Marketing messaging goes so much further than a tagline or a slogan. It is the overarching theme of the words your brand uses, the type of voice it conveys.
Great marketing messaging shows in the language and phrasing that shows up through your brand’s presence and dictates how successful a campaign will be. Here are some tips to utilize messaging to create successful campaigns.
Brand messaging
Brand messaging ultimately starts with establishing what your USP, or Unique Selling Position, is. A Unique Selling Position is what makes your brand unique and tells your customers why they should buy your product or service instead of a competitor’s.
In every successful brand messaging strategy, there is an attractive USP that shows what makes you different.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a specific feature, but it will be the distinctive piece that will transfer throughout your brand messaging and help you create a successful campaign.
Understanding Your Audience
First, you’ll need to understand your audience. It’s virtually impossible to develop a successful marketing messaging strategy without knowing who you are targeting.
You will need to know some helpful insights before delving in, like demographics, psychographics, and behavioral characteristics. This will help you understand the type of language they respond to and use.
Surveys and analytics can help you find this information about your target audience, whether from Google Analytics, social insights, or conducted surveys. If you have multiple target audiences, you will have to find this information for each group and target them a little differently.
Telling a story
A good story that is told well and authentically can help customers connect emotionally with a brand. This story will help form a core part of your messaging strategy.
To help establish your story, think about why the product or service exists, how it came to be or why it was created, and what it means to you? Think further than just practical use. Try to figure out what the product or service does in the grand scheme of things.
For example, if you are a dentist, you are in a very competitive niche. So it means you need to be very crafty. People are often afraid of dentists, and you need to show your expertise and professionalism and tell your unique story to create that familiar feeling.
You can craft your strategy alone, or you can hire dental management consulting experts that will help you find the right message and the right medium to spread that message to your community. Use examples from other brands to gain insight on how to tell your own story. Be creative!
Establishing a goal
Finding a story for your brand messaging is important, but figuring out what your goal is with that messaging is crucial. And we don’t mean financial goals. Think about what you are trying to achieve or change with your product or service, whether that be improving people’s lives or helping the environment. It is the overall theme that your product will accomplish.
Brands that show they are trying to do good in the world resonate with consumers who are becoming more socially conscious. This “goal” will help form your story and your brand and will bring a tone of voice to your messaging.
Having something you care about that goes past making money, and voicing it successfully, can play a tremendous part in producing a great brand messaging strategy and creating a great brand as a whole.
Brand Messaging Guidelines
To develop a prominent brand messaging campaign, you will have to create a story, choose a goal, and understand your audience to create the actual message.
You will also need to have brand messaging guidelines in place to guide you through the process. This will help you maintain a consistent voice across all of your different communication channels, whether that be social media, PR, or other marketing campaigns, or even your website and other marketing materials.
Your brand guidelines should contain a detailed description of your target audience, any taglines or brand slogans, your brand’s story, the company’s mission statement and values, the consistent tone of voice to be used per media channel, and when these different tone of voices should be used for each audience.
It should also include any off-limit phrases or words to avoid, specific wording to refer to your brand, service, and product, and finally, your unique selling position or your USP.
Pulling it all together
Pulling together these guidelines and moving pieces can be tricky and requires a lot of training, skill, and creativity, especially when already running a business.
This is why working with a specialized team like Clarify will help set you up for success without all the worry. When applying these steps, you will create a successful branding strategy to manage a consistent tone of voice, intriguing storytelling, and compelling consumer messaging.