Employer Communication 101: How to Define Your Brand Message

These days, over 80% of customers say they need to trust a brand to even consider buying a product from them. This makes the voice of a company and the brand message it communicates very important. So, how do you define this message and present it to the world?

Below, you can find a discussion on the tenets of creating a statement fit to tell everyone who you are and what your brand does. As you read through, make sure you have gone through each of these steps so you do not miscommunicate the most important message your company has.

Are You Messaging Internal or External Recipients?

Before you tell everyone outside your organization who you are, you should understand it within the culture of your own team. Think about the core values you try to exemplify, and define them. These can start to build the roots of the brand message you might wish to communicate to others later.

Ensure everyone on the inside of your team buys into this message. There might be nothing worse than having some people who do not agree, especially if they are to communicate with customers at a later time.

When you start talking to people external to your organization, though, they will have different needs for what they want to hear. You want to consider your message in the context of the different subcultures you will aim for.

Do You Have a Vision Statement?

Your mission statement should be a clear message with a description of the purpose and direction of your company. When you make these, your company creates a goal it intends to fulfill, as well as guidelines of what to do on the way and after it reaches that place.

Your brand messaging strategy will build upon this mission or vision statement to direct it outward. Thus, it should be clear, concise, and forward-thinking to appeal to adopters of your products or services.

When your company has questions about the messages it sends, it can also refer back to your mission statement. Those speaking can then use this as a jumping-off point to form official communication.

How Do You Compare to Competitors?

Understand you are not the only fish in what might be a very large pond. As you start creating a strong brand message, think about what your competitors are saying.

To appeal to people, you will want to create a unique selling identity to pull in people on the fence about you or others.

You can also position yourself as a very different, albeit appealing, persona from others in your industry. If they position themselves as the lighthearted voice in the crowd, you can go one better and appeal to those who want an industry leader. So long as it still appeals to your target audience, it should all be ok.

Summarize Your Brand Voice?

It can be hard to define yourself in a busy world. This is why having a unique and appealing brand voice can be so important.

Create a persona for your company. Think about the following questions to define who they are:

• How does your company’s vision impact the tone they have?
• What kind of relationship should this persona have with your customers?
• What kind of person appeals to your customers?
• Can you copy the tone of content already resonating with your audience?
• What single-word emotions would apply to your company’s persona?

At the same time, try to think of things the voice is not. This helps if people start to drift from the tone. You can point to it and suggest where people are going wrong.

Can You Define Your Tone?

After you discuss your brand voice, you will need to ensure everyone in your team understands its importance. Create an official brand messaging document.

Others working for your organization who need to speak to people on an official basis must follow these guidelines. This will ensure you stay consistent in how communication occurs.

In general, you will give this document to your teams who most often speak to customers. As such, your marketing department is the most likely to have an interest in it. Still, every now and then you might have others who need to send a message beyond your walls, and this information is there for them.

What About Pivoting?

Remember you might not get it right the first time. History is full of businesses that send out brand messages and realize they have not appealed to their users in the right way.

Make it clear internally that your brand message is one you can change. You could even make plans to update it in the first few months and revisit it on a yearly basis. This way, you can ensure you stay on-point and relevant to your customer community.

Where Can You Use This Messaging?

When you write up guidelines for your brand message, you will want to ensure your colleagues use it in the right way in the right place. You do not want to only use instructional language, for example, on a social media page.

Think about, and define, how you use your brand message and tone in the following places:

• Blog posts
• Press releases
• Email newsletters
• Social media
• Video content
• Advertising
• Marketing taglines

After you define how your brand message works in these contexts, create examples of each so people can use them as starting points.

Will You Get Customer Feedback?

Aim to get feedback. Create an open and honest chain by which people can offer their opinion back to you. This way, you can always know if your brand messaging does not meet the standards you need for it.

Empower people in marketing, technical support, and all over the company to let you know if your branding is failing to support your company, and how. Then change it so it does.

Perfect Your Brand Message

The above points should summarize how to create a brand message to stand the test of time. Creating such a message might work locally, but what about in other countries or cultures? This is why ensuring you have people well-versed in other locations on staff.

We can help you hire people who can work remotely from other regions. All you need to do is get in contact and we can run you through your options for remote working solutions. So, give us a call and get started today.