Converting a prospect into a customer can feel like more than an uphill battle in a cloudy economic climate; it can feel like trying to scale a mountain. For some, climbing a mountain like Mount Everest could seem like an impossible feat. But what if I told you that over 11,000 people have climbed what is internationally recognized as the tallest mountain on earth? Well, most of these people didn’t accomplish this achievement alone. They had a map and a guide to help them along the way. Similarly, as a business, you must be the guide for your customers, and your brand messaging will be the map and compass that helps you guide them to the top of the mountain. Many business owners and executives like you wonder, How do you create a brand message? We’ll help you navigate this daunting terrain!
How Do You Create a Brand Message?
Effective brand messaging has two essential components: defining the audiences you are speaking to and crafting a brand messaging guide for how you will engage and appeal to them with every piece of content you produce. Both components feed into each other.
Related Article: What is a Brand Messaging Strategy?
Defining Your Audiences
Before crafting your messaging, you must define your audience, which is a crucial starting point for those asking themselves, How do you create a brand message?
For this part of the process, you want to identify 2 to 4 audiences. Gaining this information requires a deep understanding of your business and industry, and at KWSM, we get much of this information from clients because they are the only ones who have the answers!
Through meetings and interviews, we ask questions to determine who their primary audiences are. This requires researching a client and their industry before the meeting, asking leading questions, and inferring from their answers about their ideal prospect.
Ultimately, the aim is to go through and outline the 3 primary levels of each pain point for their audience as it relates to their business:
- External: What brings them to you in the first place?
- Internal: How does this make them feel?
- Motivational: What does a client think they deserve when they come to you for help (e.g., I have this problem, deserve help, and shouldn’t have to feel this way)?
The 3 Parts of Effective Brand Messaging
Once you have defined the audiences, you can begin the brand messaging! After all, you cannot know how to speak to people without defining who those people are. There are 3 essential elements to creating an effective brand message.
Voice and Tone
You should first focus on nailing down the voice and tone. You want to outline at least 3 and at most 5 adjectives. The voice and tone will be the parameters for your marketing collateral.
Perhaps you want to come off as authoritative to your audience. Or maybe you want to be perceived as more fun or enthusiastic. Depending on your industry, you might even want to have a modern voice and tone in your blogs, email drips, and social media content!
Identifying the right voice and tone typically requires an in-depth conversation or interview with the client. During this conversation, we attempt to identify and evaluate the temperature of the client and industry and any existing content.
“I’ve found that simple questions to clients like, ‘What differentiates you from your competitors?’ can be goldmines for brand messaging. Essentially, you’re trying to figure out why a client would choose them over someone else, which is central to the message you want to convey to the audience.”
– Kyle Cavaness, Senior Copywriter, KWSM
Unique Audience Messages
You also want to create unique messages for each audience. In these messages, you write a mini-story for the customer, illustrating where they are when they come to you and what pain point your service will help resolve.
The unique audience messages should be between 150 to 200 words. Your goal is to hook the audience with the problem and present a “better way” to do things. This messaging dictates how you communicate with each audience segment in all content you produce.
A great way to think of unique audience messages is as a narrative that you can use when writing and promoting each service for your business.
Primary Message
The next part of creating an effective brand message is the primary message. The primary message in the brand messaging will outline how you address the entire audience and not individual segments.
For example, imagine you are a credit union that specializes in auto loans. You will communicate to someone with bad credit who needs a second chance auto loan differently than someone getting their first-ever auto loan.
Conversely, for primary messaging, you are crafting a guide for how to communicate to all borrowers coming to your institution, leveraging your unique value proposition. Generally, you can think of the primary message as the narrative for the About page of your website.
Related Article: What Should Be Included in Brand Messaging?
Need to Create a Compelling and Effective Brand Message that Turns Interest into Conversions? Schedule a Consultation Today!
So, how do you create a brand message? Creating a brand message is a time and labor-intensive process that requires considerable experience and marketing expertise in understanding how a brand should engage with its audience. The nuances of dialing in the messaging can be daunting for many business owners. But once you have scaled that mountain together, you will be greeted by blue skies, even in a cloudy economic climate!
Your company deserves to work with a digital marketing agency that can craft a brand message that turns prospects into profit. Visit our Digital Marketing Strategy Services page to learn more and schedule a consultation.
