Your business has been going (fairly) strong for a while now and you want to grow. The problem is: you’ve outgrown your initial service offering and now your brand messaging doesn’t reflect the value you provide your clients. You know you need a strategic brand messaging refresh, but you don’t have the time or know where to start—it takes so long just to do day-to-day marketing and service delivery. How do you break the cycle?!
Here’s the hard truth: you’ll never have the freedom-focused lifestyle you crave if you’re stuck in a content-generating hamster wheel ’til you die. It’s draining, time consuming, and—frankly—doesn’t even work. Even if AI is helping you generate new ideas or refine your own, it can’t encapsulate or express your own original thoughts as eloquently as you’d like, and it always sounds fake and/or generic.
The fact is: surface-level messaging won’t reel in your dream clients, and even if it does, it’ll wipe you out in the process. This is because content that lacks personality, originality, and memorability will fall flat every time. Instead, you must expertly navigate your readers through labyrinths of information overload, leading them to the ultimate destination: purchasing your services.
But it’s one thing to know you need to dig deeper to find your unique brand voice, and another to actually do it. How do you know your brand messaging is strategic and will resonate with leads? Does your content reflect the true calibre of your service offering? Are you inadvertently misleading prospects and dropping the ball somewhere en route to the bank? Is the conviction you have evident to outsiders, or all in your head?
I’ve been supporting small business owners in achieving more work-life balance and financial freedom since pre-pandemic times (remember that? 🤔). More recently, I’ve been working closely with CEOs of growing companies, helping them refine their brand messaging in preparation for upcoming TV appearances. Last but not least, I’ve been building my own freedom-focused lifestyle for the past 6 years and know just what it takes to thrive in today’s competitive market. All this to say: I’ve got you.
First, I’m going to help you get crystal clear on your overarching brand messaging, as everything needs to trickle down from there. Then, I’ll teach you how to approach each piece of marketing content with a focus on strategic, strong brand messaging, so that you can free up more of your time to focus on other things that will move the needle in your business (and actually enjoy the freedom that you’ve created for yourself). Let’s dive in!
1. Getting clear on your unique value proposition
A great starting point to determine or refine your unique value proposition is to compile and analyze any feedback you’ve received from past (happy) clients. Pull out keywords, phrases, quotes, etc. and start looking for patterns between them all. Keep these in a Google Doc, AirTable, or similar, so that you can easily add to them but also organize them into categories or themes as new ones come in. I’m talking emails, texts, comments, DMs, call transcripts—literally anywhere where clients have expressed genuine gratitude for the service they’ve received. This will start to make everything feel a lot more tangible and get you in the mood to create.
Now, as you study these themes closely, I want you to consider which of these areas of feedback differ from the way people talk about your competitors. Do these differences occur because you have opposing views to other companies who offer similar services to your own? Think about how you serve your clients better than they do, and why. Along that same vein, start to narrow down the core values and beliefs that come through in the interactions you have with clients (and team members, if you have them). How do you uphold these in your business?
Start to highlight, rearrange, and consolidate the keywords, themes, and values that come through in your notes. Refine and group these until you end up with 4-5 content buckets that reflect how you do business and the overall experience that clients can expect to have when they work with you. This is going to become your unique brand voice. Then, update all of your core messaging in line with your value proposition, including social profiles, service offerings, onboarding documentation—literally everything you say and do that relates to your business.
For example, the core values of my business coaching company, Prospology are autonomy, community, and collaboration. The keywords we hear all the time from our students are freedom, flexibility, and work-life balance. Other common themes are medical writing, freelancing, and business. If I had to summarize our brand voice in a nutshell, it’s those things. As a result, our 4-5 content buckets are: freedom-focused lifestyle, travel, freelance writing, medical writing, and entrepreneurship. Literally everything I write and speak about fits into one or more of these buckets (just this week, I presented at two conferences—one on the common mistakes freelance medical writers make in business, and the other on digital marketing best practices for freelance medical writers). Not only that, but my entire online presence perfectly aligns with this messaging, as do all of our business operations (i.e. our website copy, program application and delivery, interactions with students, sales processes, internal training, and so on).
2. Finding compelling angles for each piece of marketing content
Once—and only once—your unique brand voice is crystal clear, it’s time to level up your content marketing game. Before writing any piece of content, you must first take some time to write out the following:
- Exactly who your reader is.
- The exact problem your reader has.
- The exact solution your reader needs.
- Precisely what you want your reader to do next.
As you diligently complete each of these areas of your plan, continue to dig deeper into sections 1-3 until you go way beyond surface-level information and start getting right to the heart of the issue. Ask yourself thought-provoking questions and play devil’s advocate. Why hasn’t this problem been solved yet? What’s holding the reader back? What’s their emotional connection to the issue? Are they going to be resistant at all to what I’m going to share? Why?
Now, ask yourself if or how the areas of your strategic plan map onto your brand messaging, core values, beliefs, and value proposition. Can you refine your plan even further to make sure several, if not all, of these things will come through to your reader, either directly or indirectly? If you can’t find a connection, the topic clearly isn’t aligned with your brand and you should start over with a new one. It will save you a ton of time to eliminate poor ideas now than if you try and force them to work and end up scrapping everything later (or worse, publishing things that are misaligned with your brand voice). Your voice should be unique and powerful. Repeating what everyone else says won’t help you grow your business. DO NOT skip over this step: it’s so important.
Finally, double check that your call-to-action matches up perfectly with the problem and solution in your plan. If you’ve diverged too much from your original CTA, you’re going to have to change things up so that your content flows like butter. It’s super important to stick to your plan rigidly when you write up the piece, as it’s easy to lose the sharpness or directness of your message by going off on tangents. There’s nothing worse than a perfectly crafted plan that’s poorly executed with diluted messaging. You’re going for an authoritative voice; not a wishy washy, when-will-it-end novel that finishes up in the exact same place that it started.
The ultimate freedom is being paid to be you.
Marketing should be a healthy and fulfilling outlet that you can’t get enough of. When your brand voice is an extension of your voice (i.e. it’s aligned with your core values, beliefs, passions, and interests), work will never feel like work. Prospects will be drawn to you, and financial freedom will be well within reach. Everything you’ll do in life will be relevant and valuable to your business, blurring the lines between your personal and professional life in the best possible way. Now that’s freedom.
Do you want to free up more of your time to enjoy your freedom-focused lifestyle? I’m taking on 1-2 private clients for an 8-week intensive coaching container at $4k per month, starting in March, 2024. If you’re ready to dive in and make quantum leaps in your business, email me for details using subject line ‘BRAND VOICE’ (sophie@prospology.com). Not only will you move the needle under my expert guidance, but you’ll feel confident and prepared to continue implementing what you’ve learned about strategic brand messaging for years to come.