Messaging is one of the most important components of business marketing. A business creates brand awareness by communicating their story to the world and telling potential customers what the product or service can do for them.
At the end of the day, businesses must be customer-driven. They survive and thrive purely via customer loyalty. A brand is so much more than just a logo…it’s a personality. This is why businesses needs to craft words that appeal to their audience’s emotions and convey that their product or service will meet their ideal customer’s needs.
At Kudzu Brands, crafting a great message is what we do best! We help businesses develop unique messages and strategies to make their business known in the market. See below for some of our favorite tips!
6 Tips For Creating a Great Message
#1. Determine Your Audience
The first thing to establish as a business is, who is your audience? Knowing who your product or service is for and what their interests are will make it much easier to craft a message that will appeal to someone and potentially guide them into becoming a customer. Try the exercise below and save your outcome for the future. You’ll need it when crafting your message!
Avatar Exercise
Let’s create your ideal avatar, or a made-up person who would likely buy your product. Take a sheet of paper and write down your ideal customer’s first and last name, age, gender, job, income and neighborhood. They, try to brainstorm additional information such as what makes them tick and what are their values, do they have any hobbies, and what do they do in their free time?
#2. Know Your Platforms
As a business, it’s important to know your marketing platforms. This will allow you to choose where to place your messaging and which channels are most likely to reach your ideal audience and create brand awareness. Some examples of marketing platforms include print (newspapers, magazines and flyers), radio and television commercials, and digital (email marketing, social media and SEO).
The trick is, each of these channels is going to have different types of users and various requirements. For example, an Instagram account will be more effective if you’re using beautiful photographs to create a persona for your brand over time, while a magazine ad will work if the advertisement is grabs attention with one glance.
This is a traveler’s Instagram Feed. Her Beautiful images together, show who she is and what she is doing. Followers will feel connected to her story over time.
This is a magazine advertisement to prevent texting and driving. Magazine readers flip quickly through pages, but this advertisement will likely stick because it has a powerful image.
There are a couple of ways to learn about platforms:
Use Analytics
While this is for digital marketing only, analytics are an excellent way to watch trends and see the demographics for who’s viewing your business online. You can use this data to adjust your messaging accordingly.
Do Your Research!
If you don’t know much about a platform, research it. A great way to start is to simply go to Google and type in, “How to Market on Facebook.” There are hundreds of articles available with useful tips and tricks.
See What Works
Ultimately, marketing trends are always changing. Be sure to watch your own data trends and see what is and isn’t boosting interest in your brand. The method of trial and error never fails!
#3. Tell A Story
If we go back in time, we can observe that stories have been told throughout human history, regardless of the century or medium (word of mouth or clay tablets!). These stories have served to connect humans to each other, so if stories are the most effective way to communicate, why shouldn’t your brand be a story as well?
When crafting your brand messaging, remember to:
- Consider your avatar, or ideal client and write your messaging with them in mind.
- Define your business’s big idea. Ask yourself, where does your brand stand in the market?
- Be true to your brand to establish credibility. Accurately represent what your business is about.
#4. Always Be Honest
The time of being salesy is over. Nowadays, people desire authenticity. They don’t want to be pitched to. Instead, your audience wants to trust your brand and feel like they have a relationship with it. Here’s an excellent recipe for creating brand trust:
Humanity + Honesty = Trust
…which = Committed Customers
Humanity is about telling a real story to a real person. It’s easy to forget that you’re writing to people just like you! Honesty is about accurately representing your product. This is very important, as you don’t want a potential client to believe your product is one thing and then realize that it’s not what they thought it would be. This will break down trust and ultimately lead to poor reviews and fewer customers.
This image is not accurately representing its product. It conveys that cigarets are excellent for your health, when they are actually very bad for you!
This image is genuine. This woman is acknowledging that if you’re in a hospital, you may be having a bad day, but she is here to help.
#5. Consistency is Key!
Remember to be consistent with your messaging. For example, all relationships are built on trust, especially romantic relationships. If your significant other had one tone when they texted you, a different one on the phone, and then a third when you were together in person, would you trust this person? It would be challenging to decipher which tone was the real one.
This principle carries over into business messaging. Remember to maintain the same personality and tone throughout all of your channels. This applies to your words, images, email responses, in-person communications and so on. Customers want to know what to expect based on what they’ve seen so far. This will help establish brand trust over time.
#6. Address Pain Points
Using pain points in messaging is an effective way to evoke an emotional response and address how your business can meet someone’s needs. A pain point is something that your audience is struggling with or lacking. It’s an excellent way to segway into what your business can do for them.
Let’s pretend that your business is a speedy, early morning coffee service with 5 drive-throughs. Your audience consists of hustle-bustle people that wake up very early in the morning and need their coffee! Your messaging sequence would go like this:
- Address the pain point/what your audience is struggling with:
“Tired of waiting for your coffee to take its sweet time brewing every morning?”
- Swoop in and save the day:
“Well, now you don’t have to wait anymore.”
- Explain how you can solve their problem:
“Our express coffee service has FIVE drive-throughs, so you’re guaranteed to get your coffee ASAP!”
This example gives you an idea of how to effectively use a pain point. Consider who your audience is, what they need from you and how you can solve their problem!
We hope that this article has been helpful for you. If you’d like to go a step further, take a few minutes to re-write or create your business’s “About Us” statement. Use the audience avatar that you created along with your platform, your business’s story, honesty and humanity, consistency and relevant pain points. Have fun!
If you’re in need of extra help with creating your business messaging and marketing strategy, give Kudzu Brands a call at 828-357-8350 or email us at projects@kudzubrands.com. Growing businesses is what we do and we are happy to help!