Brand messaging is the strategic creation of a message to communicate the value of your brand.
It’s important because it helps you stand out from the competition, create demand for your products and services, and develop an emotional connection with your customers.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss why brand messaging is important and how to create a strong message that resonates with your audience.
What is brand messaging?
Brand messaging is an extension of your brand identity; it helps you communicate with customers more effectively and represents how you present yourself and your products or services to the world.
Brand messaging includes all forms of communication—written words, visuals, videos, emails, and more. Brand messaging can help you build trust and affinity with customers by resonating with their emotions and needs.
Your brand messaging should be consistent across all platforms, as consistency in branding helps create trust. If consumers can rely on your brand, business, and products, they can become return customers and advocates.
Additionally, consistency makes it easier for customers to remember who you are and how to reach out (or recommend you to others). This can help increase conversions and loyalty over time.
Internal vs. external brand messaging
Brand messaging also plays an important role inside your business. Let’s discuss the difference between internal and external brand messaging.
Internal brand messaging
Internal messaging is about creating an environment that supports your brand’s mission and values. It should focus on connecting employees to the company’s core values while inspiring them to work together towards common goals.
Good internal brand messaging should be succinct, clear, and consistent across all departments.
It should also be tailored to different teams and levels of management within your company. For example, communications sent out from HR or the CEO may need to be more formal than those sent from other departments, such as marketing or sales teams.
External brand messaging
External messaging is about connecting with customers and potential customers to build trust in your brand. It should focus on effectively communicating your brand’s value proposition and highlighting what makes you unique from your competitors.
Good external brand messaging should be engaging, creative, and easy for customers to understand.
It should also consider different communication channels, such as your website, social media, press releases, marketing campaigns, and blog posts. For example, the brand message on your homepage should be more comprehensive and catchy (as it may be a shopper’s first impression of your brand) than an abandoned cart email to a returning online customer.
Why is brand messaging important?
Brand messaging differentiates your business in a crowded marketplace.
Even if your business is competing in a relatively untapped industry, a strong, resonant brand message can help establish trust with customers bombarded with advertisements all day.
Here are a few other reasons why brand messaging is important.
To establish your brand identity
Brand messaging helps you determine how to best articulate the unique identity of your business. This includes your mission, values, and brand voice, as well as your brand story and brand promise.
Delivering consistent messages across all platforms—from your website to product packaging—will help you build an effective brand identity that resonates with your target audience. You should also consider using visual elements such as logo design and slogans to reinforce your brand messaging.
A professional logo design can enhance your brand’s credibility and make a strong first impression. Investing in high-quality design work will ensure that your brand stands out in a competitive market
To build trust
When making decisions on who they buy from, customers often look at what a company stands for just as much as they do the quality of the product or service being offered.
Through effective brand messaging, you can show customers that you are reliable and trustworthy; this will make them feel more comfortable buying from you than a competitor who doesn’t have clear messaging around their values, mission and vision statement.
To engage with customers
The most successful businesses understand that it’s not enough to simply deliver great products; they must also cultivate relationships with their customers to generate loyalty and return visits.
By leveraging strong brand messaging through channels like email newsletters, blog posts, and social media posts, businesses can create a two-way dialogue between themselves and their target customers, which goes beyond simply pushing sales messages out into the world.
Creating an emotional connection with potential customers or partners can create demand for your product or service and ensure that they remember you.
Bonus: To craft a winning team
Additionally, strong brand messaging can help you attract top talent by communicating why people should join your team to grow their careers.
This can give you an edge over competing businesses in tight job markets. It can also strengthen your company culture and help your employees connect with the “why” behind their work.
What is a brand messaging framework?
A brand messaging framework is an internal document that helps teams craft a concise and consistent message about their product or service.
It outlines the company’s core values, what it offers customers, how it stands out from its competitors, and why it matters in the marketplace.
As such, it serves as a reference point when creating marketing materials or responding to customer inquiries.
How can your team benefit from a brand messaging framework?
I’m sure your organization has dozens of documents. Does it really need another?
Yes. A well-crafted brand messaging framework enables teams to operate more efficiently and effectively by clarifying who they are targeting with their messages and what value they want to communicate.
This empowers them with the confidence they need to create compelling content that resonates with their audiences—and ultimately leads to better results in terms of engagement, traffic, conversions, and revenue.
Plus, having a brand messaging framework in place makes it easier for everyone involved in creating content to understand how it fits into the larger marketing strategy—which saves time spent debating opinions or playing around with too many options. It also eliminates confusion over which direction certain pieces should take or whether specific pieces should even be produced.
As such, having this framework in place can maximize ROI by reducing wasted effort while still hitting goals through smart investments in effective content marketing.
As for what teams specifically could benefit from a brand messaging framework:
- Marketing. Your marketing team is responsible for creating content and campaigns to engage customers and drive them to action. Without a clear sense of direction from your messaging framework, it can be difficult to ensure that all marketing efforts are aligned with the overall business objectives. With well-defined key messages, marketers can create compelling campaigns that accurately represent the company’s mission and values.
- Content. Your writers and content strategy team should understand the company’s core messages and values to craft accurate, engaging content. A clear idea of what makes your company unique helps your content creators reflect those qualities while driving home the main messaging pillars. This ensures that every piece of content supports your overall business goals.
- Leadership. Leaders should understand how their decisions affect the company’s message and how they can use their influence to reinforce key points or adjust course when necessary. Access to this information helps leaders stay informed about changes in customer perception or shifts in market trends so they can make decisions based on accurate data rather than guesswork or gut instinct alone. Moreover, if leaders speak at external events, your brand messaging framework keeps their talk aligned with your overall brand.
How to create a brand messaging framework
Follow these five steps to build your brand messaging framework.
1. Identify your audience
You need to understand who you’re talking to before crafting your brand messaging strategy.
This is where your ideal customer profile (ICP) comes into play. As a B2B company, you’ll also need to understand how your audience varies between your end user and decision maker, as these are likely different. Once you have identified these buyer personas, you can begin crafting messaging tailored specifically to their pain points and priorities.
2. Define your positioning, mission, and values
Work with your team to draft these three brand pillars.
First, your brand positioning statement comprises four components: your target audience(s), your industry or niche, your brand’s differentiator, and the value of your product or service. You may also want to develop your unique value proposition (UVP) alongside your positioning statement.
Next, your mission statement should convey what your organization does and why it exists. This statement should be brief yet powerful—no more than one sentence if possible.
Lastly, list a handful of core values that reflect your company’s culture. These values should reflect the core beliefs and principles that guide your company’s vision, mission, goals, and overall purpose. At Omniscient, we call these our Principles.
3. Develop key messages with your tone of voice
Now, it’s time to get specific. Begin by developing key messages that serve as the foundation of all communication within each audience or ICP. These messages should capture what makes your company special, including its mission statement, core values, and unique offerings.
Make sure these messages are clear, consistent, and easy for others to remember and share with others.
In this step, you’ll also determine your tone of voice—how you communicate with internal and external audiences. It includes language choice, writing style, grammar usage, and more abstract concepts like attitude and approachability (how your brand would sound if it were a person—your brand personality, if you will).
Think carefully about how you want people to perceive your brand when they read or hear your messages. This will help inform how you choose to communicate with them in the future.
4. Set clear goals
Before creating an effective messaging framework, you must first set clear goals for what you want to achieve. Do you want to increase sales? Improve customer engagement? Increase website traffic or conversions?
Setting specific goals at the outset will make it easier for you to measure success when crafting messages and marketing campaigns down the line.
5. Create your framework documentation
Finally, distill the “what,” “why,” and “how” into concise documentation that your teams can use to communicate your messaging. This will serve as your brand messaging framework—an internal enablement content.
Here’s a helpful framework example from our friends at Wynter.
How to implement Your new messaging framework
Once your framework is created, the next step is implementing it among your teams and putting it to work across all public channels—social media, email campaigns, website copywriting, podcasts—you name it.
The key here is consistency; ensure all channels reflect the same message so customers get a clear picture of who you are as a company and what you offer them.
Finally, make sure that your messaging framework evolves over time as needed; things change quickly in business so having an agile, iterative approach to your documentation will help keep up with those changes without sacrificing the consistency or clarity of the message.
Over to you
Building a strong brand isn’t just about having a great product or service; it’s also about how those products or services are presented to customers through effective marketing messaging tactics.
Brand messaging frameworks are essential for any team looking to create a unified voice around their products or services and maximize their ROI on content creation efforts.
By clarifying objectives, defining values and priorities, providing creative guidance, and helping streamline processes, these frameworks make it easier for B2B marketers to create persuasive messages that engage their target audiences, and ultimately drive more conversions along the way.