By Kim Hughes, Director
In today’s fast-paced and ever-evolving business landscape, building a strong brand presence is more crucial than ever.
Your organisation’s messaging plays a pivotal role in shaping your brand’s identity and helping you connect with your target audience, so how do you make sure it is impactful?
Here’s a simple step-by-step process to help you start to develop compelling brand messaging that really resonates with your audience and sets you apart from your competitors.
Understanding the Power of Brand Messaging
Before diving into the specifics, it’s important to understand the significance of your brand story. As Jonah Sachs, a well-known American author, designer, and entrepreneur once said: “Your brand is a story unfolding across all customer touchpoints.”
That story is the thread that weaves through every customer interaction – it’s what you become recognised for.
Brand messaging isn’t merely about PR and reputation management; it’s about strategic storytelling.
It’s about using your experiences, history, traditions, and innovations to showcase what your business is all about. At its core, brand messaging is about being clear on your key messages, ensuring consistency across all communication channels, and building a strong reputation based on genuine human connections.
The Purpose of Key Messages
Key messages are the backbone of your brand’s communication strategy. They serve several crucial functions:
- Reducing noise and overwhelm: Key messages help simplify your communication and make it more effective.
- Empowering your team: They enable your team members, as well as external partners, to be the proactive voice for your brand.
- Ensuring consistency: Key messages maintain brand consistency, credibility, and momentum.
- Focusing on product/service development: They provide a reliable focus for product and service development.
- Connecting with your audience: Key messages help your brand be better understood by prospective clients.
- Seeking opportunities and rejecting distractions: They assist in helping you accept the right opportunities while dismissing distractions.
Now, let’s dive into the steps to develop strong brand messaging.
Start with Your “Why”
Ask yourself these simple questions and brainstorm your answers…
- Your organisation’s inspiration: What inspired the creation of your business?
- Your motivation: Why do you do what you do?
- What you do: How are you serving your audience?
- Your purpose: What is the impact you want to make in your field or industry?
- Your company name: Why did you choose it? Does it mean anything significant?
Understand your ideal clients
To create messaging that resonates, you must also understand your ideal clients deeply. This goes beyond knowing your target audience; it’s about understanding their traits, problems, and feelings.
Here’s some examples of how you can start to think about this:
- Ask your clients: Conduct surveys or engage in conversations with your prospects and customers to understand their needs and pain points.
- Sales questions: Utilise common sales questions to grasp their problems. Keep a note of common themes.
- Leverage social media: Monitor social media platforms to identify industry-related talking points.
- Qualitative market research: Gain insights into your audience’s beliefs and viewpoints through market research.
Understanding your clients’ traits, problems, and feelings will help you tailor your messages to speak directly to their needs, and these are just some of the ways we can dive deeper.
Define your solutions
Your brand messaging should clearly convey the solutions you offer too. Have a think about your unique selling points (USPs) and key strengths:
- Stand out from competitors: What sets you apart from your competitors? Is it your exceptional customer service or something more unique like a money-back guarantee?
- Greatest strengths: Identify your strengths and notable achievements, such as business growth, awards, expertise etc.
- Sector impact: Consider how your business influences your industry, both in terms of opportunities and threats.
- Tangible Outcomes: Define the tangible outcomes of your products or services.
These insights will help give you clarity around your solutions, and talking about them in your communications will make your brand messaging more compelling and effective.
Define your brand personality and tone of voice
Your brand should have a distinct personality and tone of voice. Think of your business as a person. What would you want to be known as? Here are some adjectives and phrases to get you started:
- Friendly
- Innovative
- Professional
- Approachable
- Trustworthy
- Enthusiastic
- Informative
- Empowering
- Relatable
- Passionate
Your chosen personality and tone of voice will guide how you communicate with your audience and what you say.
In summary
We’ve just shared a really simple process to start you thinking about messaging you can weave into your communications and use as a guide for your content creation, whether it’s in blogs, website copy, social media posts etc.
Keep your notes to hand, share them with your team, and start to focus on your audience’s problems and the solutions you provide.
We hope this guide has been useful in helping you strengthen your brand messaging. If you’d like to learn more about our PR & Marketing strategies Contact Us.
