If you’ve felt like your brand messaging is generic or you’ve, ahem, never gone through a brand messaging exercise, then this post (and video) are for you.
Think of it as a step-by-step guide to brand messaging that your clients will obsess over. A while back I shared six brand messaging mistakes, which you’ll also want to dive into. here are a few tips for you.
First, though, let’s explore what makes an obsession-worthy brand and messaging that draws customers in like flies to honey. Ultimately, you want to be the brand like Cards Against Humanity, Who Gives a Crap, or -Pourri that stand out. Whether you want to be as bold as these guys are is a totally different question, but even if your brand isn’t humor-driven, there are a few lessons to learn from them, especially in product-driven spaces.
In the B2B or professional world, your brand messaging should be specific and speak directly to the needs of your audience. I’ve shared this Venn diagram in the past to showcase how your brand needs to stand out:
But ultimately, if you can take away that your brand messaging uses a compelling voice to accurately portray what you do and how you talk about it, you’re at a great spot. However, getting there means diving into your audience’s needs and considering how your business meets them. Let’s dive in.
Understanding Your Brand Messaging
If you’re finding this challenging, you’re not alone. Brand messaging, while one of the most important things for a company to nail, is also one of the hardest. That’s because it’s ALL so important to YOUR company it’s hard to nail down what matters most to your buyers and then creating compelling language to speak to that. Some incredibly successful companies–we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue a year–are still figuring it out.
Then factor in any pivots or rebrands, and you get the picture. Not to focus on how hard this is, but to let you off the hook for not getting it yet. It takes time, energy, and a lot of deep work to figure out who you want to be and how to position yourself as a company.
However, it’s critical to all aspects of your business — marketing, sales, and operations– so you can create a consistent customer experience and minimize brand confusion.
4 Steps to Refine Your Brand Messaging
It’s one thing to understand that you need to do something and another to have the tools to go about it. Here’s how I recommend going about the brand messaging process.
- Undergo a brand strategy exercise: Get all the key decision makers into a room and have a workshop where you review company values, compare sales and marketing (and if they’re aligned), and explore how you want to be perceived in the marketplace.
- Conduct customer research: Interview your audience and spend some time mining reviews and testimonials (yours and your competitors) to find how what they want, what they’re saying, how they talk about their problems. From there you can identify disconnects between perception and reality, as well as opportunities and gaps in the industry.
- KISS (Keep it simple sweetheart): Ditch the jargon in favor of clear, accessible language that’s skimmable, engaging, and easy to read. It should be accessible to all potential influencers in the decision-making process, not just key decision makers but anyone who will be involved either in sales or delivery. Hint: Read everything out loud to see how it sounds..
- Codify your message: By that I mean, get it in writing and figure out some key messages that move the needle. A few ways to do this include a brand messaging guide that outlines core messages, objections, problems, and your solutions. You may also want a one-page ‘say this, not that’ document you can use to onboard your team.
Go Forth and Conquer
Of course, it’s never quite as easy as checking the boxes. You need a consensus and someone to facilitate the discussion, keeping things on track, and pulling on threads or areas of dissent. Is this a guaranteed path to obsession worth brand messaging? Absolutely not. Will it get you started on the right foot? Yep. And if you’d like to discuss how we can work together on YOUR business, let’s chat. Schedule a call here.
Want to see me discuss this deeper? Check out the video below.
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Who am I to share this? I’m a brand messaging strategist and copywriter who helps smart, driven entrepreneurs and business owners turn their companies into customer magnets.
Want to know more about how I do it? You can check out my website ErinPennings.com to learn my process for clarifying your message and using it to tell your story with effective website copy and thought leadership content that fuels your funnels.
