Looking to attract your ideal clients? (Aren’t we all?) The key to making that connection with ease is your brand messaging. However, this is something that people often skip over or push off when looking at their brand as a whole. They skip to the sexy part in the design, but the messaging is vital as well.
As a brand and web designer, I have seen firsthand the importance of brand messaging and the effect it can have on your business. Even if you do have the most beautifully designed brand in the world, if you don’t have the messaging to back it up, it is still going to be difficult to connect with potential clients.
So, let’s take a look at what this is, the importance of brand messaging for your business, and how we incorporate brand messaging into our brand strategy process for clients.
What is Brand Messaging
When it comes to brand messaging, you’ll often hear people group it together with brand voice. These two do go hand in hand, but your brand messaging is essentially what you are saying to the people you are speaking to and your brand voice and tone is how you sound and communicate. In other words, brand messaging is words and your voice is how the words come across. (Remember denotation and connotation in English class, similar to that!)
Your message is what people are going to connect with and how you can start to build trust and confidence in your brand right from the start. It’s not all the copy, but key phrases, headers, statements, and words you use on repeat to solidify who your brand connects with. Your brand messaging, just like every other part of your brand, should be based on strategy.
This strategy is going to dive into different parts of your business such as:
- Who your ideal client is
- What you are actually doing
- Why you are doing it
- The issues or struggles that your clients are facing
- And tie in your brand personality
Once you have this strategy down, you are able to use this as a roadmap when it comes to building out your brand messaging. This will help you decide exactly what you need to say to your clients to connect and will also help you decide how to say it (ie your brand voice).
Brand messaging also covers a wide range of platforms across your business. Just like you want all of your logos and colors to match wherever someone connects with you, you want your brand messaging to be the same across the board.
This means you may build out things like taglines or slogans to use on social media and your website, key points that you always connect back to in your copy, and even the ideas that you focus on when it comes to your email newsletters or videos.
Every single touchpoint that someone has with your brand should work to further your brand messaging and make those connections with your clients before you even get on a call or sell them their first product.
What is the Importance of Brand Messaging
Now, when it comes to the importance of brand messaging, there are a few key reasons why this can make such a big difference in your business.
As I mentioned earlier, your brand messaging is a way to connect with your ideal clients and start to build trust and confidence in your business and brand. Doing this right off the bat when someone comes across your business is crucial, especially in today’s market as we start to see a shift in buying habits and people valuing having all of the information upfront.
We shouldn’t feel as though we have to get on a call or send over more information to help further our brand messaging and what we want to highlight with our business. Instead, that should all be laid out and clear right from the start.
People also value that connection with the businesses and brands that they invest in and this is the first step when it comes to that foundation. Especially as small business owners, people are going to be investing in you as a person as well so you want to make sure that you are effectively able to communicate who it is that is going to benefit from working with you and what exactly you can do.
Your brand messaging is also a great way to separate yourself in the market and stand out. There has absolutely been an increase in online businesses and the market as a whole is getting bigger and bigger.
While that does mean there is more diversity which is amazing, it also means that there is more competition. Your brand messaging can help to separate you from the rest of the herd and allow you to stand out in potential client’s minds as someone who is different and speaks directly to them.
For example, let’s say you are a copywriter. There are thousands of different copywriters that people can choose from to work with. So, how do you make yourself stand out and make sure that your ideal clients find you? It is your brand messaging.
This is where you can really break down who you are, and what you are doing, you can speak to the exact issues or thoughts that they are actually facing and show how you can help them to overcome those problems with your unique method or special process.
This is where the strategy part also plays a big role. If we are thinking about a copywriter, you may say “Oh, well the problem they are facing is not having copy.” And, yes, the reason they are looking for a copywriter is that they need copy, but it goes deeper than that.
You need to think about who your ideal client is and what they really want when it comes to their own business or their own life.
For example, maybe as a copywriter, you love working with personality-packed brands, and the problem that you often see clients face is that their copy just doesn’t feel like them and doesn’t show off their personality.
So, in your own brand messaging, you can highlight that you understand the value of personality and how that is something that is going to be unique to their business and how you can work with them to create copy that not only sounds like them but also addresses the root of what their clients are looking for.
Your brand messaging is really the root of how you communicate with your clients and how you make yourself stand out in a saturated market. However, you need to ensure that it is actually backed by a strategy for your brand so that it actually connects and converts with the people you want it to.
Examples of Brand Messaging
So, now that we have talked about the importance of brand messaging, let’s talk about what it actually looks like in action. Keep in mind that just like every other part of your brand, messaging is going to vary from business to business in order to target the specific types of clients that the business is rooted in.
Dueta™
Dueta™ is a platform that is designed to connect business owners with reputable professional service providers. When it came to their brand messaging, we really wanted to do two things:
RESULTS THAT SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES
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- Target the root issue that their clients are facing – hiring trustworthy service providers to help their business
- Stand out from other services with messaging that is clever and sticks in people’s minds.
Their tagline is: “The Modern Matchmaker for Business Support™” and then some of the phrasing we came up with is: “Find your perfect match, fuel your success”, and “No more guesswork—only vetted service providers.”
When it came to standing out, we leaned on their name to create slogans and phrasing that would stick in people’s minds. These were phrases such as “Dueta™: Where Every Match is the Perfect Du-et”, “Du More, Worry Less”, and “Du What You Do Best, Your Match Can Handle The Rest”. And “Du Business Supported” which is on their merch we designed.
Not only do these still speak to the issues their clients face, but they also did it in a clever way that people will remember.
Socially Her
Socially Her is a social media management and strategy company. When it came to their brand messaging, we really wanted to show off that they didn’t just post on social media for you, but they also helped build a strategy that would actually work.
So, when it came to their brand messaging, we created this tagline: “Where Your Story Meets Strategic Marketing” and for their signature course for SMMs we created this: “Strategize. Market. Measure. | Your Social Media Management Biz Blueprint”, and finally for general phrasing we wrote this statement: “Where Your Marketing Efforts Actually Reach Your Audience.”
In the sea of social media managers, we are instantly showing how they are different and what they do beyond what other service providers offer to help your marketing succeed.
Golden Hour Esthetics
Golden Hour Esthetics is a holistic facial and skin care business. They had a new signature service that they were offering, but they didn’t have a name for it.
This is another great way to use your brand messaging outside of the normal copy or slogans that you would expect. We took the strategy that we built and came up with a new name for the service “The Luminary” that was able to connect with their business name and create an overall consistent feel across their brand.
Donchez Law
Donchez Law is a father-daughter law firm focusing on personal injury law. With their brand messaging, there were a few different topics that we wanted to navigate to make sure that the right message was being communicated to their clients.
So, for their tagline, we created “Generations of Justice in Personal Injury Law.” This tagline allowed us to highlight the generational aspect of their business (ie their father-daughter relationship) without actually saying the word family.
When it comes to their industry, this is something we really wanted to make sure we were able to differentiate so that potential clients didn’t associate “family” with family or divorce law.
This goes to show that even small aspects of your brand messaging such as this can help to create a clear vision for who your brand is.
Final Thoughts on Brand Messaging
So, when it comes to your brand messaging, it really is a foundational aspect of your business and needs to be created with strategy in mind. Doing so will not only allow you to more easily communicate with your ideal clients, but it will also start to build that trust and confidence in your brand right from the start.
If you are ready to take the next step and create a brand that not only looks amazing but also connects with your clients, I’d love to chat. You can click here to learn more about my brand and web design services or click here to get in touch!
