How to Create a Competitive Advantage with Consistent Brand Messaging

Brand consistency is essential to your marketing efforts (and therefore, to your growth); there are a lot of different factors that play into this, but one of the most important aspects is your brand messaging. It’s a key aspect of your brand identity, serving as the foundation for everything your audience will see, read, and hear.

Jared Rosen, the Senior Brand Manager at Wayfair puts it this way: “Brand identity is more than just finding the right logo to place on coffee cup sleeves or mount above your front door. It’s about crafting a personality that amplifies the core elements to your brand’s DNA.” Your brand message is what communicates this to the world.

For many business owners, however, this is one of the hardest parts of the puzzle. How do you develop a brand message strategy, and how does affect your content?

I get it. I’ve been there, and this is something our Marketing Coaches help clients with every week, and it’s something my Marketing Team has helped me to refine. I’d love to share how you can get started on this as well!

Ready to create the messaging that’s right for your company? Check out Design Your Ideal Messaging — it’s jam-packed with strategies, training, and resources from the UYB Marketing Team!

Step 1: Establish Your Goals and Brand Voice

This is a vital first step in establishing consistency in your brand messaging strategy. Without it, your online presence turns into a random display of “I have no idea what I’m supposed to post, but I have to post something, so…”. This is completely understandable but doesn’t tend to help you reach your goals.

We’ve all seen — and probably done — the following:

Feeling like you should probably post something on social media (but not having time to dig into the process), you delegate the task to a team member. They have no idea what to post either, so your page or feed ends up being a random mix of motivational quotes, holidays, and engagement questions.

Don’t get me wrong, those CAN BE part of your Brand Messaging to resonate with your ideal audience, but they also are sometimes slapped together and thrown out there without much consideration for what you are trying to accomplish. It all starts with establishing your goals for marketing and your brand voice.

What would you like to accomplish through your marketing on various channels? Do you want to increase your brand awareness? Build community? Drive prospective clients to book a call or download a lead magnet? Build advocacy among your current and past clients?

Each of these goals takes a different messaging strategy. This is why we encourage you to create a blend of one third posts to educate your audience on what you do, one third posts to resonate with your ideal audience and one third of the posts are designed with a clear call to action.

Once you decide upon your goals, the next step is to determine your brand voice. This is the personality you want to portray to your audience.

When I sat down to write my original business plan for Upleveling Your Business, I included a section on my company and personal brands. These have both evolved over the past few years — and my Marketing Team has done quite a bit to refine them — but the basis of the brand voice is still the same as it was in the summer of 2019. We’re fun, streamlined, and vibrant, dedicated to helping busy business owners develop the systems and teams that will allow them to build a profitable business and THRIVE!

Step 2: Determine Your Target Audience

Once you determined your goals and brand voice, it’s time to nail down who you’re talking to. Who is your target audience?

This might seem like an odd question; after all, you want to reach as many people as possible, right?

Wrong. Good marketing will attract the people you most want to work with — the ones who will be a great fit for your services and your team — while naturally repelling the people who would be better served by one of your competitors.

Take a moment to think about the clients you love working with. What patterns start to surface?

Do you like working with young professionals? Retirees? C-Suite executives? People in a complex situation who need your skills? By honing your messaging, you can speak directly to them and build rapport.

I recommend taking it a step further, though. Who do you not want to work with?

This answer will be different for everyone. Do you want to stick to clients who will bring less stress to the situation, or do you enjoy the challenge of an aggressive case? Do you want to work with lower maintenance clients, or do you thrive filling the needs of people who are higher maintenance? Are there certain types of cases you already know you don’t want to work with?

These are all things that should be taken into account when developing your messaging. Our Design Your Ideal Messaging course will help you do this — and of course, our Coaching Team can help you as well!

Step 3: Determine Your USP and Brand Story

Your USP, or Unique Selling Proposition, is the aspect of your branding that will give you a competitive advantage when it comes to marketing. This might sound complicated, but at its core, it’s actually pretty simple: what sets you apart from your competitors? What do you offer that they don’t, and why are you the best fit for your ideal client?

This will probably take some brainstorming, but as it comes to you, you’ll start to find ways to bring it out in your messaging. It might seem a bit uncomfortable to do this at first, but it’s actually a benefit to both you and your clients.

Once you determine your USP, it’s time to inject your personality — your brand story. Essentially, your brand story is why your audience will want to engage with you.

This can include stories from your background, elements of your personality, your core values, your “why,” and more. This is what humanizes your brand and helps you create connection. Gone are the days of “Instagram Perfect” — to cut through the noise in today’s world, people want to know that you’re real.

Step 4: Build Your Marketing Systems!

I can’t emphasize this one enough. The first three steps help you develop your messaging, but without strong systems, you won’t be able to maintain the consistency you need to reach and nurture your audience.

This might seem like an unnecessary step, but trust me — they will save you and your Marketing Team a lot of time, and they’ll help to ensure that your messaging is cohesive and on-brand.

Creating the right messaging and marketing strategy takes intentional work — once it’s in place, though, keeping up with it should be a smooth process. With the right systems in place, it will be!

These systems can include everything from your Policies & Procedures Manual to the checklists, workflows, planners, trackers, and templates that your Marketing Team can use to streamline their processes. Don’t feel like you have to build these from scratch, though — we have created resources to help you do so in a fraction of the time!

Developing consistency in your brand messaging will allow you to stand out from the crowd, attract your ideal audience, and build rapport with your prospective clients. It takes some intentional work to develop, but once you have it in place, you’ll be amazed at the results!

Kristen David, a former trial lawyer and partner who went from working 85 hours a week and taking home way too little money in her law firm, built it up to a million-dollar-plus business, then sold her shares and pivoted into a business coach guru. She is now an international speaker, bestselling author, and operates a successful business, empowering business owners to build thriving, profitable businesses that are self-managed with systems. She helps busy business owners build those systems by implementing policies and procedures the Fast Track Way.

Originally published at https://www.uplevelingyourbusiness.com/.