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Every business owner has plenty of experience describing their products and services. But what should you do when you’re not speaking as yourself, but as your business? That’s what we mean by brand messaging — and creating a proactive brand strategy, with consistent brand messaging, is key to attracting customers and winning their loyalty.
What is Brand Messaging?
Your brand messaging is how your business talks about itself and communicates with prospective (and returning) customers. Your brand messaging is showcased everywhere your business operates, including:
Your website
Your social media channels
Your newsletter
Your customer service
Your advertisements
Your product packaging
When you communicate as your brand, you aren’t speaking only as yourself, whether you’re a business owner, marketer, or agent. You take on the role of the business itself, speaking on behalf of everyone involved, to deliver a clear identity for your entire organization and its offerings.
Why is Brand Messaging Important?
When you’re at the grocery store, the shelves aren’t full of plain boxes describing what’s inside. You aren’t only faced with one option for every product, either. Whatever marketplace your business inhabits, your customers have options, and they’re all competing for attention.
Your brand positioning is how you can catch your customers’ attention, and communicate your brand’s unique qualities to them.
When you’re creating a brand messaging framework, consider what sets your product, services, or identity apart from the competition, including:
What makes your offerings better or different
Your business background and story
A particular mission or cause your business supports
A specific style or outlook connected to your audience
Your message needs to be direct and digestible. Think about the top thing you want prospective customers to know about your brand, and make sure your audience can understand it with even a brief look at your messaging. You don’t want your brand’s voice to get lost in the crowd.
How to Test Brand Messaging
Testing is a fantastic way to gauge your audience’s response to your brand messaging and make any necessary adjustments to maximize their engagement. When you’re not sure which message will work the best, want to try multiple approaches, or just want to make sure your approach is effective, a strategic test is an ideal tool.
The most common way to test brand messaging is through an A/B test. You’ll deploy two versions of your message, then monitor which one reaches more customers, or whether there are any other differences in your audience’s response. Your A and B versions can take many different forms — you might test different imagery, descriptions, or any other element of your message. You’ll want to keep everything else in the test the same so that you’re only measuring the differences in performance between your two versions.
Many marketing platforms have built-in ways to deploy and manage these tests and to retrieve and analyze your testing data. Once your test has run, you can dig into all of the differences between your two versions, see which offered better performance on your key metrics, and feel more confident about your messaging going forward.
What to Include in Your Branding and Messaging Guide
Sure, you may understand all of the specific ins and outs of your brand’s message, but eventually, you’ll need to communicate those notes to other people. Whether you’re training your own marketing team or working with an outside agency, a brand guide can be enormously helpful.
Your branding and messaging guide should include:
The key points to communicate about your brand
Descriptions and examples of your brand’s voice
Do’s and don’ts for talking about your brand
Specific formatting or vocabulary requests
Brand colors, logos, and other visual elements
With your guide in hand, everyone else can follow your instructions and ensure your brand messaging has a consistent voice, tone, and presentation. Ideally, all of your brand’s messaging, regardless of who created it, should feel like it really came from one source. Your branding and messaging guide are how you can help ensure that happens.
Need support with your brand strategy and messaging?
Reach out to our team! We can support you with branding your organization, creating a visual identity that has longevity, and positioning your brand with messaging that resonates with your target audience.
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