Effective brand messaging is critical to your company’s reputation. It increases brand recognition and helps establish how you are perceived in the marketplace.
Here are three ways to enhance your brand message and create a stronger image that resonates with your audience and supports your business goals and outcomes.
1. Amplify Your Brand Values
Values are the foundation of your company’s culture, and they set the tone for what drives the passion and motivation behind the business. Strong relationships are built on shared values. Consumers often make business decisions based on the people associated with them, rather than the products offered.
Communicating your values internally is just as important as communicating them to the media and public. After all, employees at all levels are your brand evangelists, so should have a consistent message and believe in what the company stands for.
Take Ben & Jerry’s, which is known for more than just its delicious ice cream. The founders use their business to make the world a better place through their commitment to human rights, social and economic justice and environmental protection and restoration. Their core values and the issues they care about are stated clearly on their website and used consistently in their marketing efforts. The founders even stipulated in their agreement to sell the company to Unilever that the brand retain the autonomy to pursue its own social agenda.
2. Define Your Niche
In addition to shared values, customers may be more inclined to do business with a company that is known for a specific thing and specializes in what they need rather than a company that claims to dabble in everything, which can dilute the brand narrative.
For instance, the financial services sector consists of businesses offering many of the same capabilities. Firms may choose to highlight one or two areas of specialization, like retirement or business succession planning, and heavily market those services. The same may ring true for a food and beverage brand that may choose to highlight its line of vegan products.
The first step to owning your niche is to identify the audience(s) you want to target and create brand messaging that resonates with them. From there, you can develop an integrated communications strategy to get the message out to the right targets.
3. Highlight Your “Why”
While it’s often easier to describe the “what” and “how” of the business, it’s important to clarify the “why,” which is the part of the brand story that most strongly sets you apart from your competitors. It’s where you can elicit that emotional connection and relate it back to your values.
What is the company’s reason for existing? Do the founders have a captivating story or an interesting history? As Simon Sinek famously said in his Ted Talk, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it, and what you do simply proves what you believe.”
Burt’s Bees is a great example of a company that has a personal brand story, which began in the early 1980’s when a candle maker and a beekeeper got together. After making $200 in one day from selling beeswax candles at an arts and crafts sale, Burt's Bees was born. Fast Forward years later and the business has since expanded its product line and evolved into a billion-dollar company.
Click the link for more ideas on how to engage your audience with a powerful brand message. In this blog, we break down the steps for building a successful messaging platform: How to Engage Your Audience with a Powerful Brand Message.
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