5 Fundamental Flaws With Your Brand Messaging (And Ways To Fix Them)

Storytelling is an art, and when it’s about your brand messaging, it gets a lot more challenging than usual.

You need to incorporate every single detail about your brand into your brand’s message. What you do. Around which beliefs your brand strategy revolves. In what tone you describe your products/ services. Who your employees are. What makes your brand unique when compared with others.

Combining all these blocks, you need to construct a clear yet cohesive message that resonates with your target audience effortlessly, this is what we call a Brand Message.

When you work with multiple content creators, it becomes a bit tricky to infuse the factor of uniformity within your brand messages. When it comes to sending your message across the audience, no matter which content you are working on; an ad copy, web content, calls-to-action or social media, every single piece of writing needs to be consistent and evenly toned. If your brand messages fail to complement your brand story that means you need to work on the architecture of your brand messaging.

In order to tell your brand story the right way, you need to fix all the faults in the style and tone of your messaging. But how do you know that you need to work on it to make it better?

Here are 5 signs that your brand messaging needs to be put right before proceeding further.

1. A fault in your storytelling

Suppose you are a fitness wear brand and your brand message includes only a few inspirational taglines and a couple of ad campaigns involving celebrities. Would it be sufficient to match the standard that Nike has built over the decades? Absolutely not. Nike is a brand that has always made its mark with gripping storytelling. The brand always comes up something so compelling that the audience can’t help but connect instantly with the brand. With their brand messaging they have always strived to induce some kind of positive change in their audience’s mindset. Think of their Equality campaign, that was more than a promotional campaign, a movement that got the audience hooked and connected at a large scale.

If you fail to offer any of the values that have been described with Nike’s example, that means you have got nothing special and inspiring to contribute. Then why would they be interested in listening to you?

Fix it: If you really want to induce a sense of connectivity, you need to work on the bigger picture rather than just a promotional campaign. You need to articulate a framework based on your values and beliefs. You need to tell your audience what difference you want to make with your brand. You need to craft the stories based on your brand’s principles and come up with the right way to convey your stories.

2. A fault in your address

Before sending your message across, first of all, you need to know the audience you are having a conversation with. You can’t just create a single message for a different set of the audience as every set may have a separate intellect and their needs and personas can be miles apart. Therefore, you need to understand the needs and wants of a particular audience, and then your message should be framed to address those needs.

Fix it: To understand a particular audience, you need to create personas first. You can conduct brief surveys through your web forms or email marketing. The responses gathered from these places can help you understand their goals, fears, needs, and with the help of all the accumulated points, you can tailor your brand message to represent the various segments.

3. A fault in your brand messaging architecture

Brand messaging architecture sounds like complicated terminology. However, it’s a simple concept that once understood, can bring tremendous results in terms of storytelling. It’s a simple framework that needs to be established before you craft a brand message as it helps your team to educate people about your brand and it makes sure that there is a minimum disturbance in your message, as well as completely resonating with a target market.

Fix it: If you are still unaware of the ingredients of an effective Brand messaging architecture, let’s have a look at the elements that you need to combine to make one.

• Brand’s Position in the Marketplace
• Value Proposition
• Punchline
• Brand Stories

In order to clearly define these elements, you need to gather your creative team members on the same page and make them aware of each aspect that constitutes your brand messaging architecture. Once each of the elements has been articulated, next you need to visualize them so that content creators become aware of the implementation strategy. Not only this, but you should also make sure that your team is familiar with your brand guidelines.

4. A fault in your brand voice

Striking brand messaging is not only about what you have to communicate. It’s about the way you communicate and the way you tell your story. Do you have emotional hooks? Is your voice capable enough to get people connected and involved? If not, then all your brand messaging efforts will be in vain. On a daily basis, we bump into dozens of brand messages which fail to evoke an urge to get involved with the brand. Why? Because they fail to develop a convincing and unique tone/voice of their own.

Fix it: Brand tone and voice are more than just a custom logo design, punchy slogan, and color scheme. The horizons have been expanded and modern-day branding demands a lot of input from the marketer’s end. If you really want someone to become a brand advocate, you will have to bring something that really matters to them.

For example, Dollar Shave Club is a brand which has developed a personality with their eccentric humor and the ability to convey the way it is. Their casual, short and clean copy has been formulated to cater to men primarily, from their web copy to social channels, they successfully maintain the sweet and straightforward tone.

5. A fault in your copy

Wherever you get the chance to flaunt your brand, you should flaunt your brand. Remember that a commercial is not the only place through which you can show how wonderful your brand is and why people should be connected with this brand. If you are a talented as well as witty content creator, you can create the magic with any piece of copy that you work on.

Fix it: Consider your calls-to-action, your social media bios, as well as your product descriptions, as the golden spots where you can play with the words to insinuate who you are. These are the spots you can get the maximum advantage of conveying your brand impression without having to put in extra effort.

Wrap

Only a well-defined and finely executed framework will help your team curate your branding message in a homogenous way.

There are numerous ways to communicate your brand message to your target market. However, your brand message should always orbit around your brand strategy and each attempt of brand communication should be meant to reinforce the brand’s goals and vision. Remember, without a thoughtfully crafted plan your brand messaging efforts will bring you anything but the desired results.

Guest author: Loius Martin is a Creative Marketing Manager at Invictus Studio, a design company situated in Dallas. He has been guest blogging for quite a long time about design, search engine marketing and branding. You can follow him at @loiusmartin1

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