In an age where personalization and authentic connection is highly sought, developing clearly defined brand messaging that truly resonates with your audience is key. When you can articulate your brand in powerful language, you can effectively reach and connect with the people you’re trying to ultimately convert.
But telling your story effectively can be a challenge.
How do you speak about your product or service in a compelling way? How can you succinctly communicate what you do or what your company is about? And how do you maintain a cohesive story across all platforms, from your website to social media?
Here are a few tips to help you craft brand messaging that helps you effectively engage your audience and turn leads into sales.
Remember that Sales Speak and Messaging are Different
Simply listing out a few broad selling points doesn’t cut it when developing compelling brand messaging. Remember that your goal is to pique the interest of potential customers and connect with them on a more personal level. It’s unlikely that anyone will stay on your website, read your case studies, or follow you on social media if you’re producing bland content full of sales speak.
Lay Out Your Core Principles
Who you are and what you believe in are two major elements of what gets people interested in working with you. Without them, it can be difficult to communicate or act consistently. Make sure to identify your purpose, vision, mission, and values before you begin developing your brand messaging.
Know Who You’re Speaking To
To communicate effectively, it is imperative to understand who you’re speaking to and what they care about. What are their wants and needs? What do they need help with? How can you make their jobs or lives easier? You can gather these insights by creating brand personas — demographic and psychographic profiles of the different types of people you’re trying to reach. When you have a deep understanding of brand personas, you can better tailor your messaging.
Slack is a great example of a company that does a fantastic job of tailoring brand messaging to different types of teams. If you take a look at the image below, you’ll notice how well they speak to two types of departments: IT (top) and marketing (bottom).
Understand Your Positioning
What makes you different from your competitors? How do you stand out in your market? What niche do you fill? This type of information will influence every level of your messaging. To determine this, you need to conduct a thorough competitive analysis. Once you’ve done so, create descriptions that explain what you do better than everyone else. Articulating this clearly and succinctly can help to ensure that your brand messaging is an extension of your positioning.
Perform A/B Testing
Once you have your brand messaging laid out, A/B testing can help you find out what is and/or isn’t working for you.
However, although A/B is an incredibly helpful tool, it can also be frustrating. It takes a lot of work to set up an A/B test. And if your variations are too minor or sample size is too low, you could end up with rather uncompelling results.
A simpler option would be to set up ads on social media, and the specifics of which one you should use will depend on where your industry is most active. For instance, at IoT Marketing, we’ve noticed that LinkedIn is ideal when it comes to connecting with IoT and high technology industry-focused audiences. Social media ads are easy to implement, a lot less costly, and tailored to the people you’re attempting to reach.
One way you can A/B test using social media ads is by:
- Creating separate landing pages that use identical design but have different copy
- Writing varying copy for the social media posts that will include the link to your landing page
- Tracking your analytics to see which ones received more conversions
Whether you’re testing a new tagline, CTA or value prop, social media ads can help you easily see what is and isn’t resonating with your audience.
The process of developing effective brand messaging is a lot more complex than what many organizations truly understand. However, following these brief guidelines will help you get on the right track.
And if you need any further help with your messaging, the team at IoT Marketing is here to help! Contact us to find out how we can help your brand build compelling messaging that converts and enables your business to reach new heights.