the right words, via both verbal and nonverbal messaging. It refers to the voice tone, style, and language that appears on your site as well as other marketing materials that motivate them to make a purchase with your company. Ultimately, these things together tell the story of your brand.
Brand Messaging is all about how your audience perceives you on the basis of your brand’s values, visions, missions, and culture. So, find out the –
- Purpose of your brand
- Vision for your brand
- Future of your brand in the next couple of years
What Is Internal Brand Messaging?
Internal brand messaging lets your employees know what and why your organization does what it does via a set of guidelines. Typically, it is based on your values, mission, and vision. It helps them to communicate with other people consistently.
What Is External Brand Messaging?
Once your internal brand messaging is all worked out, you can easily and effectively communicate to your customer base and target audience. Generally, external brand messaging comprises your positioning statement, factors that set you apart from your competitors, value propositions along with your tagline or slogan.
Why Is Brand Messaging Important for Your Company?
Every piece of content you share communicates your brand story in some way or the other, which means every person in your organization, must tell the same story consistently in whatever content you post.
Without having a proper set of guidelines for your brand messaging, you are going to end up with different stories or stories with different accents every time.
You need to frame your brand messaging guidelines in a way that will ensure all your team members, whether from sales, marketing, or support, are able to tell your brand story correctly. It should define you, your work, and the ways you do it. It typically includes:
- Your company’s unique selling proposition (USP)
- Your target audience’s description
- Your brand’s goals and values
- The story of your brand
- Your company’s taglines or slogans
- Voice tone to use
- Other messages to include, if any
- Any phrases or words to eliminate from your brand’s messages
Without proper guidelines, your content will be fragmented, but when every team member follows the guidelines, every piece of content will be in line and effective. This will help your brand to:
- Enhance brand consistency – Since everyone will be telling the same story, brand consistency will improve your brand awareness and grow confidence with your customers.
- Boost staff efficiency – Since everyone will know what document they need to refer to whenever creating any content, whether it is a post for social media, your website’s homepage, or a response to a support query.
- Increase revenue and boost lifetime value – Since consumers who trust the company they are purchasing products from, will eventually reward them with their loyalty, engagement, and recommendations.
Brand Messaging is responsible for making your brand relevant to your customer base and convinces them to trust in your company, which makes it extremely important for your organization.
Example of Successful Brand Messaging Strategy
Successful brands know the art and science of making their brand message consistent, memorable, and relevant to their target audience, and no surprise, this adds up to their success. Let’s understand this with an example of successful brand messaging strategy.
Apple Inc.
Apple is the master of selling the latest technology products using easy human benefit-driven language, and no doubt why Apple today is the world’s most valuable publicly traded company.
For instance, on the Apple’s recently launched iPhone 11, instead of talking on technicalities like pixels, resolution, memory, etc. they just went out with the tagline “Just the right amount of everything.”
Customers today love it when brands present things in the most easy-to-understand way, and that’s what Apple did to explain its benefits: “A new dual‑camera system captures more of what you see and love. The fastest chip ever in a smartphone and all‑day battery life let you do more and charge less. And the highest‑quality video in a smartphone, so your memories look better than ever.”
Now the customers need not have to worry about the tech specifications because they trust the brand – Apple to know what they are doing. They just want to have the latest iPhone model with the best camera and design.
How to Create a Brand Messaging Outline for Your Company
Now that we know about brand messaging and its importance for your company let’s discuss how you can create a brand messaging outline for your organization to enjoy all those benefits.
Components of a Brand Messaging Outline
A typical brand messaging outline contains your company’s:
- Tagline
- Value Proposition
- Brand Messaging Pillars
This type of outline is planned to flow from tip to toe, where each part strengthens and supports the previous one. Starting from your tagline (the main concept), it goes on to introduce your unique value proposition (your work) and ends with your brand messaging pillars (ways you do it.)
You can acquire the following information on the basis of your brand messaging guidelines to prepare your brand messaging outline.
Step 1: Create your value proposition
Value proposition is nothing but a simple statement that describes the benefits your products and services offer, i.e., what value consumers will get from it. It reflects how your company fixes a problem and why the customers should choose you over your competitors.
Find answers to these questions to create your value proposition:
- For who have you made the product/service? Who is it going to benefit?
- What are you helping them with? What does your product or service do?
- How does your product or service help them?
For instance,
ABC is a vitamin supplements manufacturer that helps people get the essential vitamins to ensure their good health for life.
Step 2: Make your tagline
A tagline should be short and snappy – like Apple’s “Think Different” and Nike’s “Just Do It.” It should also summarize your brand value proposition and positioning. Try using fewer words and leave the description part for your value proposition.
Step 3: Build your brand messaging pillars
Your brand messaging pillars form an important part of the outline. These pillars are the primary selling points or benefits that set apart your brand’s products or services from the crowd.
For example, if we see, Apple has put forward three primary benefits and features of iPhone 11:
- A new dual‑camera system captures more of what you see and love.
- The fastest chip ever in a smartphone and all‑day battery life let you do more and charge less.
- The highest‑quality video in a smartphone makes your memories look better than ever.
Now in case you have more selling points, then you should focus on the three most crucial benefits and features that you want to highlight, or you can think of ways to merge a few points into others.
Step 4 – Check and tweak your brand messaging
Once you have your brand messaging sorted, it’s time to check and refine it. Go through each section thoroughly to ensure that the message is flowing logically, the voice tone and language is appropriate, and the benefits are clear. You can add or discard words to enrich or compress your message accordingly.
How to Implement Your Brand Messaging Outline
Now that you have your brand messaging all worked out, you need to ensure that it is being implemented.
- Make it a part of your brand messaging guidelines
Firstly, you need to include your brand messaging outline in your brand messaging guidelines. They both go hand-in-hand, and using them together will make sure that you have a consistent brand message.
- Refer to it when developing content
Secondly, ensure that every team member, including the freelancers, is referring to the outline whenever they are developing content, whether it is for emails, ads, or social media. Every piece of content that you share should refer to your value proposition, tagline, and at least one of your brand messaging pillars.
Conclusion
Brand messaging is something that you strategically make to stand out from the competition and become relevant to your audience. It convinces the customers to trust your company, which is why your brand values and personality must be in line with that of your target audience.