About 20% of businesses fail within their first two years. Many things can force a company to shutter its doors, but one of the most common is poor planning.
Without a proper business plan, a company has no brand identity. Without a brand identity, you won’t be able to reach your target audience.
Part of establishing your identity involves building your brand messaging framework. You should have a clever tagline, mission statement, and brand pillars. From there, you can create a message guide.
Are you ready to get started? Check out this quick branding guide to learn more about what goes into building your framework.
What Is Brand Messaging?
Brand messaging is how you communicate with your potential customers. The way you talk to people can motivate them to buy your products. It could convince them not to do business with you.
Of course, customers consider more than your tone of voice when deciding if they want to buy your products. They’ll also look at your values and company story.
Your message also tells your target audience why your company matters. When building your brand messaging, let your personality shine as much as possible.
Once you build your messaging framework, you can use it for your blogs, taglines, marketing materials, social media posts, and product packaging.
Find Your Target Audience
The first step in building your brand messaging strategy is finding your target audience. If you try to jump in before knowing who you’re marketing toward, you’ll have no direction.
Create buyer personas to represent your potential customers. Who are they? What are their ages and occupations?
Where do they live, and are their pain points? Do they have any goals that your products could help them with?
You can get the answers to these questions with the power of Google Analytics. You’ll need to have multiple buyer personas. A decent way to build them is by using feedback from your current customer base.
Decide on Your Mission Statement
After building your customer persona, you can create your mission statement. It’s a sentence that explains your company’s goals.
It will tell your customer base what your business does. Not only will your mission statement act as a blueprint for building the rest of your branding framework, but it can provide your staff members with some direction.
When writing your mission statement, be sure to make it brief. If you write a page, it will be less memorable.
Keep your mission statement open. It needs to cover both your short-term and long-term goals.
After writing your mission statement, get feedback from your employees. Don’t be afraid to change it based on what they like and don’t like about it.
Write Your Brand Promise
Next up is your brand promise. Like your mission statement, this should be no more than a single sentence. When writing it, consider how you want your target audience to perceive your company.
Use your brand promise to explain what your company does and how you do things differently from your competition.
Focus on Your Value Proposition
Your value proposition tells your customer base how your products can help them. It’s sort of a broader version of your brand promise.
Make a list of values you can bring to your customers and choose one or two to use as a blueprint to build your entire proposition. It can be something as small as price savings.
Craft a Creative Tagline
A tagline is a short and catchy phrase that draws customers in. Taglines often combine some aspects of the brand promise and value proposition statements.
Your tagline should be as concise as possible. Think no more than five words. If your tagline is too long, it will overshadow your brand instead of highlighting it.
Being descriptive can be challenging since you only have three to five words to work with. However, the more descriptive you are, the more you’ll motivate others to interact with your brand.
Decide on Your Brand Pillars
Brand pillars are what make a small business and startup unique. They’re your special selling points.
Identify your top three selling points and add some supporting information under them.
Create a Guide
It will be easier for your staff to implement your brand messaging strategy if they have a guide. This will ensure they use the right tone and language when speaking to your customers.
The guide should include keywords that staff can use to bring attention to your brand. Include a FAQ section that your team can refer to when they have questions about sales and marketing.
Analyze Your Current Content
The last step of building your framework is to analyze your current content. You want to be sure your blogs and social media content mesh with the values in your framework.
It should appeal to your target audience as they are now. It needs to match your value proposition and follow your new brand voice.
Consistency is important. Anything that doesn’t match your current style should be removed or updated.
Begin Building Your Brand Messaging Framework
Building your brand messaging framework is crucial for identifying your target audience. Without a distinct brand voice, you won’t be able to communicate with your customers.
After identifying your target audience, write your mission statement, value proposition, tagline, and brand pillars. Once you have all this written down, create a guide for your team and analyze your current content. Any posts that don’t meet your new values have to go.
For more ways to keep your company’s doors open, explore our blog.
