What is a brand messaging strategy - and do you need one?
All your questions answered…
Spoiler alert, I’m a messaging coach, so yes, I think you need to have a brand messaging strategy. I believe clarity around your messaging is absolutely essential for all thriving businesses and that the crucial next step, once you have that clarity, is to make a plan to communicate your message with the right people.
First of all, what is brand messaging?
Messaging is how you express the heart of what you do, who you do it for, the transformation it creates, and why it matters.
Messaging includes your niche and some elements of your positioning, but it’s fundamentally about communication - your message only works if it resonates with the people you want to reach.
It’s the foundation on which you can build both your copywriting and your marketing strategy. Messaging is the what and why of what you do, and in a perfect world, you can encapsulate its essence in a memorable phrase, but as long as you can express your message clearly in a couple of sentences, it’s done its job.
Your message will help you to get remembered and get referred. Getting clear on your message means that you can pinpoint the topics you need to talk about, and the conversations you need to be having to draw your audience in. You’ll be able to bring a new focus to everything you teach, offer and share, and as a result you’ll start gaining much more traction.
When you get your messaging right, you won’t have to compete solely on price - potential clients will understand the real value of your services.
People will no longer seem confused or glaze over when you try to explain what you do. You can ditch the jargon and the tired elevator pitch and start feeling excited about telling people about your business.
If you’re struggling with writing your web copy, or you’re not getting any traction with your marketing, it’s highly likely that your real problem is with your messaging. If you don’t know how to express the value of your work to others, it’s almost impossible to write compelling copy or to devise a marketing strategy that will land with the people you really want to work with.
Having a clear message is step one in becoming acknowledged as a subject-matter expert, which is also the first step in becoming much more referable.
What is a messaging strategy?
Your message is how you put into words the real value of your work. Your messaging strategy is how you plan to use your message to connect with your potential clients.
For it to work well it has to both be an authentic expression of the value your service offers and it also needs to resonate directly with your potential clients. This means it needs to meet them where they are and be expressed in the words they would use themselves.
I see your strategy as having two stages. You start out with a messaging framework of different ways of expressing your messaging for different circumstances, and you make sure that the messaging you create is distributed in all the obvious places - on your website and in your newsletter and social media bios.
But there’s a second stage to your messaging strategy, and that involves outreach.
If you create a messaging framework but then don’t have a plan to reach new people, there’s a good chance that what you’ll end up with is a punchy and memorably-written website that very few people will ever see. A good messaging strategy can change that.
There are so many ways to share your message with potential clients - here are just a few of the most obvious examples that can work well for service-based businesses:
Blogging and SEO
LinkedIn posts
In-person networking and conferences
Keynote speeches
Workshops (free or paid; as standalones or part of a series; within other people’s memberships or mastermind groups…)
Podcast interviews
Themed roundtables
Referrals
IG Lives
A free challenge
Virtual summits
Your messaging strategy is about how you communicate your message to your ideal audience. It’s a marketing strategy that is rooted in your core messaging. It can lead to being seen as an authority in your field, which also makes it more possible to focus mainly on sustainable evergreen marketing methods, helping you to avoid burnout.
When I work with my clients on this second phase of their messaging strategy, our emphasis is on, how can we bring this messaging to life in ways that feel authentic, doable and that will have an impact with their intended audience.
Why is it important to have a messaging strategy?
With your messaging in place, you’ll have a new-found clarity about business and marketing decisions and a way of engaging with potential clients that feels natural and allows you to be completely true to yourself.
No more feelings of dread around posting on social media or feeling guilty because it's weeks since you last wrote to your mailing list. Instead, you know just what you want to say and you know it's just what your perfect fit clients want to hear.
You don't need to be loud and brash to be heard above the online noise - your quiet voice can have a big impact with the exact people you most want to reach. But you still need to have a plan for how precisely you want to reach people.
Having a strategy will allow you to stay consistent with your messaging, but also to plan for enough variety to stop yourself from getting bored. You don’t want to end up rigidly micro-managing your every move for the next 12 months - but you do want to make sure that you’re not relying purely on inspiration in the moment when it comes to carrying out your marketing activities every week. That’s a recipe for inconsistency, shiny object syndrome and random and confusing messaging (ask me how I know this…).
When you have a flexible plan for outreach activities you actually want to do, in order to share a message that lights you up, the whole process of marketing your business feels radically different. You never know, it might just become one of your favourite activities as a business owner.
What do you need to consider when creating your messaging strategy?
Your biggest decisions here are going to be what to talk about and what kinds of outreach to prioritize.
When it comes to choosing the kinds of outreach activities you’ll focus on, there are two things to consider. Firstly, what works for you. Secondly, what works for your clients.
If you’re shy, introverted and live in a remote area, it’s probably not going to make sense to have in-person networking as your top outreach tactic - even if that’s something that you believe would be appropriate for your ideal clients.
Blogging and SEO, backed up with a solid referral strategy and maybe a handful of podcast interviews (which are 1:1 conversations you’d find less draining than networking, and are done remotely) might be a much better mix. But only if that’s going to work for your ideal clients.
If conferences, trade shows and other in-person events are the way to reach your ideal clients, then what would it take to make that work for you? Could you focus on trying to be a headline speaker at the very most relevant conference of the year and do all your marketing as one big push (and then spend a week in a spa recovering!)?
When it comes to choosing your core conversation topics (otherwise known as content buckets or brand pillars), they need to relate directly to your overall brand message and the top-of-mind concerns of your ideal clients.
When I work on this with my clients, we consider three things in order to choose the right conversation topics.
We look at patterns that come up in their client intake forms and sessions, to see what’s top-of-mind in the early stages for new clients. We think about the service(s) that we ultimately hope potential clients will sign up for. And we look at the client’s bigger why - how can we connect their messaging with their values and/or a broader movement which might resonate with their ideal audience?
This way we ensure that the conversation topics make sense in relation to the messaging and that they are actually able to drive sales.
What’s the difference between the kind of messaging strategy we see from big corporations (like Starbucks, Coke or Apple) vs coaches, designers and other microbusinesses?
Big businesses have established a brand story in our minds already, and have enormous budgets to put towards advertising and influencer sponsorship. As a result, they’re able to spend and spend in order to remain top-of-mind with customers and retain their market share. They’re looking to appeal to an extremely broad audience and they’re aiming to offer an extremely consistent customer experience.
You and I have tiny marketing budgets and consequently tiny reach. When these companies got started we weren’t even born, much less running our businesses.
As solo service providers, we can’t be all things to all people. Coke can have a tagline like ‘taste the feeling’ or ‘real magic’ and it can evoke memories for their customers of hot sunny days with ice cold cokes on the beach - memories which are continually reinforced with gold-tinted sun-soaked ads. If an individual service provider had a similarly generic tagline, it would be meaningless to their potential customers.
As small businesses, we have to be more specific in our messaging.
How can you use this difference to your advantage?
As a solo business owner (or the founder of a micro business), you have one glorious advantage over the big box firms. You.
You can market your business in quirky, personality-filled ways that are completely out of reach to corporations. This doesn’t mean that you have to be a ‘personality brand’, it just means that you can bring aspects of yourself - your values, your bigger purpose, your point of view - to the messaging and marketing of your business. You can stand out just by being yourself.
This doesn’t have to mean being super-vulnerable or over-sharing, just showing up as a rounded person who has a range of interests and skills. People connect with other people and there’s a big tranche of the market out there who would much prefer to support a small business than put their hard-earned money towards swelling the coffers of the multinationals.
Simply sharing more of your journey to setting up your business can be really effective - and every winding turn you took along the way can be seen as a strength you now bring to your work - see my piece on 7 ways my past work as a book editor informs my work as a messaging coach now for how this can play out.
You can create a brand story that is just as effective and as memorable as those of the big brands - stories are how we connect with other people and understand the world and the likelihood is that your story will be more customized and relatable for your ideal client than it’s possible for a big brand’s story to be. You get to be more creative and adventurous than the big brands, whose every decision needs to be signed off by multiple committees.
As a small business, you’re able to have a narrower niche than the big brands, which also allows you to pinpoint your positioning.
Also, you can also be more flexible and agile than corporations - if a new technology or trend appeals to you and would work for your customer-base, you can jump on it immediately, and potentially use it as a differentiator.
Finally, you can have the best brand messaging in the world, but you still have to deliver on your brand promise. This is an area where you can shine.
You have infinitely more control over how your clients experience working with you than Starbucks has over its customers’ brand experiences. Starbucks has to rely on thousands of (not especially well-paid) staff all around the world, who are the people actually interacting with the customers. In your case, that person is probably you, or a member of your small, hand-picked team.
Examples of brand messaging that work well
Brene Brown is someone whose messaging is remarkably consistent, effective and memorable. The tagline on her website, ‘keeping it awkward, brave and kind’ is the same as the sign-off to every single episode of her podcasts.
She’s also a much better example for micro business owners to consider than multinational brands - although it’s important to note that she has a business that employs 30+ people and that she also has access via her books and TV specials to the marketing teams of Netflix, HBO, and Penguin Random House, so don’t expect to match her reach any time soon…
Her message has very gradually evolved over more than a decade, starting out being about shame, moving into the link between vulnerability and courage, then into courage and leadership and now moving into the importance of emotional agility - but she still talks about shame and vulnerability today. Overall these are not separate messages, but different iterations of related ideas.
When you watch, for instance, her Netflix special, you find the same stories and examples that she’s been telling in talks, books and podcast episodes again and again and again. They’re so well-crafted and brought to life with self-deprecating humour that they’re extremely engaging and effective, even if you’ve heard them many times before.
It’s this consistency that means her message now has incredible reach. If she’d had one viral TED talk success in 2010 and then gone on to talk about different topics to different types of audiences, you might not remember her any more, but by continuing to dig deeper into the same topics, and not being afraid to repeat herself, it’s now nigh-on impossible to be part of the coaching/leadership/self-development world and not find her being quoted at every turn.
When it comes to people whose brand messaging is highly effective, but who don’t (yet) have Dr Brown’s reach, a good example might be the coach Trudi Lebron. Creator of the Institute for Equity-Centered Coaching, podcaster, author of The Anti-Racist Business Book, her website tagline is ‘Stop choosing between doing good and doing business’ - which speaks directly to the concerns of her target audience, who want to do just that. Her business, book and podcast all relate clearly to her overarching theme of using business as a vehicle for social change. As with Brene Brown, there’s a coherence and depth to her messaging.
How can you make your messaging consistent without burning out or boring yourself to death?
Make sure you’re really in love with your core conversation topics
Don’t aim for daily consistency in posting etc. - create a rhythm that’s sustainable for you
Tara McMullin’s idea of remarkable content - creating less, but better - is extremely helpful here.
Evergreen marketing tactics (like SEO and podcasting) and/or content repurposing also really really help.
Can messaging work for creative, multi-passionate people?
This is something that comes up with a lot of my clients, and the answer is yes. In fact, your messaging can help to resolve some of the things that make nicheing tricky for multi-potentialites.
Often, when people have a wide range of interests, they’re sick of trying to force their round peg into a square hole just in order to be able to say they’ve found their niche. But their lack of focus leads to them being all things to all people and getting exhausted and over-extended as a result.
Everyone understands why they’re supposed to niche, but it feels like they’re closing off so many interesting avenues. They don’t want to limit themselves - and none of the methods for nicheing that they’ve tried take account of what it’s like to be a creative, multi passionate person.
Instead of trying to fit yourself into a pre-made box, there’s a different approach, which involves starting with you, your stories and your personal strengths and passions. The focus is on uncovering the golden thread that runs through all your work, however disparate it may appear from the outside. Then you can focus on putting that into words. Your message allows you to craft an overarching theme that will bring all your diverse interests together in a way that makes sense to others.
This is pretty much my favourite thing to do with clients - find out more about Unlock Your Message here.
3 key takeaways for creating your messaging strategy
Your messaging strategy can only be as good as your underlying message. If you don’t have a message that feels authentic to you, that encapsulates the real value of your work, and that’s expressed in a way that resonates with your audience, then the best strategy can’t salvage it - you need to go back to the drawing board first.
Your strategy has to work equally well for you and for your intended audience - so it needs to play to your strengths, and at the same time it needs to meet your audience where they are.
Your strategy doesn’t have to create a high volume of leads, instead it needs to be very effective at differentiating your offer, so that the resulting enquiries are from perfect-fit clients.
Before you can even start working on your messaging strategy you’ll need to work out what your message is. Find out more about creating a brand messaging framework here.