The Essential Brand Messaging Guide: What to Know
Whether you sell products, provide services, or are even just trying to make a career change, communicating your brand to your audience is critically important. Your brand story is your calling card, telling your fans, potential customers or clients, and prospective employees and employers what you do, what you believe, and how you operate. Because your brand story is so important, you need to make sure your brand messaging is clear, engaging, and consistent. If people can’t tell what you do or see conflicting messages on your website versus your social media accounts, it can undermine the hard work you do every single day.
If you’re not sure where to start with communicating your brand story or you just think you might be ready for a refresh, you need this essential brand messaging guide. It will help you drill down to the heart of your story, creating messaging that resonates with your audience, encourages them to engage with the brand, and builds trust in your brand and your credibility.
When it comes to refining your brand messaging, here’s what you need to know.
What is Brand Messaging?
Your brand messaging is how you communicate your brand’s mission, offerings, and value to your audience, whether that’s customers, prospective customers, the general public, potential employees, and more. Before you can share your brand messaging with others, you need to have a good grasp of what you want to say.
Your brand messaging will include all of your communications from website copy and taglines to mission statements, marketing materials, panel appearances, customer service conversations, emails, and more. Ultimately, you want to consistently share your brand’s voice, value, and identity across all of these channels, sending a clear message about who you are no matter who you’re talking to.
Why is Brand Messaging Important?
Brand messaging has a number of goals. You want your brand messaging to:
Build credibility: Clear, authoritative, consistent narratives can help you establish yourself as a leader in the field and also work to establish you and your brand as experts.
Sets you apart: A big part of what you include in your overall brand messaging should be what makes you different from your competitors. Why should people hire you or trust you over others operating in the same space?
Establishes relationships: People want to feel connected to your brand and want to support stories, values, and people instead of solely making a purchase. Your brand messaging helps them understand who you are and why you do what you do, which can help drive that relationship.
Boosts conversions: Once people understand the value you bring, they’re more likely to make a purchase, set up an appointment, or get excited about potential opportunities.
Your Step-by-Step Guide to Essential Brand Messaging
Now that you understand what we mean when we say “brand messaging” and how the right messaging can make a real difference for your business, you’re ready to start pulling together your key messaging points and writing your brand story. Here are some brand messaging best practices to help guide your way:
Know your audience
Everything you share with the public should be built on the foundation of who your audience is and what they need. Here are a few things to consider when building out background information on your audience:
Who are you talking to and why?
What problems are they having and how can you solve them?
How can you spur them to convert?
2. Know your value
In order to create effective brand messages, you need to have a very clear understanding of what your brand brings to the table. How can you help your audience? What do you have or do that your competitors don’t? Your brand messaging should help people understand why choosing your brand over another is a good idea.
3. Create your brand voice
When you’re working on your brand messaging, one of the most important (and perhaps most frequently overlooked) parts is developing your brand voice and tone. Create a style guide and a voice guide for your brand so that you can share it with anyone else who is also writing copy or otherwise sharing your brand message, so that you know everything will stay consistent no matter who is creating the materials.
When creating your brand voice and tone, you want to think about your brand identity, the industry in which you work, and your audience. Do you work in a particularly formal industry? Then you may want your brand voice to also be a bit more formal. Do you like a more laid-back, informal tone? Make sure all of your communications fit within that.
Working to define your brand voice can help make sure that your messaging stays consistent, so it’s worth doing early on if possible.
4. Create your key messages
Once you've determined your brand voice and tone, it's time to create specific key messages. If you're a solopreneur, you'll likely be creating your brand messaging on your own, but if you have a team, there are more people who should be involved. Make sure you're including:
The founder or company leaders: This group is integral to the brand messaging process. Because they're most closely focused on the brand's overall mission and core values, they have a lot they can contribute to key message development. Plus, in the case of a small business, people in these roles may have previously filled a number of different roles (like sales, marketing, customer service, and the like) that would help give them additional insights into what customers think, need, and can relate to.
The marketing team: Unsurprisingly, you're going to want your marketing and communications pros in the room when you're working on key messages. This group knows how to best speak to your audience and how to tailor that messaging to various marketing channels: emails, social media platforms, website copy, etc. They're also going to be great at looking at messaging points in different ways, which can be really valuable when working through how you want to position your brand to reach various groups of people.
The sales team and the customer service team: Although they may not need to be in the room during initial development (though they might be helpful during brainstorming phases!), you're going to make sure you run any key messages by the sales and customer service teams. These groups are in constant communication with your audience and are most likely to hear customer feedback. Don't leave them out.
The creative team: While the wording you use for your key messages is important, successful brand messaging requires visual elements. Loop the creative team in sooner rather than later so that all of your messaging—verbal and visual—is cohesive.
The product team: If you have products, especially technical products, that you're selling, including the product team can help you make sure you include details in your messaging that you may otherwise overlook.
Other people you may want to include: When developing your key messaging, you may also want to include consultants you work with, outside agencies (like a PR agency), or other stakeholders like investors. These groups—like the sales and customer service teams—may not need to be involved from the very beginning (though it may be helpful to have your PR team included), but you might benefit from sharing everything with these kinds of people before making any final decisions on what your messaging strategy will look like moving forward.
When you bring the group together, here's what you'll want to focus on to make sure that you're creating effective brand messaging that reflects the brand's values and the overall brand personality:
Think about the brand's unique value proposition: What is the main thing that your brand delivers for your audience that other brands don't? Make sure you're able to express it in a clear, short sentence that can be included in all kinds of marketing campaigns, materials, and other comms.
Think about different segments of your audience: How can you adjust your key messaging or supporting messaging to make sure it reaches different groups of people. It's likely that your customer base is made up of smaller groups of people looking for different things. How can you create unique selling points for all of them?
Think about how you can simplify: Ultimately, you should be creating consistent messaging that's easy to understand. Your initial efforts will bring you closer to your final messaging, but they may be too detailed or complicated to work for final public messaging. Your messaging strategy should be simple, built on the needs of your target audience and your brand pillars and values.
You'll also want to think about the different kinds of messaging you need to create. Do you need a new mission statement? Are you focused on defining how you want to talk about your brand's competitive advantage? Do you think your brand's elevator pitch needs work? Or are you just working on building some general messages that will help build a solid foundation for all of your content creation and marketing efforts.
5. Build your brand messaging framework
Now that you've identified what your most important messaging looks like, you're ready to build out your brand messaging framework. Your messaging framework will be your map. This strategic document should include all of your key messaging so that you can make sure you incorporate it into your various communication channels. This way, you’ll be able to keep your brand messaging consistent more easily, no matter where the messaging appears.
On your brand messaging framework doc, make sure to include:
Core messaging: This is the main story, mission, or message you want to share with your audience.
Secondary or supporting messaging: This is all of the messaging that helps to support your core messaging.
Taglines and other quick phrasing: These kinds of messages are usually short and sweet, but catchy and memorable for your audience. They’re things that will stick in people’s heads and make them think of your brand. They should be representative of your identity and mission if possible to be most effective.
You ideally want this document to be an exhaustive (but organized) list of all of the messaging your team thinks is important when discussing your brand. You can also include the most important visuals to make a more comprehensive framework that will be beneficial to all members of your team.
6. Refine your messaging
It might be a little bit frustrating to hear, given all of the time and effort you put into creating your messaging and implementing your communication plans, but you probably will have to continue to refine your messaging over time.
The best way to understand if your messaging is resonating with your target audience is to share it with real people, hear their feedback, and adjust things accordingly. If there’s something they’re not understanding or that seems to push them away from your brand, you’ll need to make some adjustments to your brand messaging so that it’s as effective and impactful as possible. Review your messaging every so often so that you can make sure your brand communications grow with your audience and your offerings.
Solid, strong brand messaging strategies are critical for helping your brand grow. This essential brand messaging guide will help you create messaging that resonates amongst your audience as well as implement that messaging and know how to review and refine your messaging as needed.
Once you've nailed down your brand's messaging, the next step is to implement it across blog posts, your website, social media posts, emails, press releases, and more.
Ultimately, your messaging should be clear, concise, and consistent across all channels. The stronger your brand messaging is, the more solid your brand’s foundation.
Need more help defining or refining your brand message? We can help! Reach out to learn more.