In this article
How to Develop a Brand Messaging Strategy
Creating a brand messaging strategy requires a mix of research, critical thinking, collaboration with various stakeholders and lots of iteration, as getting it right and keeping messaging consistent is crucial. It starts with returning to the company’s origin story whilst evaluating past successes, mistakes, feedback and key learnings.
Having worked on numerous rebranding projects and messaging revamps, I’ve compiled my key steps for developing a brand messaging strategy, including actionable tips to help businesses who are considering updating their own.
Why compelling and consistent brand messaging is more crucial than ever
Creating clear brand messaging and tone of voice (ToV) guidelines will help you nail your brand’s personality and define the language to use when communicating your company’s purpose, positioning and solutions. It also helps your teams embrace key messaging pillars, live and breathe the values and talk and write in the brand’s tone, every time, in every interaction.
“Consistency of voice is vital for maintaining continuity and brand recognition.”
However, your brand messaging needs to be compelling, memorable and suitable for your target audience. This is more important than ever in competitive markets, increasingly flooded with AI content.
Ensuring your brand stands out in the AI age
So, how can you ensure your brand stands out from your competitors and doesn’t sound like everyone else? Companies are under increasing pressure to be more efficient and do more with content, with less time and resources. But with many marketers leveraging generative AI tools, the result can be a lot of generic content and various brands sounding the same.
Achieving unique brand messaging comes from really delving into:
- What your business does
- What it really means to people
- How it unlocks opportunities and addresses challenges in your sector
- What problems it solves/needs it satisfies
This takes time, research, conversations, brainstorming and iteration. Yes, you can lean on AI to help formulate ideas or support research, but the real magic happens through conversations between key stakeholders.
Key steps in developing a brand messaging strategy
Below, I’ve outlined the key steps to develop a brand messaging strategy, based on my methodology and what’s worked well for me when supporting clients through the process.
1. Go back to basics to rediscover the ‘why’ behind your brand
You may have heard of the golden circle and the idea of understanding the ‘why’ behind your business, but really defining why your organisation exists is crucial in brand messaging strategies.
If you’re an established company looking to refresh your messaging and tone of voice, you might think you already know this. But assumptions need to be reevaluated when creating a new strategy.
Tip: Get the founders together with key members from different departments to talk through the ‘why’ behind the business. You’ll probably get a lot of different answers. Also, consider customer successes, reviews, testimonials, etc.
2. Build in-depth buyer personas (or ideal customer profiles)
Most marketers understand the importance of buyer personas or ideal customer profiles (ICPs). Whether it’s for creating product decks, sales presentations or marketing campaigns, many companies have a clear picture of who they’re targeting. But how detailed are these personas and ICPs? And how much of what you know is based on assumptions or outdated information?
When it comes to developing a brand messaging strategy, personal details are everything. Building rich buyer persona profiles and getting into the weeds of your ideal customer needs, challenges, behaviours and pain points will give you so much fuel for your messaging approach.
Tip: Build your persona profiles with a balanced mix of your team’s experience, knowledge of existing customers, market and competitor research and feedback from within and outside of the business.
3. Establish where your business sits within the market
Fully understanding your brand’s positioning will help you frame your key messaging statements, buyer’s journey concepts and hooks for your solutions and services.
Expand on any existing market research you have, scope out your direct and indirect competitors, and establish where your business sits (and why), and what opportunities for growth exist, now and in the future.
What is a positioning statement?
A positioning statement conveys a brand’s value proposition to its ideal customers, shows what sets your business apart from others, describes the products/services it offers and explains how it fulfils a specific need in the market.
Tip: Seek out high-profile examples from successful brands and those in your specific industry to get inspiration.
4. Discuss and define what makes your brand different from your competitors
Defining a company’s USPs and key differentiators is common practice in business. However, the details you extract and the brand messaging narratives you can craft from these are gold dust. Brand differentiators are what can help you stand out from the competition, make your content memorable and ease customer buying decisions.
Tip: Look beyond just what your solutions do compared to your competitors and consider factors like company size, location, tenure and cultural differences. Tap into customer feedback on why they chose you over other vendors.
5. Develop vision, mission and purpose statements
One of the core outcomes of a successful brand messaging strategy is establishing compelling and inspirational mission, vision and purpose statements. Individually and combined, these can be the spine of your strategy and the springboard for numerous brand concepts, slogans and marketing messages.
What is a vision statement?
A vision statement is about where your business is headed and what the future looks like if your company is successful and you achieve the mission you’ve set out.
What is a mission statement?
Your mission statement should outline how you aim to make your brand vision a reality, including the objectives and behaviours that support it.
What is a purpose statement?
A brand’s purpose statement explains why your organisation exists, outlining the reason/s it was formed, the journey it’s on, what it’s seeking to address/solve or the opportunity it aims to grasp.
Consider writing a brand onlyness statement
Onlyness may sound like an odd term, but the point is to define what makes your brand the only one of its kind in your particular segment/niche. Check out Martin Neumeier’s Onlyness Test.
6. Decide on your values and voice characteristics
This is where your branding messaging strategy and guidelines start to take shape. Define or revisit your existing brand values and accompany them with a few words about how and why you embody them.
What is “brand voice”?
Your brand voice should be a set of character traits that define how you communicate and use language. These characteristics guide and inform your tone of voice, including the type of vocabulary your brand uses in content, messaging and communication.
7. Create a brand tone of voice (ToV) chart and messaging use cases
Brand tone of voice is one of the most important parts of your brand messaging strategy and guidelines. A ToV chart is a reference point that outlines how messaging concepts and values should be expressed, and in what context.
Once you’ve finished your chart, use it to develop messaging use cases for different scenarios, solutions and personas, plus key straplines.
8. Craft messaging narratives and a hero’s journey
With all the research, messaging foundations and statements developed, you can start getting creative to bring it all to life. The ‘hero’s journey’ is a storytelling concept that can be used in brand messaging strategies to build a narrative.
9. Create language rules to ensure messaging consistency
Once your branding messaging strategy and guidelines are underway, it’s important to include some key language rules:
- Words to use/not to use
- Capitalisation and punctuation use
- Use of active voice
- Brand name rules
- How to format quotes
- How to refer to the company and its people
In summary
Developing a brand messaging strategy is both a data-driven and creative process that requires teams to revisit why their companies exist. It should involve various stakeholders and internal and external research, allowing you to determine key differentiators and meaningful and memorable brand statements.
Need help developing your brand messaging strategy?
I hope these tips were helpful. If you need help with coordinating sessions, building the messaging framework and adding the required creative to your strategy, get in touch. Also, check out my brand messaging services to see how I can help your business.