Top Guide to Brand Messaging and Brand Voice 2024
Your key messages and brand voice inform all of your marketing communications — from your website copywriting to every email and social media caption.
What is “brand messaging”?
Brand messaging is the words you use to communicate what you do, why you do it differently, and why your target audience should care.
Brand messaging is the foundation of a brand’s identity, which informs everything it does. These clear, concise messages are strategic and research-backed.
The 2 most important functions of a brand’s message are
speaking to a target audience’s needs or wants (often called a pain point)
positioning its unique solution (Unique Selling Point).
Key messages are fundamental to communicating what you bring to the table. Every business has a unique value, whether it be a record-breaking new technology (ok, probably not) or simply a compelling story.
Successful key messages are those that clearly communicate this unique quality. What makes you unique will be sticky in your customers’ brains, and they’ll be able to remember you in a crowd of competition.
Brand messaging in action – Alo Yoga
“Spreading mindful movement, inspiring wellness and creating community.”
These eight simple words communicate so much.
Alo Yoga is a yoga clothing company, but its brand message calls out to a much wider target audience. It appeals to health-conscious people dedicated to bringing balance and holistic health to their lives, which goes much further than yoga.
In saying “creating community,” the brand also communicates a certain ‘in crowd’, as if to shop with them is to be part of a club of like-minded people concerned with personal growth.
What is “brand voice”?
If brand messaging is what you say, your brand voice is how you say it.
Brand voice is what brings character and personality to your communication. Your voice is just as important as your message; it can easily change how your brand makes people feel.
Think of it as encompassing style, the words and phrases your brand uses, values and beliefs and tone (e.g., formal or informal, serious or silly).
The best and easiest way to stay on brand is to create a brand voice guide that outlines the key characteristics of your brand's personality. It should include assets such as a word bank and a comprehensive list of writing style do’s and don’ts, such as when it’s okay to break grammar rules.
Brand voice is the main component of being consistent in your communications. Consistency and repetition across all your touchpoints build trust and credibility and leave a lasting impression. Clearly defining how your brand uses language, style and tone makes consistency easy.
Brand voice in action – Alo Yoga
Alo Yoga’s brand voice can be felt in its vocabulary and even its punctuation.
Their message uses buzzwords ‘mindful’ and ‘wellness’, which connote a modern lifestyle embracing holistic health. Commas break the sentence up into three phrases that have a comfortable rhythm. Saying the message aloud, you can hear the phrase’s uplifting cadence, which evokes a strong call to action.
The message has a positive yet serious tone and is impact and mission-oriented. It uses action words to tell us what the brand does — spread, inspire, create. It is similar to the types of messaging used by non-profit organizations, which tells us that the brand wants to be seen as ‘doing good’.
Invest in a professional copywriter or DIY?
At best, most people gloss over establishing their brand messaging and voice. Much more common is to ignore one or both.
People tend to want to immediately launch a beautiful website or start firing off ads. Everybody loves short-term gratification. But brand messaging and voice are for those playing the long game. It's non-negotiable if you want long-term, scalable success.
Doing brand messaging and brand voice right is an investment. This project requires intense research and much consideration. But it’s an investment that pays for itself many times over.
If you don’t currently have the budget to hire a professional copywriter but want to start the building your brand messages and brand voice , start by thinking about:
Who is/are your dream client(s)?
What value do you add to their life with your products/services?
What makes you different from everyone else?
What is your “why”? What’s the real reason you do what you do?
Spend a good amount of time mulling these over. Write down everything that comes to mind. Forcing yourself to explain your answers to these fundamental questions will help clear up your key messages and highlight areas you need to strengthen.
I can help you create a Brand Messaging & Voice Guidebook that you’ll use every day, forever.
In 3 weeks, you could have a super-detailed, super-personalized roadmap to brand messaging and brand voice that you and all your contractors or employees will refer to for everything your brand puts out into the world.
Brand messaging and brand voice is my most in-depth, intensive process. It starts with a custom, comprehensive brand discovery questionnaire, followed by a 1-hour video call to meet & greet face-to-face and talk strategy. I launch off from this starting point and collect data about your target clients and competitors. All this background feeds into my creating your Brand Messaging & Voice Guidebook.
Email or message me with any questions or to get started on your project.