5 Ways to Improve Your Brand Messaging from a Branding Coach

Branding

Oct 4

BY MICHELLE KNIGHT

Brand messaging is how you share who you are and what you do with your ideal customer through your marketing efforts so that you can consistently attract your ideal customers and lead them through the buying journey.

Brand messaging is kind of my love language. And the reason for that is because it combines both of my passions and both of my areas of expertise, branding and marketing.

Today, I want to share with you five ways to improve your brand messaging.

WHAT IS BRAND MESSAGING

I want you to think of your brand messaging as the way that you communicate with your ideal customer.

You're going to find your messaging plays a role in everything that you do from your copy to the content that you put on your website, to the content that you share on social media, to your advertising, to what you say on a stage.

Your messaging is the base of all of your marketing efforts.

However, messaging is typically done at the branding level, so it’s important that when you’re identifying your niche and ideal customer, that you’re also doing work on your brand messaging.

I'm going to move forward and assume that you have a solid brand, meaning that you've watched, I don't know, this video right here on personal branding and understand the key pieces to create a brand. Only then will your messaging actually make sense.

I often find that entrepreneurs, when they come to me, have a really hard time going through their messaging because they haven't done some of the preliminary work.

The preliminary work for brand messaging is essentially who you are, what your brand stands for, what your brand provides, i.e., the problem that it solves and how it solves that problem, and the specific language that your ideal customer is using to describe those pieces.

All of those elements play a role in your brand messaging.

The importance of your brand messaging is that you can effortlessly communicate to your ideal customer. So, as I mentioned, it plays a role in brand awareness, brand attraction, and brand connection, which are three pillars of marketing.

Let's begin by talking about one of the first brand messages that I recommend you have in order to make your marketing seamless. This is your hook.

BRAND MESSAGING TIP 1:
YOUR HOOK STATEMENT

This is essentially what we used to refer to as the elevator pitch that we now call your hook, and it serves in the exact same way.

The elevator pitch was designed so that if you were in an elevator with someone for 10 seconds, you could describe what it is you do and how you support your ideal customer. The idea wasn't that you could give all the information away, but that you could intrigue them to want to learn more.

You sub elevator for a website, and you still have the same amount of time. You've got 10 seconds or less to hook your ideal customer and say, "I have got exactly what you need.”

That is why the hook is so important.

We also find the hook plays a role in your social media bio and in introducing yourself on podcasts or onstage. Your hook can be expanded upon in various forms to introduce who you are, who you serve, the problem you solve, and how you ultimately support your client.

There are five pieces to a hook that works like a charm.

5 pieces of a killer hook

Number one, is who you are. This is where you can also share your name, title or your specific niche or industry.

The second thing you want to share is your ideal customer.

This is typically a very quick demographic or self-identifying quality so that your audience can say, "Yes, that is me. No, that is not me." Again, the idea is to hook your audience to want to learn more, and, honestly, repel people who aren't the right fit for your brand.

The next thing that you want to do is connect with your ideal customer where they are and talk to them about their problem.

So, what is the very specific problem your ideal customer is facing as it relates to your business?

Not every problem they've got, just that very specific one.
What does that feel like to them?
What does that look like for them?

Number four is how you come in and support them with your unique selling proposition, or what we like to call it over here at Brandmerry, your super power.

And number five is how you ultimately get them closer to their desired outcome.

All five of these elements make up your hook. And while it's a great template to follow, to go, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, through the five, you don't have to do that.

Just make sure that you touch on all five. This is going to allow you to share with your audience exactly what it is you do, how you support them, and be intriguing enough that they want to learn more.

For reference, here is my hook statement: I’m MIchelle Knight, Brand Strategist and Founder of Brandmerry.com. I teach female entrepreneurs who struggle to create a reveue-generating business how to brand themselves online and market their message through the power of storytelling so they can create more income and impact in the world.

BRAND MESSAGING TIP 2:
CORE BRAND MESSAGES FOR YOUR BRAND

The second type of messaging that I always recommend my clients create at the branding level are called core brand messages.

Now, these are very special to Brandmerry. It's something I've been teaching for years, the idea is to think about your core brand messages as the umbrella for your messaging moving forward. This really focuses on the brand as a whole, rather than a specific product or service.

Of course, there might be some crossover, especially if you're in the coaching or the consulting industry and you offer one-on-one services.

But what I want you to get used to is getting really clear on exactly who you are and how you support your clients and why what you're offering is important to them.

So, the core brand messages serve as a way for you to gain clarity around your brand specifically, and then start showing up consistently talking about the same thing. Consistency is the most important part of messaging in general.

Although you might not just copy and paste a core brand message on social media, this exercise is a practice for you to get really good at explaining what it is you do and how it benefits your audience. Those are two key pieces to messaging overall.

If your audience doesn't understand how what you do actually supports them, how it's going to get them closer to their goal, how it's providing them value and ultimately benefiting them, then it's not going to hit the mark.

You're going to fall flat every single time.

So, when it comes to core brand messages, we recommend that you create 10 to 15 core brand messages that are going to clearly share what your brand as a whole does, your framework, your expertise, your strengths, and how that's going to benefit your ideal customer.

This comes after ideal client work and is going to allow you to really communicate with your clients on those core emotional pieces that are going to get them fascinated and captivated with what you are providing.

Writing Your Core Brand Messages

When it comes to your core brand messages, there are three steps to the process.

Number one is to share what you ultimately provide.

Number two is why it's important to your ideal customer.

And number three is why it's really important to your ideal customer, why they need it today.

So, an example of this might be one of my core brand messages that says, "I teach my clients the power of storytelling so that they can create a captivating, personal brand and attract their ideal customers and stand out in a saturated online market."

I've touched on the pain points, I've touched on the desire, and I've added urgency to it by saying, "You're going to stand out when you go through this process.”

BRAND MESSAGING TIP 3:
CORE BRAND MESSAGES FOR YOUR PRODUCTS

The third way to improve your brand messaging is to create specific CBMs, core brand messages, for your individual products and services.

Now, this is going to come as your brand expands, as you're offering more specific products and services, maybe free trainings, little ebooks, all the different things that you can create. You want to get more granular with those core brand messages for the individual product.

So, while I shared with you that the power of storytelling is something that applies to my brand as a whole. If I was promoting a program that I have called Roadmap to Freedom, where we specifically talk about core brand messages in one of the modules, I could go a little bit further and explain how storytelling plays a role in core brand messages and how that has benefited my audience.

You'll see these messages really come into play when you're creating something that has different parts, that has modules, different weeks if you're doing a group program.

If you want to create a really strong message for the product in and of itself, this is where you can step in, use the same framework that you did for the core brand messages to apply that to the product.

Both of these are just great exercises in not just saying, "This is what you get," but, "This is what you get and why it's important to your ideal customer."

BRAND MESSAGING TIP 4:
CREATE CONSISTENT CONTENT

When it comes to marketing, one of the things that you want to focus on is creating consistent content. This is the way that you show up and reach your ideal customer at different stages of the client-buying journey. I talk about that entire process and why marketing matters in this video right here.

In the video, I explain that there are different stages of the consumer buying process, and every single stage is important. Not everyone's going to find your brand ready to whip out their credit card and buy; so we want to create content that's going to nurture our audience, that's going to educate them, inspire them, motivate them, and, yes, entertain them as well.

When you're thinking about the different types of messages to create, one of the rules of thumb that I love to kind of put into play for my clients is to always run it through the brand filter.

If you see that a piece of content is being created online, and you'd love to add your two cents to it, or your audience is asking you a lot of questions about X, Y, and Z, or you use one of my favorite tools, Keywords Everywhere, to see what people are searching for, before you create it, you want to run it through your brand filter.

BRAND FILTER: Is it actually going to apply to your brand and to your ideal customer?

A great way to do that is to go back to your core brand messages, to see if it actually applies to your brand as a whole.

You don't want to create content just to create content. So, when you're creating content, think about content that specifically amplifies your core brand messages.

One of the exercises I love to teach is taking your core brand message, just one to start, and coming up with five to 10 different topics underneath that umbrella.

For instance, my core brand message is around storytelling and the power of storytelling as it applies to branding, I could talk about the importance of storytelling.

I could share a blog on five ways to tell better stories.
I could share a template for telling stories on social media.
I could share the number one reason you should tell stories and the number one mistake.

Actually, I've shared all those pieces of content before, and they always circle back to my brand. So, they're always in connection to what I provide and consistent, which is incredibly important when it comes to messaging.

We know that a consistent message can actually increase revenue by 33%.

BRAND MESSAGING TIP 5:
FOCUS ON THE BENEFIT

My last tip for you today is to always focus on the benefit. I've been saying that over and over and over again, but no message is complete if your audience can't actually see what's in it for them.

Remember, as consumers, we're constantly asking ourselves, "But how can this help me? What's in it for me? What's the benefit for me?"

So, do yourself a favor, no matter what type of messaging you're creating; whether it's your hook, your core brand messages, a tagline for your program, you're talking about a specific module, you're offering a free training and you've got three bullets on what they're going to learn, or you're just creating a post for social media, that you always think about the benefit for your audience, and you clearly communicate that.

At the end of the day, you're a business or you have aspirations to become a business, and you want people to buy your products or services. So, we have to always keep our audience front and center when we're thinking about our messaging.

CONCLUSION

I hope that this was really helpful in breaking down the different ways that messaging can apply to your business, for understanding the difference between branding and marketing, and how messaging fits into both of them.

And, of course, my number one way to always make sure your messaging resonates, and that is with the benefit.

If you want to explore fine-tuning your brand, specifically your brand messaging, and learn how to show up consistently and effectively with your marketing efforts then I invite you to learn more about my live program Roadmap to Freedom.

Doors open once a year in October and this high-touch program is perfect for entrepreneurs ready to create consistent income months.

Learn more at brandmerry.com/freedom.

P.S. Have you tuned in to The Brandmerry podcast? I release new episodes every Thursday on topics around branding and marketing! Check out past episodes and be sure to subscribe at brandmerry.com/podcast