What Are Brand Messaging Guidelines?
Everyone wants to have a memorable brand; one of those stand-out brands that humanize your business and engage your audience’s emotions.
Having a magnetic brand is what will make the difference between an offer that is good but doesn’t make an impression and an experience your consumers won’t forget.
To build a powerful, story-driven brand that accomplishes this goal, you need consistency across channels. Whether you’re a solopreneur running a small business or a larger corporation with a team, you’ll want your content and campaigns to sound like you at every touchpoint.
Nothing is worse than spending time and money creating content only to have your social media sound completely different than your website and blog.
The key to a successful and consistent brand is to create alignment between your brand strategy and your content creation.
Enter, brand messaging guidelines.
What is brand messaging?
Brand messaging guides all of your marketing communications to be driven by your brand strategy. It’s how you can ensure that you “sound” like your brand on all your marketing channels.
Brand messaging typically includes the specific values that your company wants to communicate about your offers, such as product or service positioning, mission statements, and more. These messages are meant to center your audience so you can deliver value to them through your marketing material.
Brand messaging also helps lead the way in how to talk about your product or service.
For instance, think about your favorite commercials. Regardless of the industry, you’ll find that whatever comes to mind has some memorable element: humor, luxury, etc. – and that’s no accident.
Some brands position themselves as great quality at a good price, while others position themselves as high-end, high-touch products and services at a premium price. In each instance, their marketing reflects these things accordingly.
In the same way, you need your content to take into account your brand strategy so that your audience is guided by the same emotions and values that drive your business.
To be consistently on-brand across channels, marketers develop a tool called brand messaging guidelines which document those messaging touchpoints to help teams stay in alignment across all marketing functions.
These guidelines are typically presented as a document or booklet with information like your mission statement, core values, content pillars, voice guidelines, and more.
Creating brand messaging guidelines ensures that your marketing campaigns resonate with your target audience, convey your brand's unique value proposition, and guide all of your communications, from content marketing and partnerships to customer support.
What is the difference between brand voice and brand messaging?
You’ll often hear “brand messaging” and “brand voice” used interchangeably, but they’re actually two different concepts.
A brand’s voice is the way a brand communicates with its audience. It encompasses the specifics around personality, tone, language, and more.
The best way to think about this is by imagining your business as a character. For instance, Nick Miller from New Girl is quirky, yet genuine and approachable. On the other hand, Spencer James from All American is confident, humble, and candid.
Similarly, your brand may have the exact same offers as a competitor, but your messaging will set you apart from one another and more importantly, resonate with a different set of target audiences.
Therefore, brand messaging is the content of the communication, while brand voice is the style in which the communication is delivered. Both are important components of a brand's overall identity and are used to convey the brand's values, personality, and unique selling points to its audience.
Why do I need brand messaging guidelines?
Brand messaging guidelines document your brand voice and personality so you can scale your business while retaining the authenticity of your brand in your communications.
Whether you’re speaking to customers or stakeholders, the messaging themes and key points of focus should be in alignment with your overall brand strategy. This includes everything from your core values to your personality and tone.
The purpose of brand messaging guidelines is to help ensure that all communication from your business is consistent, clear, and effective in connecting with the right audience. Not to mention, any professional content creators on your team will love you for giving them some guardrails to operate within.
Having clear brand messaging guidelines can also help save time and effort by providing a clear set of guidelines for writers, graphic designers, executives, investors, partners, and more to follow when communicating on behalf of the company or organization.
4 Steps to Creating Brand Messaging Guidelines for Your Business
If brand messaging was easy enough to DIY, everyone would be doing it and everyone would have a pretty magnetic brand. Obviously, that’s not the case. While these steps can help you get started – especially if you’re working on a tight budget – partnering with a professional brand and content strategist will save you money in the long run.
Establishing brand messaging guidelines helps with building brand awareness and a rebrand can cost you the credibility of your brand. If you’re interested in learning more about professional brand strategy, contact me to learn more.
1. Define your brand strategy
Remember, brand messaging is driven by brand strategy. In order to effectively understand what you want to say and how you want to say it, you need to start by defining an authentic brand strategy.
Get an idea of what your mission, values, and unique selling points are. This will help you understand what your brand stands for and what makes it unique.
You’ll also want a clear picture of your target audience, also known as your ideal customer. Understanding who you are trying to communicate with will help you adjust your messaging to be as relevant and as effective as possible.
2. Determine your content themes
Based on your brand strategy and target audience, you will be able to identify key themes and messages you want to communicate about your brand. These should be focused on the benefits and value that your brand offers to your customers.
For instance, if you are a Black-owned lingerie brand advocating for inclusivity in the intimacy space, you’ll want to resonate with marginalized identities, consumers that wear lingerie, and/or perhaps other Black entrepreneurs in the industry.
This gives you three main anchors to pull all your content ideas back to and informs exactly how you want to position your brand’s thoughts in these areas.
3. Establish a tone and voice
Knowing what you want to say and how you want to say it equips you with everything you need to determine the tone and voice that you want to use when communicating about your brand.
These elements should be consistent with your brand identity and should be appropriate for your target audience.
Using the previous example, you may decide that being poetic, bold, and confident makes the most sense for your brand. A gentle, luxury feel resonates with the industry while being bold and confident helps tie together the industry and your products with your overarching mission.
Select language and terminology that aligns with your values and mission so that all your communications will be clear, concise, and easy to understand.
4. Create guidelines
Lastly, put all of this information together to create your brand messaging guidelines! Whether you do this entire process yourself or you work with a professional copywriter and brand strategist, you’ll want something tangible to use internally.
When I work with my clients to develop brand messaging guidelines, I create a presentation that includes a summary of the brand, mission statement, core values, unique value proposition, brand positioning, and brand voice architecture.
Need custom brand messaging guidelines done for you?
As you can see, brand messaging is an essential part of developing a magnetic brand identity. It is an intentional process that is rooted in storytelling, strategy, and core values.
Getting custom brand messaging guidelines done for you professionally can be a game changer, especially if blogging or content creation is a key function of your marketing strategy.
To learn more about working with me on brand messaging for your small business, get in touch.
