Brand messaging involves strategically using language and visuals to convey your brand’s offerings, personality, and core values. It molds your branding elements to diverse contexts, purposes, and occasions, helping you maintain a consistent presence across multiple platforms and touch points.

But an effective brand messaging strategy goes beyond catchy taglines and slogans — it means building a cohesive narrative that resonates with your target audience to foster strong, authentic connections that last.

What is brand messaging?

Brand messaging transforms your brand identity and values into impactful messages by conveying your unique value proposition memorably and establishing emotional bonds with audiences to encourage loyalty and engagement. Key components of brand messaging include:

• Copy: The topics, style, tone, and the overall impression your brand conveys through written text
• Visuals: Colors, images, typography, iconography, layouts, and other aesthetic elements
• Content: The core ideas you’re conveying, such as your brand’s mission, values, unique selling propositions, and problems your product or service solves
• Narrative: The storytelling techniques you use, such as sharing a captivating company history on your about us page, featuring success stories through case studies, and offering insightful or educational blog content

Brand relationships thrive on consistency and authenticity in messaging and behavior. Straying from these principles can erode the trust and rapport nurtured over time, potentially harming the brand’s reputation. This consistency, crucial in outward-facing communications, also shapes internal communications, reinforcing the brand’s integrity in the public eye and within the organization itself.

In-house teams, the backbone of any organization, know well that authenticity and coherence aren’t just demands of external audiences — they’re expectations within the team as well. Ensuring a seamless thread of values and narratives across both spheres helps prevent a hypocritical and insincere brand perception and fosters a robust brand ethos that resonates with all audiences — and stakeholders — involved.

For example, a B2B company dedicated to giving businesses a competitive edge may develop a highly competitive, incentive-driven culture. Their internal communications could feature performance dashboards that use language encouraging healthy competition and goal orientation to motivate employees. Conversely, a firm championing collaboration might ignite inspiration among their workforce more subtly, perhaps narrating the journey of a synergized team achieving outstanding results together.

6 steps to create a brand messaging framework

To develop a unique brand voice and establish clear communication guidelines for your business or project, follow these six steps:

1. Understand your target audience

Identify your target audience’s demographics by analyzing existing customer data, surveying current clients, and reviewing market studies while noting aspects such as age, gender, location, income, education, interests, and other variables. You can conduct user research to better understand your audience’s needs, preferences, and pain points and develop personas representing key demographics to target them more effectively.

This clarity enables you to forge more genuine and impactful connections by speaking directly to your audience’s deeper desires and needs. By tailoring your messaging to align with their core values and aspirations, you capture attention and cultivate lasting relationships built on understanding.

2. Define brand values and personality

Drawing from internal documentation, your company’s mission statement, existing brand messages, and discussions with key staff members, create a narrative articulating the company’s core values, mission, and personality.

Brainstorm adjectives you want associated with your brand (for example: bold, reliable, caring, playful) and select three or four. Use these as a reference for your content’s tone, style, and voice to make your brand relatable and create a narrative that resonates emotionally with audiences.

3. Develop a clear value proposition

A value proposition is like an engaging elevator pitch — it concisely outlines your brand’s benefits to potential customers. Analyze your existing value proposition to ensure it accurately communicates the unique value your brand’s product or service brings to the market and uncover areas for improvement. Whether you’re drafting a value proposition from scratch or refining an existing one, consider your customers’ most pressing needs and how your brand goes above and beyond to satisfy them.

The best value propositions are short, simple, and results-focused. They include information on what makes your company unique, key differentiators that set it apart from the competition, and your commitments to potential customers. When developing a value proposition, consider incorporating strong verbs that encapsulate what you promise to do — like empower, transform, discover, or reimagine — to convey the transformative impact of your offerings vividly.

While most brands have only one value proposition, you may need to create multiple if your business deals with diverse market segments or customer relationships (like B2B and B2C). Adopting this approach lets you address the unique needs, preferences, and pain points of different customer groups more effectively, filling the gaps that a one-size-fits-all message might leave. However, the deciding factor for creating multiple value propositions largely hinges on the complexity of your customer base and the diversity of their expectations and requirements.

4. Craft key messages

Using your value proposition as a starting point, develop three to five core messages you want to convey to customers. For example, a clothing company might choose the following key messages:

• We’re unique. Come to us for distinctive clothes you can’t find anywhere else.
• Our clothes are comfortable. We help you look your best without sacrificing comfort.
• We’re eco-friendly. Buying from us supports sustainable practices and natural fabrics.

These pivotal messages are the foundation for your company’s content strategy and should guide the keywords you target in content creation and your approach to publishing new material and refurbishing existing pieces.

5. Ensure consistency with messaging

A fluctuating brand message, whether across platforms or over time, could confuse customers about what your brand stands for. To minimize variation, create a set of brand communication guidelines with examples demonstrating how to convey your messaging best. Maintaining an updated visual style guide that reflects your evolving brand further helps preserve its core identity.

Consistency reinforces credibility, gradually establishing trust and loyalty among your customer base. Also, the more often people hear a message, the more likely they are to believe it. That means repeating similar messages can transform casual customers into loyal brand advocates.

6. Evaluate and update

Your brand messaging will evolve alongside your company. Anticipate continual adaptations to accommodate market fluctuations, new product or service developments, socioeconomic shifts, and emerging marketing and customer communications trends.

To ensure your brand remains relevant and resonates, adopt a proactive approach by annually revisiting your brand messaging guidelines and adjusting them based on the developments and shifts highlighted earlier.

During this process, seeking feedback from both within and outside your organization helps pinpoint opportunities for improvement and exploration. Internal team members can provide insights based on their intimate knowledge of the brand and its objectives, while external customers and industry peers can offer fresh perspectives, identifying flaws and opportunities for growth and innovation.

Where to use brand messaging

Brand messaging activates every time you use language or visuals to communicate, including:

• Website content and design
• Social media interactions, including responses to customers’ posts
• Digital advertising campaigns
• Email marketing materials
• Customer support interactions

Aligning your brand voice across varied channels often involves omnichannel marketing — deploying campaigns consistently across multiple platforms such as social media, websites, and email newsletters. Tailor your messages to fit each channel, but ensure your brand’s core principles and messages stay unified and recognizable no matter where audiences engage with them to maintain a strong and cohesive identity.

A brand’s personality should stay consistent but also adapt its tone across different platforms and contexts. This strategy helps you engage diverse audiences and ensures you comply with the norms and conventions of each platform, giving your brand a dynamic and nuanced presence.

For example, your website tone might be professional and serious, while your social media posts adopt a more casual vibe, possibly incorporating an emoji or two. In customer service encounters, the emotional tone may become warmer and more helpful or apologetic.

How to incorporate brand messaging into web design

Companies often use their website as marketing hubs by directing visitors from email campaigns and social media ads to engage and take action on the site. This makes website messaging crucial for brands.

Integrate brand messaging seamlessly across your site by leveraging:

• Content. Communicate your brand’s priorities through how you select and approach topics. For example, a well-established financial firm might convey authority and expertise through content explaining key investment principles, while a new fintech app might sarcastically critique their industry’s status quo before presenting their revolutionary solutions to users.
• Color. In addition to using brand colors, you can also use color psychology to mirror your brand’s persona throughout the site — yellow communicates joy, blue conveys calmness, and green and brown symbolize harmony with nature. This strategic use of color enhances visual appeal and reinforces your brand message, fostering a stronger connection with your audience.
• Images. Opt for visuals that echo the emotions you want people to associate with your product or service and consider their layout — a law firm website might have a neatly arranged photo grid with text, while an artist website may embrace a more abstract approach.
• Typography. Typographic design helps communicate your brand’s personality and evoke emotional and cognitive associations in readers. For example, an urban brand might choose a graffiti display font to convey a gritty feel. In contrast, an artisanal bakery or craft studio might choose a handwriting font to capture the handmade nature of their products.
• Icons. Your website’s iconography and graphical style reflect your brand’s personality. Choice in shapes, colors, sharp or rounded edges, and line weight can subtly reinforce — or undermine — your message.

A super brand messaging example: Move Animation Studio

Move Animation Studio’s website, designed by Guy Powell, is an excellent brand messaging example. This internationally renowned studio — which has collaborated with companies like Nintendo, LEGO, Toyota, and Spotify — communicates their playful yet professional brand personality through consistent web design choices.

Displaying their animation expertise through website animations, the studio integrates scroll animations throughout the site, coupled with a vibrant, looping animated logo at the top left-hand corner of the screen.

Like the best landing pages, Move Animation Studio maintains cohesive brand messaging. The colorful shapes making up their animated logo accompany and entertain visitors as they scroll down, changing size and transforming to offer an engaging visual journey.

In addition to visual storytelling, Move Animation Studio strikes an excellent balance between joy and professionalism in their website copy. Exclamation marks and phrases like “We were so excited” communicate the team’s enthusiasm for their work, while words highlighting the technical side of the work, such as “augmented reality experience” and “custom-built,” convey competence and industry expertise.

Finally, Move Animation Studio’s contact page reinforces professionalism and enthusiasm through informal, friendly copy. The title “Let’s talk” and the call to action (CTA) “Get in touch” extend a friendly hand to visitors, encouraging interaction instead of commanding it. Another exclamation mark at the end of “Send us a message or give us a call to get the ball rolling!” conveys the team’s anticipation for the prospect of a new project and demonstrates an environment of excitement and collaboration.

Share your brand’s message with Webflow

Webflow allows you to create website experiences that authentically reflect your brand messaging. With Webflow, you can build visually appealing and user-friendly sites that resonate with your audience, convey your unique value proposition, and adapt and change as your brand messaging shifts.

Teams of marketers in charge of brand design, positioning, and digital advertising will also find tools with Webflow to help them check campaign performance metrics and experiment with different types of brand messaging.

Whatever your brand’s message, Webflow gives you powerful tools to help you share it with existing customers, prospective customers, and your employees.