This blog is part of the Brand Foundation Series. Where the first five posts talked about your vision and mission, how you can define your why, your values & beliefs, how you can make your business stand out, and how you determine your ideal client. For the last two weeks, we talked about how you can use market research to get to know your ideal clients, and how to research your competitors followed by how to draft that ideal client profile.
Now it is time to use all of that information and craft your brand messaging. Because you can have all the information and know where you want to go with your business and how you are going to differentiate but if you can not get your brand message across and really connect with your audience all the hard work you have done to get to this point won’t come across.
You’ll learn:
- How to create a website headline that is more than a label
- How you can use a different angle to sell your services
- How to make your client the hero of the story
For a long time, I have struggled with getting my brand message out. I felt I had so much knowledge and experience to share, but while I could explain it while talking to someone, I struggled to put it in writing. Somehow it never came out the way I wanted to.
So I took action and enrolled in Ashlyn Carter’s Copywriting for Creatives. It’s still work in progress, but I finally feel I have a better understanding of how to share my personal brand message. But I have also talked to so many other business owners who struggle with the same thing. And after doing market research for a client who is also a designer, I noticed how similar our messaging is.
From what I have seen, it generally is a variation of intentionally, authentic, strategic or purposeful design. And the results we are achieving for clients is for them to show their expertise, look more professional and attract drama clients.
These are all great terms (and I am a bit afraid that I am sounding very critical of other designers, but I really don’t mean it in a bad way) but if most of us say the same thing, how can we stand out?
So let’s walk through a couple of things you can do to make sure you do stand out.
Don’t use your website’s headline as a label.
This was a comment on a post I did within the Copywriting for Creatives Facebook Group (an amazing course from Ashlyn Carter) which I used to create my brand message. In this case I was asking for feedback on ideas that I had for my new headline.
‘sooo my issue with headlines is that ALL TOO OFTEN we are wayyy too tempted to craft them like a label on a file folder. The options you provided could become much more captivating if you turned them into questions or statements. Think along the lines of “Ready to …?” or “You deserve …!” and similar FEELINGS you can evoke for your reader. Remember your headline is PART of the Problem – Agitation – Solution formula!’
And this comment made so much sense, and when doing some market research into designers, I notices that this is happening quite often. A couple of website headlines that I found:
- I’m a brand identity and website designer serving passionate, ambitious small businesses and solopreneurs who want to be thoughtful and intentional in their design choices.
- Intentional branding & website design for creatives
- Handcrafted Brand Design for Creative Entrepreneurs & Wedding Professionals
- Bespoke brands founded on intentional strategy and timeless design
So to craft a headline that makes you stand out, think back to the market research that you have done when it comes to your ideal clients. What are the pain points or struggles your ideal clients are having? And how can you agitate that problem a bit more? So that when this ideal client lands on your website, they instantly feel (though your headline and subhead that focusses on the same emotion) like they are in the right place. That you get their issues.
Use a different angle to sell your message.
Remember I mentioned in the beginning that the brand messaging of designers generally a variation is of intentionally, authentic, strategic or purposeful design? And the results designers are achieving for clients is for them to show their expertise, look more professional and attract drama clients.
This is not unique to just designers because can copywriters, social media managers and marketing managers not say the same?
So think about what can you bring to the table that is different than any other in your field. Think back to what your mission is, your vision, your values and beliefs, your expertise. If you combine this all, can you say that nobody else can say the same thing? Maybe it’s not that nobody can say the same but can you see how this can help you stand out?
You can also pick a different angle to stand out from others in your field. Instead of saying you are a designer/copywriter etc. that helps their clients connect with their ideal clients, you could use your mission as the angle. Maybe your mission is helping single moms build a business through brand design/website design/copywriting. This way your mission becomes the main angle, and you can use a pain point that is specific to single moms.
Make your client the hero of your brand messaging.
One of the first books I have read about brand messaging was Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller. And I absolutely recommend reading this book. One warning though: you will never look at a movie in the same way.
What Donald Miller does in his book is walk you through the 7 step story brand framework which is also used to create storylines for movies. The steps are the following:
- A character (the hero)
- Has a problem
- And meets a guide
- Who gives them a plan
- And calls them to action
- That ends in a success
- That helps them avoid failure
I won’t go into every step in detail but what this framework does is make the character (your ideal client) the hero. They are the star of the story. And you, are the one that is helping them is the guide that they meet and that will help them get to where they need to go with their business.
What this means in practice is that you need to create your brand messaging in such a way that it is all about how you can help your ideal client to reach their goals. But this is also where I think most of us struggle the most.
When you go to someone’s website, and the text is all about the business owner, we easily lose out interest. Because we don’t know how this person can help us. And let’s face it, we’re only on that website to find out how this person could help us without a problem, and every sentence on the about page starts with I. Or if you can read their whole life stories we don’t feel this person could help us.
What you can do instead is talk about the pain points that your ideal clients have and how you can help without starting the sentence with I but shift to focus on them. And I get it we desperately want to showcase our experience, knowledge and qualifications. But there is a way to do this by putting the focus on our clients.
As an example: instead of saying “I have over ten years of experience with helping women just like you build a website their clients will love” you can say “helping woman like you build a website your client will love, based on over ten years of experience.
In the second sentence, you/your is mentioned twice, which shifts the focus from you as the business owner to your client. And you show that you are the right person to guide them by mentioning the experience but in a way that it is not the main point of the sentence.
So, have a look at your website and see if this is something you unintentionally are doing. And do a quick check with your competitors and see how often they position themselves as the hero.
Up next
Next up in this Brand Foundation series is the last post of series where I wrap up of all the elements that I talked about in this series and talk about the next steps.
How do you feel about your current brand messaging? Do you struggle with creating a consistent message?
