Before fully diving in with designing your visual identity in order to build your brand strategy, you need to figure out how to express who you are as a brand and speak to your audience accordingly (brand essence). This is because, ultimately, your logo, images, and slogan are a visual translation of your brand messaging. To ensure that your roadmap, brand messaging, and visual identity aligns, you must take the following steps.
Examine Your Brand
View your brand from the outside with a customer-centric approach. Get inside the minds of your customers through surveys or other forms of market research. Next, examine your brand from the inside out. What’s the vision of your brand? Where do you see the future of your brand going in the next year? In the next five years? Finally, consider the outside marketplace. Becoming in tune to what your competitors are doing will help you stand out. Remember to be unique and authentic.
Create a Brand Essence (Personality, Voice, Tone)
Your brand essence is your brand’s personality, attributes, and a reflection of your roadmap and how you infuse it into every aspect of your brand. This could be in the form of customer service, sales, marketing, etc. Your brand voice and tone reflect the way you sound to your audience.
A brand’s essence includes the words, phrases, slang, and jokes you use to interact with your audience, as well as the tone you use to deliver your message (formal, informal, joyful, sad, optimistic, or sincere). Ask questions like: what type of relationship do you want to have with your customers? Is your brand playful, kind, exciting, or sophisticated? What is your workplace culture like? These questions will help you determine your brand’s essence and will be helpful in formulating your brand messaging.
Value Proposition
The value proposition is the promise of value your brand delivers, acknowledges, or communicates to your audience. It explains how your brand solves problems and improves situations, what specific benefits your customers can expect, and why customers should buy from you over your competitors.
Creating a value proposition can happen in 3 easy steps.
- Identify customers benefits. What benefits does your product offer to customers?
- Link the benefits to your value offering. Identify what value your product brings to customers.
- Differentiate and position yourself. Make it clear who your target audience is, what you offer to them, and how you’re different.
Tagline
A tagline is the sentence, phrase, or word that businesses use to summarize their market position. Consider your product positioning, key benefits, brand pillars, value proposition, audience, and tone when crafting your tagline.
Examining your brand from different angles, creating your brand essence, developing a value proposition, and introducing a catchy tagline are all ways that you can build your brand messaging and, eventually, capitalize on your brand strategy.
About Millennium Agency
Millennium Agency is a national, award-winning, digital, creative, content/PR, and video marketing firm. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, our team unites creative branding and data analytics to accelerate our clients’ growth, while combining our clients’ vision with our marketing expertise to increase sales opportunities and drive brand success. From video advertising and web design to social media and PR, Millennium can guide your marketing efforts every step of the way. Contact the professionals at Millennium Agency to learn more!
