Stephen Houraghan here of BrandMasterAcademy.com and in this video I want to
talk to you about brand messaging specifically the importance of brand
messaging and the tool that you definitely should be using to go out and
express your brand in the marketplace and I know what you're thinking
core message?
now I've been in the branding game around about ten years or so and
in that time I've had many many people entrepreneurs business owners
come to me and ask me how much do you charge for a logo but what I've never
ever heard a business owner or an entrepreneur ask me is how much do you
charge for brand messaging but if you think about what branding is for a
second if you think about the end goal of branding the end goal of branding is
to shape the mind of the audience to influence their buying decisions so that
they choose your brand over your competitor's brand that's what the end
goal of branding is but think about your own buying decisions here how many times
have you gone out and bought a product or bought a service based on a logo or
based on a brand identity now if you're a designer and you love design and you
love brand identities then maybe maybe you've gone out and made a purchasing
decision just because you love that brand identity but that's not how most
people make decisions most people look at the market and they listen to what
brands are saying they listen to the messages and they build an idea of what
that brand means to them and the value that they bring to the table and the
difference that they make and how that brand would fit into their lives and
then they make a decision based on that and it is the messaging of that brand
that shapes the idea that shapes the image of that brand in their mind and
paints a picture of what kind of impact that brand will have in their life so if
you don't have a messaging strategy if you don't have a clear messaging
strategy for your brand well then you're not shaping the mind of your
audience and you're not influencing the mind of your audience the way your
competitors probably are so what is brand messaging well they're all the
individual key messages that you want your audience to understand about your
brand that will help to shape their perception of your brand and help to
paint that image of your brand that you want to own in their mind
so pretty much all and every piece of communication that you send out into
the marketplace across all touch points is part of your brand messaging strategy
so that just goes to show how broad the brand messaging strategy is because
today there are so many different touch points there is your website your
website copy your blog posts your social media posts your packaging your business
cards any kind of print collateral your email your drip campaigns all of these
are touch points that your audience comes into contact with your brand and
if you haven't taken the time to shape the messaging through the key messages
that you've identified that you want your audience to understand about your
brand then each and every touch point is a missed opportunity to shape the mind
of your audience the way you want them to see your brand now when I first dived
into brand strategy I realized pretty quickly how important messaging was but
when I started to research one term that I kept coming across was core message
now if you look into a brand messaging then core message is a term that you'll
see come up again and again and core message is a very important part of
branding essentially it's the most distilled message that you would use for
your audience to get them to understand the most important part about your brand
and that's usually based around you know your differentiation strategy and the
value that you bring in the difference that you make in comparison to your
competitors but your core message on its own is just a body of copy and if
you go out onto Google and you search for these terms you're gonna come
across these articles that will give you a formula to create a core message and
the core message will be a body of text but a body of text is not a tool a body
of text is not something that you can use to shape your brand messaging
strategy it's not something that you can use again and again and again once
you've created that core message it's not something that you can go and post
to your social media account then to your website and then continue to repost
again and again and again that same message over time so your core message
although it is a useful tool and it really does distill what it is that
you're trying to get your audience to remember about your brand and it's
important internally within the brand as well so everybody
clear on what that you know really important message is that you want your
audience to understand but as a tool it doesn't help as a tool to express the
brand to go out and express the brand across multiple touchpoints consistently
over time it doesn't help because it's just gonna reiterate that same point
over and over again so you need something more than that and the tool
that you need to go out and express your brand is a brand messaging framework so
what is a brand messaging framework well it's not a single body of copy the way a
core message is rather it is a collection of key messages that all come
together to shape the idea that you want your audience to have about your brand
so they'll shape their perceptions so they see your brand the way you want
your brand to be seen so this is all developed strategically you need to
understand what your audience wants and the difference that you want to make in
the marketplace the value you want to bring and how you want your audience
to see your brand in the marketplace and then you develop a
series of key messages to help shape those perceptions those key messages
when they come together in the form of a brand messaging tool then you can use
them time and again to shape your messaging to shape those touch points so
that over time your audience sees these messages again and again each time they
do it helps to shape their mind a little bit more the way you want your brand to
be seen and over time they will have the perception of your brand that you have
strategically set out there in the marketplace and ultimately the idea is
that with those perceptions it will influence their decisions to take you on
as their brand of choice so that is the important difference between the core
message and the brand messaging framework one is a simple single body of
copy the other is a series of key messages that are strategically
developed to shape the mind of your audience but not all key messages are
created equal and there is a hierarchy when it comes to these messages you need to
first identify what the messages are and then prioritize them in order of
importance and this order of importance is not based on you it's based on your
audience it's based on what your audience deems as most important now
when it comes to all of us when we look at anything when we're introduced to
anything new the very first thing that we think about
whether we think about it consciously or not is what's in it for me if we're
introduced to something new whether it's a new brand or a new idea the first
thing that we automatically think about and this is part of our reptilian brain
we just do this automatically we think about what's in it for me
so your brand messaging framework needs to be split up into your primary core
message and your secondary core message the primary core message is going to
focus on scratching that itch for your audience so you know they quickly
understand what's in it for them they can quickly see if there's value and
they can they can see what kind of influence that your brand brings to the
table what impact it's gonna have in their lives and once you've scratched
that itch once you've convinced them that yes you do have a role to play in their
lives and you do bring some kind of value to the table then your secondary
core message is about humanizing that relationship it's about bringing more to
the table than just this transaction over here it's about humanizing your
brand showing that there's a human side and that you're more than just a
corporate entity so your primary core message is the most important message
because you need to quickly convince your audience that you have some kind of
value for them and you know you need to feed that reptilian brain that you're
not a threat here you can bring some kind of value to the table and then
after that your secondary core message really starts to nurture that
relationship and really brings that human side to your brand so that your
audience doesn't just see the value but sees that there's more to your brand
than just this transaction and this ties in perfectly into the importance of your
brand voice now what you say to your audience through your key messages will
influence what they understand about your brand and shape that idea of what
you bring to the table in their mind but the way you deliver those messages will
shape how they feel about it and this is getting into the human side of branding
and the human brand persona and that brand personality you need to lace your
brand with personality you need to understand the personality of your
audience and develop a personality for your brand so you can speak to your
audience in a way that they're going to be most open to your messages so if
you're able to strategically lace your communication with
that kind of personality then you're gonna be able to resonate not just with
the words that you use and what you say through your messaging but the way you
say it and the personality that you deliver those messages with now the next
principal that you need to understand is that your brand message sells an outcome
now your product or service might be jacked up on features and benefits and
that might be the difference that your product or service offers in the
marketplace but if you keep banging on about your features and your benefits
it's not gonna have the impact that you think it's gonna have and there's an old
saying that a customer doesn't buy a drill
he buys a hole in the wall so with that same philosophy your brand is not
selling what its selling it's not selling the thing it's not selling the
product or the service its selling the outcome of the product or the service
what that product or service brings what that outcome is on the back of buying
that product or service and that's key in your messaging you need to focus in
on that outcome and you need to understand the emotional connection that
your audience has to that outcome how do they feel about achieving that
outcome and how do they feel about not achieving that outcome and they are the
difference between your fears and your desires and if you understand them and
you're able to lace your brand messaging with those fears and desires and you're
able to talk to those pain points well then you're gonna be able to develop a
messaging strategy that resonates with your audience that resonates with those
emotions that they're feeling around those pain points so it's really
important to remember that outcome focus in on that outcome not to focus in
too much on the specifics and the details but take a step back and look at
what they're actually trying to achieve where are they trying to get to what
journey are they on at the moment and how are
you gonna be able to help them get there so focus on that outcome through your
messaging and you'll resonate more clearly with your audience and finally
go out and develop a brand messaging guide now remember what I said before
about the core message the core message is not a tool that you can use again and
again and it doesn't guide all of your communication certainly not consistently
anyway you need to understand all of the key messages that you want your audience
to understand before going out and creating any kind of piece of
content across any single touch point because that guide will act as
consistency for that messaging and overtime that is what's going to shape
and influence the idea of your brand in the mind of your audience that
consistency time and again those key messages time and again they are what
you've defined in your brand strategy as what you want your audience to
understand about your brand and if you keep delivering those messages over time
then that is how your brand is going to be shaped in their mind that is how you
influence their mind and ultimately that is how you influence their buying
decisions so develop that guide and make sure it's used consistently throughout
all of your messaging but I'd love to hear from you have you been using core
message as your primary messaging tool have you got a new perspective now on
brand messaging and brand messaging strategy and will you try to implement
what you've learned in this video into your own processes I'd love to know if
you've got any questions in relation to messaging at all let me know in the
comments below I'll do my best to answer all of them if you like this video
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