How to Create Brand Messaging that Resonates with Your Target Audience

Getting crystal clear on brand message is an amazing first step to take in your PR journey. It's actually where I start with all of my Luxe PR Management clients, where I started with my clients when I worked in an agency, and how I start my course, Vision to Voice - with the foundation of brand messaging and being crystal clear on what your key messages are for your business. 

Why is Brand Messaging Important?

There's a couple of reasons for this. One, it helps your clients understand you and what you offer. You have your key messages that you can very clearly articulate. And the client understands very clearly what you're trying to say. This means that there's no confusion, there's no getting lost in translation. Even better, the client can potentially start to repeat those key messages for you to their friends and family.

It also helps media understand why you are relevant to them and their stories, and how you could be a resource for their future stories. So when you're pitching your media and you're using your key brand messages, it's a lot simpler for media to remember you. It's a lot simpler for them to understand where you fit into their stories versus if you write paragraphs and paragraphs in your pitch - they can't really pick out from that where you might be a fit for their upcoming features.

It also makes you an incredibly confident business leader having these key messages ready and locked in for you. You're not searching the back of your brain looking for the right word, or thinking, “Does this make sense? Is she getting it? Is he not getting it?” You're not feeling unsure about yourself because you've tested your key messages, you've aligned with them, you feel really awesome about them. And you can repeat them over and over to again solidify that affinity and awareness for your brand.

What a Clear Message Can Do For Your Brand

It is a struggle to do public relations without brand messaging. It's also a struggle to promote your business without brand messaging. While your vibe and your visual branding can be very consistent, and that can help support you, we also want your communication and your verbal branding to be really consistent. And key messages help solidify that.

Without them we're kind of floating around, not really sure what we can do for our clients and clients are not really sure how we fit into their life or what results they can expect from us. Key messages make it super clear - the how, the why, the what. We know what the contract between client and business brand is and we know what the contract between media and client and brand is.

So we want to focus on clear brand messaging to solidify our prominence as a brand for our clients, our media, and ourselves.

How to Get Clear on Your Brand Message: Key Message Exercise

Let's get into it! How can you get so crystal clear on your message that you feel like a super confident CEO?

1. Create Your Key Messages

First, we want to create key messages for your business that describe what you do, how you do it, and the results that people can expect from you. This is important for both product and service-based businesses. 

I want you to take 10 minutes and write down 10 lines that talk about you and your business, your product or your services, and the results that people can expect from you. 

For example, a couple of my key messages are that I make public relations super accessible to the small business owner. Another one of my key messages is that Vision to Voice is my PR accelerator for female founders. It's very clear who and what my product is for. 

You want to keep going with some of those lines that come to the top of your head, the things that you find yourself repeating. You can try out new words or words you've been using all the time. 

I would really suggest writing them down rather than trying to keep them in your head because it gets jumbled up, especially in the world of Instagram, social media, etc. It all kind of gets scrambled in your brain with other people's brand messaging.

2. Rehearse and Experiment with Your Key Messages

Then I want you to rehearse these 10 messages and test them out with an audience. You can say them in front of the mirror, to your husband, your partner, your girlfriend. Maybe you talk about them with your family. You can try them out on an Instagram Live, in a Reel, in some copy in a social post, or in an email newsletter. You don't have to be married to any particular one just yet, just see what's flowing and also what's resonating with your audience. 

Maybe talking about the results is really intriguing to your audience instead of talking about the “how.” For example, when I talk about the accessibility of PR that I'm trying to offer to my clients, I’m communicating my process. When I list the details of my PR course, it doesn’t necessarily resonate with my audience as much as that. I only learned that through testing out my key messages through social media. 

Feel free to use social media as a marketing study, like a little case study group. You can experiment and see how you feel. It’s important to pay attention to how you feel when you're delivering them as well because that's a really big part of it. If you don't feel confident talking about a key message point, it's probably not the key message point for your brand or business. Make sure you feel really good about the key messages that you've decided on. 

3. Narrow Down Your Key Messages

After you’ve rehearsed your 10 key messages, I want you to pick three to four that have really resonated. Look out for the key messages that are leading clients to your offer, growing your followers, and getting positive responses from your media pitches.

Then, you know those key messages are working. People are understanding what you're trying to say and they're curious about learning more about you and your brand. You want to keep that going by holding the key message true to you. That doesn't mean that you can't ever make tweaks to it! 

If you find the ten, three, or four that really make it work for you, your audience, and the media, then those are the messages we should focus on. We don't want too many key messages, and we don't want too few. 

4. Repeat Your Key Messages

Finally, you want to keep repeating these key messages. This is so important for communicating clearly with your audience. Repetition is the most important part when it comes to brand messaging because we want people to be able to share information about our business. We want people to be able to repeat the most important elements of our business, so that they feel like they're not only a part of the community, but they really know and understand what our business is about. 

If our key messages or brand messaging is too confusing, often people won't be able to understand or share our mission, what we're trying to get across, or the impact we're hoping to have in the world. This is why it’s important to make sure that it's really easy to understand, comprehend, share, and repeat and that you consistently repeat as a business leader your key brand messages.

Get into the habit of sharing your key brand messages - in your Instagram posts, your captions, your blogs, your YouTube videos, your speeches, your events, introductions, podcasts, all the things. Make sure you're repeating your brand messages so that your community understands what mission you're going after, what results you're trying to get for them, and how you want to participate with them through your branded business. 

You'll notice with the brands you feel most connected to, you can repeat their business messaging, brand messaging, and key messages really easily. Even if it's not the exact message, you understand what they're trying to get across, and you want to share it with the world.

One example of this in action is Apple. I think we can all repeat Apple's brand messaging in terms of really seamless, beautiful computers and tech. We don't know exactly what they're saying on their website right away, but we know what Apple is about. We know the aesthetic, we know the experience, what it's about, and we buy into it and share it with others as well. It's just intuitive. 

Final Words of Advice

We want that to happen with our businesses too. That all comes from this key message exercise where you can really narrow down what your business is about. When we create, experiment, narrow down, and repeat our key messages, they not only get into our head, but into the head of our audience, community, and the media. 

The more that you keep repeating your mission through your key messages, the more confident you're going to be as a CEO. You don’t have to dig through a brand mission statement that you memorized ages ago. You know the key pillars of your business that align with your brand. They're the mission. They're the reason you're here, and honing in on your key messages will allow you to share that with your audience.