3. Understand the 4 Key Elements of a Strong Brand Messaging Framework

Before you can even begin to craft a powerful brand messaging framework, you need to understand the four key elements of that strategy: Targeted Personas, Positioning, Brand Voice, and Content Style Guide.

Each element is made up of several smaller facets, and each plays a pivotal role in shaping your marketing message to the masses. I’m going to lay it out in terms that all of our heads, hearts, and stomachs can jive with: the good ol’ PB&J.

Targeted Buyer Personas (or Customer Avatars): The Bread

Knowing who you’re talking to is the FOUNDATIONAL element of good brand messaging. Everything else is built upon and falls in line with what you learn about your ideal customers.

In fact, even the most expertly-crafted ‘why’ statement would fall flat on its face without a keen understanding of the audience.

This is why taking the time to research and develop a strong targeted buyer persona, also known as a customer avatar, is the first step to creating ANY marketing strategy, including your brand messaging strategy.

A targeted buyer persona is a snapshot of your ideal customer that outlines key demographic information as well as decision-making factors like their goals, challenges, and any potential objections that they may have to buying from you.

You’ve heard of ‘pain points,’ right? A well-planned customer avatar is where pain points are both discovered and soothed.

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A solid buyer persona should tell you:

Who the customer is. – General demographics like gender, age, profession, income, lifestyle, and marital status.

What their goals are. – Because this is B2B marketing, you’ll want to highlight things that weigh on their mind on a daily basis while they’re at work or driving forces behind their search for a new provider/solution.

What challenges they are facing. – Your customers are businesspeople, too. So, they have their own unique set of work-related challenges that they need to overcome and are looking to you or a competitor to solve for them.

Possible objections or fears they may have. – Price is always a common objection here, but think of other, less obvious objections that might come up in the sales process.

Now, this example is a pretty common and relatively lean customer snapshot used in B2B marketing. But, I encourage you to dig as deep as your data and customer relationships will let you. In this case, you can never have too much.

(Can you ever really have too much of anything? Nevermind, didn’t think that through. Yes, you can)

So, how can you find the information to build an adequate persona?

While much of this information is best gathered from the horse’s mouth, some of it can be gleaned from some careful internet stalking.

• • Job Boards
  • Surveys
  • Testimonials & Reviews
  • Social Groups
  • Customer Service
  • Common Support Issues
  • Complaints

👉 Learn more about how buyer personas can be your secret weapon to effective marketing. 👈

The Statement of Value (commonly called the Positioning Statement): The Peanut Butter (I prefer smooth)

The Statement of Value is a beefy component of a strong brand messaging strategy because it defines:

• • Who you are.
  • What you offer.
  • Who you’re selling to.
  • What’s in it for them.

However, this information is delivered in a variety of vehicles, including some that you may have heard of:

🔊 Mission Statement –  A simple statement about who you help and what you help them achieve.

🔊 Vision Statement – A simple statement about your long-term goals as it relates to your mission statement.

🔊 Positioning Statement – A more robust statement that outlines who you are, what you do, why you do it, who you help, and what you help them achieve.

🔊 Brand Values Statement – Outlines the culture and values that your business lives and works by.

🔊 Elevator Pitch – A very conversational version of your positioning statement.

🔊 Tagline – A quick, memorable version of your mission.

Needless to say, these elements factor into pretty much every single piece of communication that you put out as a brand.

“Effective messaging emerges at the intersection of what your buyers want to hear and what you want to say.” – Adele Revella

Now, you probably already know most of this information or have a lot of opinions, but refining it into something that makes sense to your customer could be the missing link in your marketing message. Because let’s face it; passionately describing what you do to a customer doesn’t always have the impact that you hope. That’s what happens when you’re too smart for your own good.

See…as business owners, marketing managers, and entrepreneurs, we know we’re smart. But, sometimes we aren’t sure how to articulate what we want to say without using jargon or techno-babble that the customer just won’t understand.

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Taking the time to sit down and work through your Statement of Value as a team helps simplify a complex subject. Plus, having an outside perspective is MASSIVELY helpful in making it human and conversational. 

Your Unique Brand Voice: The Jelly (or jam, if you prefer)

The final element of a powerful brand messaging strategy is your fabulously unique brand voice.

A brand voice is the expression of the people and values behind the brand. Without a brand voice, you’re simply a commodity competing on product price and as we all know, the lowest price often wins but doesn’t necessarily produce loyal customers.

Your voice is not WHAT you say, but HOW you say it. It embodies the feeling that your audience gets when interacting with your brand both digitally and in person. 

A unique brand voice can easily set your brand apart from the rest of the industry by instilling trust and being relatable. While what you’re saying may not necessarily cause people to remember, how you say it and how it hits them…will.

The most important thing to remember about your brand voice is that it represents the brand, not the person, and therefore cannot come from a single source. To best represent your brand, your voice must be sourced from everyone that deals with your brand, from the customer to the CEO.

You can find great sources for your brand voice in many of the same areas as you found your customer avatar details:

• • Surveys
  • Surveys
  • Testimonials & Reviews
  • Social Groups
  • Customer Service
  • Common Support Issues
  • Complaints

Look for commonly repeated adjectives and phrases. These phrases highlight both the Voice of Customer (phrasing that they identify with) and Brand Voice (tones and styles they identify with).

The Content Style Guide: The Butter Knife

You don’t want to cut the crusts off of this key messaging element! While your content style guide is an often overlooked element of a messaging strategy, it really ties it all together.

The style guide is essentially the butter knife that is an organized set of rules for crafting branded copy across all of your channels. It pulls together all of the strategic elements of your Persona, Voice, and Statement of Value into a single, easy to understand document.

A content style guide also includes all baseline style requirements such as:

• • AP or Chicago Style Guidelines
  • Relevant acronyms.
  • Formatting for numbers, time, dates.
  • Specific punctuation to use or avoid.
  • Hyphenation rules.
  • Specific word choices to use or avoid.
  • Title formatting.

Think of it as the big manual of DO’s and DON’Ts for your marketing message, specifically the written word.

4. Implement Your New Brand Messaging Strategy

Now that you’ve got a shiny new brand messaging strategy, what the hell do you do with it?

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1. First of all, you should crowdsource approval and revisions of the document.

The entire process of developing a message tends to shake a lot of things loose for your team and letting them review the final product will typically result in more enlightened results.

2. Distribute the final strategy documents across your company.

Once the strategy has been revised and finalized, distribute the final copy to everyone within your organization who is responsible for creating content, either directly or indirectly.

Distribute physical or digital copies of the strategy to:

• • Marketing Manager
  • Social Media Managers
  • Call Centers
  • Salespeople
  • Freelancers

3. Schedule gradual updates to your existing content.

Now that everyone has a copy of the expected messaging strategy, it’s time to go back through your content audit and update the overall message.

Start with the most critical, customer-facing sources:

• • Website Content
  • Social Media Content – Both posts and page details.
  • Email Templates
  • Email and Phone Scripts
  • Print Marketing Collateral
  • Employee Onboarding/Offboarding Documentation

Don’t try to rush and do this all at once, you’ll end up missing a step or falling into old habits. If you have the resources, hire a freelancer to help you update the content.

5. Engage in Ongoing Message Maintenance

A brand messaging strategy is designed to be a flexible, living document. That’s why it’s always smart to reevaluate it every so often as your business and markets evolve.

So, after you and your team have updated all existing content and distributed the strategy to all relevant parties, schedule message maintenance roundups.

During these roundups, you’ll want to repeat your message assessment, make necessary tweaks to your strategy, and repeat steps 1-3 in the implementation phase above.