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This post was originally published in May 2019 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Creating impactful messaging helps prevent you from shouting into the void with your marketing material. But how do you create a brand message strategy that resonates with decision-makers?
In this chapter, we’ll dive into:
Learn how to build a strong brand experience with our downloadable guide.
A messaging strategy is a plan to communicate a set of relevant ideas with your prospects. Typically, these messages inspire your prospects to either learn more about you or purchase your solution.
Ideally, both your sales and marketing leaders join forces to create talk tracks for both sales phone conversations and marketing materials; these talk tracks should be proven to be highly effective for your current buyers.
By actively workshopping a messaging strategy together, you will avoid misalignment and a bad brand experience.
The secret formula to a compelling brand messaging is:
EBQ Tip: We discussed how to create an ideal customer profile and how to perform a market analysis in Chapters 1 and 2 of this guide respectively.
In other words, your brand message strategy must be backed by data.
If you are currently testing out a new market or talk track within the B2B space, we highly recommend investing in an SDR team. SDRs — or sales development reps — are primarily responsible for contacting your prospects directly through phone calls and emails to nurture them. They can test out your experimental brand messaging and report back to you on what is and is not resonating with your market.
Now that we understand what makes a strong brand message strategy, let’s look into how to create a message that lands with your targeted audience.
An effective marketing message is three-fold. It should:
When you created your buyer persona, you should have researched and understood which pain points to address. Otherwise, consider checking out “10 Components of a Well-Defined Buyer Persona.” The article teaches you how to identify your prospect’s most important decision factors.
Then, list out the most prevalent pain points within your current buyers that led them to convert. Do not focus on too many pain points, as you might accidentally create an unfocused and generic marketing message.
Example:
Let’s say you’re a CRM company that is currently targeting small to medium businesses. Using your market analysis, you identified the following four common pain points:
After digging into your current customer database further, you find that the two biggest challenges are your prospects wasting too much time on data entry and not being able to afford a more robust solution.
Now, we’ll center our value proposition on those two pain points:
In marketing, tone dictates the overall feeling one gets after they engage in your marketing material. In the B2B marketing world, using a professional tone helps build credibility within your industry.
What’s also important is matching the formality of your buyers. Matching the tone your buyers use to communicate helps them feel connected to your brand. Depending on aspects of your buyer persona, such as their industry or seniority in their role, they might use a more formal or casual tone in their business communications.
If you approach your buyers in an overly serious tone, you can come across as cold — thus isolating your brand from your buyers. On the other hand, overcompensating with an extremely laid-back tone can come across as unserious — thus lowering your trustworthiness within your industry.
Therefore, the secret to using the right tone in B2B marketing is striking the right balance between friendly and serious.
Your marketing should show prospective customers that you speak their lingo, that you know all about their industry and environment, and that you are the solution to their organizational problems.
Not only should you reflect your customers’ typical vocabulary, but you should also express your value statements in a way that conveys the benefits gained from using your solution — instead of just describing what your product can do.
Example:
Going back to the CRM example from earlier, here is how our marketing team would approach the brand message strategy.
First, we would translate our identified challenges to how our customers would benefit from using our solution:
Then, we can combine our conclusions about which pain points, tone, and wording to use to create one succinct value proposition:
Save time with a functional yet affordable CRM that auto-populates your data and keeps it all in one place, built especially for small businesses."
In this chapter, we explored what makes a strong brand message strategy. From there, we outlined the three biggest components of any effective messaging:
Translating a strong brand message strategy into usable marketing collateral can be challenging for many business leaders — especially if they are already strapped for resources and time. Our marketing team can help take your overall brand message and create engaging lead magnets that attract the right buyers. Visit our marketing services page to learn more.
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