Developing Brand Voice & Messaging
When I started the marketing team at an education technology startup, we had no real “brand” to speak of. We had some early messaging ideas, but we hadn’t formally worked those messages into our marketing plan or decided what our brand stood for in any way. We weren’t even entirely sure who our audience was.
For many startups it’s common and not even problematic to start this way. Especially if you are building a product or service, it makes sense to focus there first. But eventually as you bring your product to market and aim to scale, you will need a clear brand message that can be communicated consistently to customers.
Why is consistent messaging critical to building a strong brand?
Your ability to build trust and loyalty with your customers depends on how people feel about your brand and what they come to expect of you. Are you authentic, clear, and consistent or scattered and conflicting? Is it easy to repeat or share with others what your brand is about or hard to remember or put into words?
Consistency helps you achieve brand affinity by instilling confidence, dedication, and trust and signaling professionalism, purpose, and stability. Defining and documenting your brand voice and messaging can help you create consistency by establishing guidelines that inform your marketing copy, media outreach, speeches, and more. It should be updated regularly based on feedback from your customers, and it should evolve with your company as you grow, while still grounding you in a few core commitments.
Who is your target audience?
As with almost anything in marketing, you should start with your audience. Who are you talking to and what do you know about their beliefs and motivations? The brand intention you set, your value proposition, and your messaging should all speak directly to this audience and what you know about them. I’ve created brand documents for companies that stem from conversations with target users, interview notes from product testing, market research, and competitive research.
What do you stand for?
Once you know your audience, it’s time to think about the core of your company. What can you promise to your customers no matter the circumstances? This is your brand promise. A brand promise is not necessarily something you communicate directly to your audience. Instead, it serves as a universal north star for your marketing and hopefully for company decisions more broadly. A brand promise answers the question: what do we stand for? It remains constant even as your product or service evolves, and it helps ensure that all your content creates a consistent experience for customers and ladders up to brand goals.
How will you communicate?
Reflect on what you know about your audience and come up with 2-3 principles for how you will communicate in a way that resonates with them. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and consider what you are looking for from a brand - is it trust? relevance? humor? credibility?
Whatever the case may be, you should strive for a consistent brand voice that connects with your audience and helps you stand out from your competition. Below is an example of brand voice principles from an education technology company.
Educator-First - We create a two-way dialogue with educators rather than tell or "market to" them. We do this by asking questions, listening, recognizing, appreciating, and playing back to educators what we’re hearing from them.
Trustworthy - We strive to keep our communication clear and simple without being folksy. We under-promise and over-deliver, and we feature user-generated content as much as possible.
Global - We’re optimistic about the opportunities to connect children and educators around the world and strive for an inclusive, multicultural, human-centered, non-political approach to our messaging.
Finally, what will you communicate?
Once you know what you stand for and how you want to communicate it, you can start to develop a few key messages for your brand. You don’t have to cover every type of copy you might need, but you should develop a few consistent responses to key questions. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
What is your product or service? Ensure you describe your offering to the world consistently. Obviously you may need to tailor your message for different audiences, but if you describe your product ten different ways to ten different clients you will simply have ten different ideas in the world of what your product is. That’s a recipe for confusion rather than brand recognition and word of mouth referrals.
Who is it for? “Everyone” is rarely the answer to this question. More likely you are focusing on a particular demographic or psychographic, and your answer can help demonstrate understanding of the need you are filling for your audience. For example, your product may be “for new parents who have limited time and money to spend.”
Why does it exist? Or Why is it unique? This is an opportunity to share what motivated you to start your company while also connecting to your customers’ needs. Is there a bigger mission behind your work? Or was there simply a gap in the market you thought you could fill? In either case, make sure you explain your ‘why’ in a clear and compelling way so your customers know what you’re all about.
With a brand promise, brand voice guidelines, and a few key messages, you’ll be well on your way to clear and consistent communication that will guide your broader marketing strategy.
