How to create a strong brand messaging strategy: 5 steps plus examples

If you don’t have a strong brand messaging strategy, you have virtually no chance of building a strong relationship with your target audience or boosting sales. After all, your logo and products can only tell your customers so much about your brand.

If you want to forge an emotional connection with potential customers, differentiate yourself from the competition, and convince people to invest in your brand, you need to communicate with them.

Your brand messaging strategy ensures you’re elevating your brand image, with marketing campaigns and statements that showcase your unique selling points, brand personality, and mission statement.

It’s the north star for all of your marketing efforts, giving the consistent voice you need to tell your brand story in a way that generates growth. It can even help you earn loyalty from your employees, and attract new stakeholders to your company.

So, how do you develop a brand messaging strategy?

What is a messaging strategy?

A brand messaging strategy is your comprehensive plan for how you’re going to convey your brand voice, personality, and core values to your customers and other stakeholders (employees and investors), through external and internal communications.

Strong brand messaging requires a clear focus and consistency. The more consistently your messages highlight your brand positioning, brand promise, and key differentiators, the more powerful connections you’ll build with your audience.

Unfortunately, while many companies have a communication plan, they don’t always have a strategy that ensures their messages align with their specific goals and the different audiences they want to reach. This leads to scattered, ineffective communications.

Building a clear messaging strategy aligns your teams and creates focus. It helps you hone your message regardless of what different communication channels you’re using and constantly highlights your brand’s core message.

Why you need a strong message strategy

Put simply, your brand messaging strategy helps your company in numerous ways. Externally, it builds brand awareness, by ensuring your brand messages give your consumers crucial insights into your company’s values, differentiating factors, and personality.

Internally, your brand messaging strategy empowers and connects your teams. It ensures all of your employees, from sales teams to marketing and customer service experts, know how to convey your tone of voice, and unique value proposition.

With a brand messaging strategy, you take a cohesive approach to building a strong brand identity, across all of the touch points and communication channels where you interact with your community.

For an example, take a look at Wendy’s. Their brand messaging strategy constantly draws attention to the benefits of their product (fresh beef and products). However it also positions the company as fun, friendly, and humorous, helping it to connect with the right people.

The benefits of message strategies

Breaking it down, the biggest benefits of a brand messaging strategy include:

Focused marketing and advertising

When you build a strategy for your communication and marketing efforts, you’ll draw on extensive research about your target audience, their pain points, and their goals. This helps you make better decisions about your marketing campaigns.

You’ll be able to determine which marketing channels you should be using to tell a compelling story about your brand, which selling points you should draw attention to, and more. You might even spend less money on ineffective advertising campaigns.

Improved strategic alignment

With an effective brand messaging strategy, you don’t just give clarity to your customers, you give your team members a deeper understanding of your company too. You’ll help them to understand what buyer personas you want to interact with, and what your organization’s strengths are.

This leads to better well-crafted brand assets, as well as more consistency in the way you manage sales, marketing and customer service. You might even be able to use your internal messaging strategy to attract new talent to your team, enabling business growth.

Increased loyalty and sales

It takes more than a great product to earn brand loyalty these days. You need to show your customers your committed to addressing their specific needs, build relationships with them through different channels, and earn their trust. A good brand message framework helps with this.

Your brand message strategy will ensure you can send a consistent message about your values and benefits to your customers, earning their loyalty and trust. The more you share the same powerful insights with your customers, the more you’re likely to get sales.

The components of effective messaging strategies

So, how do you create an effective brand messaging strategy? As with most brand assets, you’ll usually accomplish more if you seek the help of a professional. A brand messaging strategist like Fabrik will guide you through the process of creating effective brand messages.

They’ll help you identify unique selling points, find your position in the industry, creating your key messages, and differentiating yourself from the competition.

Whether you’re using the help of a specialist, or working on your own, however, a great brand messaging strategy should always include the following things:

Unique selling points

Unique selling points are the elements of your business, service, or offering that distinguish you from the competition. They can help to identify your position in the market, signifying that you’re more affordable, luxurious, or professional than the competition.

Unique selling points can also be linked to your history, or the experience you offer. For instance, Network Homes’ unique selling point is that it makes high-quality housing available to everyone, this inspired the tagline, “Good homes make everything possible”.

Identifying effective USPs means examining your competition and your target audience. Find out what you can offer that your competitors can’t, and make sure those selling points matter to your audience with focus groups, surveys, and market research.

A clear mission, vision, or purpose

Your brand mission highlights what you want to accomplish as a company, beyond simply making money. Understanding the “why” behind your organization helps you to create more impactful messages that resonate emotionally with your target audience.

Accurist doesn’t just want to “sell watches”, it wants to give customers a taste of British heritage, and affordable luxury.

Nike doesn’t just want to sell athletic apparel; it wants to inspire people to achieve their fitness goals and live healthier lives. Identify your brand mission, your brand values, and the impact you want to have on the world, and embed that into your marketing messages.

A powerful brand story

Finally, one of the most important elements of any brand messaging strategy is an engaging and meaningful brand story. Your brand story is a powerful tool that shows your customers where you came from, here you’re going, and what you stand for.

For example, Hawkswell was founded by a team of hands-on production specialists united by a passion for innovation and interactive storytelling. Over the years, they’ve built their studio around a quest to help people create and share impactful stories.

A well-crafted brand story doesn’t just give more depth to your brand identity, or help you fill your website with content. It humanizes your business, helping to show customers the dreams and spirit behind your organization.

How to build messaging strategies for your brand

Now that you know the components you need for an effective brand messaging strategy, it’s time to get to work. Again, you can work with a specialist on these stages who can do some of the work on behalf of your brand.

Otherwise, be prepared to dive into the following steps…

1. Research your target audience

Analyzing your audience is something you should do before you create any brand asset. You’ll only identify an effective unique selling proposition, and create amazing products if you already know what matters to your target market.

When you’re building your brand messaging strategy, a deeper understanding of your target audience will help you to identify what kind of personality will resonate with your customers, what language you should use, and what statements you should make.

It will also help you to identify where you’re going to interact with your customers, through various channels like social media, blog posts, email marketing, and public relations.

If you don’t already have them, build comprehensive buyer personas that identify your customer’s demographics, psychographics, and behavioral characteristics.

Remember, you might have multiple different segments in your target audience. If so, make sure you create a new persona for each group, identifying everything from age range to gender identity, education level, location, and values.

2. Write crucial brand statements

Once you’ve identified your target audience, you can start building the central statements that identify your brand essence. We recommend starting with a strong positioning statement. This is a short sentence that sums up everything your brand is about, what it does, and who it serves.

Here’s an example from Tesla to help you:

Ideally, your positioning statement should make it easy to see the benefits you deliver to a specific customer. Adding reference to your unique value proposition and “proof points”, can be helpful too.

Alongside your positioning statement, you might also want to create:

• A mission statement: A clear, simple summary of what you your business does, such as “We deliver simple and convenient cleaning services to customers across the UK.”
• A vision statement: A statement that identifies what you want to accomplish, such as “We want to become the world’s most customer-centric company.”
• A value statement: Something that outlines the core values of your brand, such as “We are sustainable, customer-focused, and innovative.”

3. Develop your key messages

Now you have your brand statements and a clear view of your target audience, begin working on some of your central “key messages”. These are the specific messages you’re going to want to constantly communicate to your target audience.

Usually, they should be based on your brand positioning statement, mission, vision, and values, as well as what you know about your customer’s pain points.

As an example, some of the core messages we created for GamaLife, an innovative investment company, focused heavily on preparation and the future, such as “Planning and Protecting our future should be easy.”

Statements like this draw direct attention to your values as a company.

Remember, you might have a handful of different key messages connected to different value propositions and benefits you focus on.

If you’re a company that specializes in simple, but innovative technology for small, large, and mid-sized businesses, you might also create messages in different tones to suit those various groups.

Step 4: Choose your messaging channels

You’re almost ready to start putting your brand messaging strategy into action, but first you need to decide where you’re going to be sharing your marketing messages.

There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy here. You could consider traditional channels like television, radio and print. Alternatively, you might focus on digital channels, like social media posts for Instagram and Twitter, or email marketing campaigns.

The trick to success is choosing the channels where you’re most likely to encounter your target audience. The research you did into your customers will come in handy here. Based on what you know about your audience, where are they most likely to happen across your brand?

Are they the kind of people who check Instagram every day, spend hours scrolling through TikTok, or listen to podcasts non-stop?

Taco Bell knows its customers span a range of demographics, so it has a strong offline presence with billboards and television ads, but it also invests a lot of time into tailoring its message to younger audiences on social media channels like Instagram.

Step 5: Create clear brand guidelines

Finally, make sure you can keep your brand messaging strategy consistent. Brand guidelines will give your team members all the direction they need when they’re crafting blog posts, social media content, and anything else for your communication strategy.

Make sure you clearly identify the target audience for each channel you’re going to be using, and the type of language they respond best to. Check your team members are aware of how to show your brand’s personality consistently through every touchpoint, with the right tone of voice.

It’s also worth putting a strategy in place to ensure that you’re regularly reviewing your messaging strategy and updating it based on what you learn about your customers. Use social listening tools, collect feedback, and be ready to adapt as necessary.

Successful messaging strategies: Messaging strategy examples

Before you dive into creating your own brand messaging strategy, you might want to check out some great messaging strategy examples from well-known brands.

We’ve already referenced a few throughout this guide, but here’s a couple more to help inspire you…

1. Loom

Great messaging strategies focus on conveying what makes you valuable to your target audience, and what your purpose is. Loom offers a great example of a messaging strategy with everything from its social media presence to its website.

Loom instantly draws attention to the value of video for sharing messages on its homepage, and reminds customers how simple and intuitive its platform is to use.

On its social media pages, the company keeps things simple and direct with quick, value-focused statements that draw attention to the unique benefits it offers.

2. Abri

Abri’s messaging strategy helps to position it as a friendly, accessible source of support for anyone who needs help with housing. The company’s welcoming voice makes it seem more human, and warm than most of its competitors.

The organisation also uses a lot of social proof in its messaging, referencing other people to ensure that it can back up its claims. Even on social media, you’ll find plenty of examples of Abri’s straightforward, but friendly tone of voice.

3. Dove

Dove is one of the best-known beauty brands in the world for a reason. Its messaging strategy constantly positions the brand as an innovator committed to helping people of all creeds and backgrounds rediscover their confidence and self-esteem.

The company’s messaging revolves around statements that draw attention both to the natural ingredients Dove uses in its products, and its belief that all beauty should be a source of confidence, not a cause for anxiety.

With its brand messaging strategy, Dove stands as an inspirational, motivational, and caring company, that genuinely commits to putting its audience first.

Work with a leading brand messaging strategist

Clearly, a well-executed brand messaging strategy can work wonders for your brand. Companies with exceptional approaches to messaging are the ones that build the strongest relationships with their audiences, earn the most loyalty, and make the most sales.

Of course, developing a messaging strategy of your own can be complex. It takes a lot of work to identify the right tone of voice, your core messages, and the right channels.

At Fabrik, we help companies from all industries discover and implement the perfect messaging strategy to optimize their brand voice.

Contact us to see how we can help you build the ideal messaging strategy.

Fabrik: A branding agency for our times.

Now read these:
—Brand messaging: What it is and how it works
—How to create a brand messaging architecture
—The essential guide to brand messaging hierarchy