Your brand message should be at the centre of marketing, sales and communications strategies for businesses of all sizes. With buying decisions losing the influence of salespeople, it’s more important than ever to create clear, concise and coherent brand messaging to attract and retain customers.
Creating clear brand messaging
A strong brand message will help you to demonstrate credibility, improve the performance of your advertising and will even drive brand loyalty and advocacy, helping you to better retain customers and scale up your marketing efforts.
One of the main objectives when creating clear brand messaging is to provide clarity to your customers so that they can quickly understand what it is that you do, and what makes your business stand out among the competition, ultimately enabling them to make purchasing decisions. Creating unique brand messaging usually forms a part of your initial brand development strategy.
In order to clarify what it is that you do, and what messaging you want to put out into the ether, here are some starting questions to ask yourselves:
- What do you do?
- What are your USPs, and why are you different?
- What is the impact of your product/services on your customers?
- Are you the best at what you do? Why?
- How do people currently perceive your business? Are these perceptions accurate?
- How do you want people to think about your business?
Your answers to the above questions combined with your brand mission and goals will help you to start developing a brand message that stands the test of time.
Implementing your brand messaging
One of the easiest ways of creating a muddled brand message is by not having guidelines in place. A comprehensive set of brand guidelines will keep all of your teams on the same page, and will mean that whether your customers find you on your website, through online advertising or from an email, your messaging will be coherent across all platforms and customer touchpoints.
This also extends to your product and customer service teams – if your brand messaging talks about putting customers first, but this isn’t supported by the customer experience, this will confuse your customers and ruin the efficacy of your brand messaging.
The form that your messaging takes can vary, based on your current goals as a business, as well as on the platforms you’re using. For example, as part of your acquisition strategy, you may create content and messaging that clearly shows the benefits of your product or service on social media.
However, if you’re looking to retain customers, you may focus on customer engagement-style messaging, and content that demonstrates your authority in your industry using targeted email campaigns.
Measuring your messaging
It’s important to measure the effects of your brand messaging regularly. Although your tagline and product descriptions may seem clear to you, many businesses find during research that there have been misunderstandings which have caused potential customers not to get in touch, or deciding not to purchase at all.
As well as asking for feedback on your website and messaging, a great source of insights is ‘listening’. Social listening tools such as Awario and Mention can enable you to ‘listen’ to the conversations about you and your brand online, to monitor trends and to react and adjust your messaging accordingly to provide clarity.
To conclude, it’s important to not only create clear brand messaging initially, but to implement it consistently across all customer touchpoints, and to monitor and react as needed.