Your brand strategy is invisible to your customers. Your messaging isn’t.
It’s what you say and how it lands, that decides whether your strategy delivers.
Think about this for a moment.
Your customers (and those people you want to be your customers) will never see your brand strategy. They’ll never read your positioning either. And they’ll never know exactly how much careful thinking went into your value proposition, or how many hours or days you spent getting into, ahem, ‘debates’ refining it.
The only part of all that work they’ll ever actually experience is your messaging.
I know! That means your messaging is carrying the weight of it all on its hefty, wordy shoulders. And if it’s not up to the job, all that thinking, research, planning, understanding you’ve worked tirelessly on (I know you have) remains exactly where it is. Hidden. Doing nothing for you. Nada, zilch, diddly squat.
So what is ‘messaging’ then?
Pretty damned well important, that’s what!
Messaging is how your positioning and value proposition reach people. Not just reach them, get through to them. If you get it right that is.
It’s that bridge between the (absolutely critical) early doors upstream thinking and your customer.
It’s not one clever line or nifty little phrase you’re quite pleased with. It’s what you talk about, consistently, across every channel and everywhere a customer might come across you. Your website, your ads, your emails, your social posts, your proposals, the way you or one of the team talks about you when someone asks what you do.
Good messaging doesn’t just describe what your business is. It communicates the key benefits and advantages of your business in such a way that it makes the right person feel like you’re talking directly to them.
It tells stories and identifies truths that resonate with people because they can see themselves in what you’re saying. It:
- sets your brand apart from the competition
- gets you remembered
- unequivocally answers the ‘why you?’ question time and time again
- shows people you understand their challenges, wants and needs
- convinces people you’re the right choice
- makes you the easy choice.
What weak messaging looks like.
Bland. Safe. Functional. Forgettable. Swap the name/logo and it could come from anyone. That’s what it looks like.
Broadly speaking you could say most businesses tend to fall into one of two common traps with their messaging.
The first is talking about yourself. You know the stuff. “We offer X, Y and Z. We’ve got a team of forty. We’ve been going since 2003.” All true, all understandable, but all about you. When the person reading it is only really wondering one thing: what’s in this for me?
The second is using the same old platitudes everyone else uses. You can guess what they are. “Passionate.” “Trusted.” “Customer-focused.” “Quality you can rely on.” Don’t get me wrong, they’re fine words in themselves, but they’re ones your competitors are using too.
Both traps have the same root. The messaging is inward looking and built around the business, not the buyer. The absolute opposite of “Customer-focused.”
If you say the same thing as everyone else, you sound like everyone else. And sounding like everyone else is the fastest route to being forgotten.
You aren’t going to make ground on the market leader, those pesky brash new upstarts causing a bit of a stir, or give people a reason to switch from their current partner.
What good messaging does.
Good messaging intentionally starts somewhere different. It starts with understanding the customer. Their situation, their problem, what they’re trying to achieve, what’s getting in the way.
It speaks their language, not yours. It easily and incisively says you understand where they are, where they want to get to, and how you help them get there better than anyone else.
If you get that right and your messaging talks in those terms, guess what, good stuff starts to happen. People stop skimming past you, filtering you out, and start paying attention instead. Because what you’re saying feels like it was written for them.
And woah! That feeling you’ve just given someone that “these guys get it” sends confidence surging right through them. They believe they can trust you.
It starts things moving infinitely more than any lazy ‘I didn’t really spend the time trying to show you I know you if I’m honest’ list of features you could put in front of them.
Consistent brand messaging compounds.
Here’s the part that’s easy to underestimate.
One strong, clear, incisive message, consistently showing up again and again, everywhere someone comes into contact with you, that’s powerful.
Don’t give people a different version on the website to the one in the room, to the one on your socials, to the one you send digitally.
Because familiarity builds. Recognition builds. Trust builds. Every time your message shows up looking and sounding like you, it reinforces the last time, building memory structures and creating what Byron Sharp at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls mental availability – the tendency to come to mind in a buying moment.
Over time (and I’m not talking days or weeks but months and years), that consistency compounds into something a one-off campaign (even if it’s clever) can never buy: a business that people recognise, remember, and instinctively think of first.
That’s a win isn’t it. Instinctively being thought of first?
Before your competitors, before others you hadn’t even realised were competitors, before Billy Big Business.
Take that any day. Because then it’s down to you to close the deal. It’s more about ‘don’t screw this up and it’s yours’ than it is ‘ alright, show me why I should give you my money’.
On the other hand. Businesses that chop and change every few months (or even more scarily, every few weeks) – use new words, new tone, new emphasis, a new ‘angle’ from Gary in Sales or CFO Colin’s niece – never get that compounding effect. Don’t even give themselves the merest sniff of a chance.
They keep starting again. Draining resources, draining budget.
Consistency is what turns messaging from a cost into an asset.
Getting your brand messaging right.
Super-duper, wipe the floor with your competitors, ‘you can see I know you’ messaging doesn’t just work on its own. It’s built from your Positioning and Value Proposition.
Positioning decides the ground you stand on and the territory you can own. Your value proposition articulates what that means for your customer. And your messaging is how all of that reaches them – clearly, consistently, in a way that lands.
Get the thinking right but the messaging wrong, and nobody ever hears it. Get the messaging polished but the thinking underneath it’s a bit weak, and there’s nothing real to say.
You need strategy and messaging to work together. Your strategy gives you clarity on who you are, who your customers are, how you help them. It gives you something worth saying. The messaging makes sure it’s actually heard.
Where to start?
It all starts with the customer. Think like you’re one of your customers (or someone you could serve in your sector).
I mean it. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you know better than them what they‘re grappling with, what they want, what they need.
And if you aren’t sure, get out there and speak to em! Ask them to be honest, ask them what’s giving them sleepless nights, ask them what’d make their life easier.
Then come back down to earth. Read your own website as if you were a prospective customer who’s never heard of you. Be honest with yourself. In the first few seconds, is it clear what you help people achieve and why you’re the right choice? Or is it just a list of what you do and how long you’ve done it buried in a long winded, less than straight forward navigation?
Then dig a bit deeper. Look at your headers, your sub-headers and the rest of the words. How many sentences start with “we”? How many could have been written by any of your competitors? Every one of those is a chance to turn the message round to face the customer instead.
It’s not about clever copy. It’s about clarity, relevance, and communicating the same customer truths consistently until people remember it.
Or…
If you think your messaging isn’t pulling its weight and it could work harder for you, but you worry you might not have the expertise, or just simply don’t have the time, guess what, we could have a chat. I know, who’d have thought!
If you’d like a fresh pair of eyes on whether your messaging is doing its job, leave a comment here or get in touch and we’ll set something up.
You might also find these related articles worth a read:
Brand positioning — what is it and why does it matter?
Why you really should value your value proposition
