Brand communication strategies should be designed to create exceptional customer experiences that foster community and build customer loyalty. Using buyer personas to define voice and tone, brands should connect with their audience at every touchpoint to build trust.
Be consistent with your messaging. For example, positioning yourself as a low-cost brand and advertising premium prices can clarify your target market.
Understand Your Audience
Understanding your audience is one of the most important steps in developing a brand communication strategy. This allows you to create marketing materials that speak directly to them and help you develop loyal customers.
Demographics are a great way to start, but it’s also important to understand the specific characteristics of your core customer groups. For example, if your target audience comprises parents in their 40s, it’s important to know whether or not they are married, have children, and how much they make.
Similarly, it’s important to understand your audience’s purchasing habits and their needs. This can be done through surveys or simply by analyzing customer data. By gaining this insight, you can better craft your messaging and identify the key selling points that resonate with them.
Create a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
A USP is a short, clear statement that conveys what makes your product unique for customers. A USP is more than a slogan and should be woven throughout marketing materials, sales conversations, customer support scripts and even your supply chain. For example, the USP of Bee’s Wrap is “Better for the environment and better for you.”
It speaks to their audience and what matters most to them (being healthy and environmentally friendly). It’s also clear that they’re not for everyone, which is okay – companies that try to be everything to everybody end up being nothing to nobody. Learn about your competitors to discover what sets you apart and hone in to create an effective USP. Ideally, your USP should be one sentence long.
Create Buyer Personas
Once you’ve collected and organized demographic, psychographic and behavioral data from various sources, it’s time to create buyer personas. These fictitious representations of your target audience are vital for developing an effective marketing strategy and ensuring your product meets or exceeds customer expectations.
Buyer personas can be based on the specific goals and challenges of a particular client or prospect. Still, they should also encompass general demographic information such as age, gender and job title. They should also describe what their day-to-day looks like, how they consume information and where they get it.
You can find great information on your ideal customers by reviewing the analytics on your website and social media pages and the reports generated by your pay-per-click campaigns. Consider interviewing existing clients and prospects.
Craft Your Messaging
Once you’ve identified your target audience and unique value proposition, the next step is crafting your messaging. Your brand messaging is the voice of your business and should reflect how you want your audience to perceive you. For example, if you want to be perceived as an expert, your branding communications should use technical writing and include many statistics. Your messaging should incorporate humor and puns if you want to be seen as fun and sophisticated.
Once your brand messaging framework is set, create a core message that distills the key messages your business should communicate to its audiences. This can be a tagline, slogan, or key visual.
To ensure your message guide is on point, have team members from all departments review and offer feedback. This will help keep the communication of your brand consistent across all channels.
Create a Consistent Visual Identity
Whether creating a brand communication strategy from scratch or doing a rebrand, it’s important to ensure your visual identity is consistent with your unique personality and USP. It only takes a split second for potential customers to make a first impression about your business and decide whether or not they want to buy from you.
Your visual identity can include various elements, from shapes to colors. For example, brands that use simple, distinctive shapes like Lego blocks or the Coca-Cola bottle often do so to reinforce their groovy and fun personality. Colors can also be a powerful branding tool, as the United Colors of Benetton showed years ago. A style guide for your visual assets, including fonts and core shapes, is essential.
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