When strategizing a marketing funnel for your business, one of the most in-depth elements of the process is deciding what you want your brand message to be.
Before you decide on your company’s brand message, you must answer the following questions about your business:
- Who is your audience?
- What makes you stand out from the competition?
- How can I reach my target audience?
Who Is Your Audience: Understanding Your Audience Using a Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional model of your ideal customer.
There are a number of ways to create a buyer persona using data and research. At Ajax Union, we identify four core points about our ideal buyer: who they are, what they do, what their environment is, and what their pain points are.
Using research and other insights, we try to uncover the answers to these questions:
- What’s their position?
- How old might they be on average?
- What are they hearing, seeing, or feeling on the day to day?
- What do they struggle within their role?
- What are their goals?
By uncovering these insights, you can focus your content and message to your audience in a personalized, targeted way.
What Makes You Stand Out From The Competition: Creating a Unique Value Proposition
A unique value proposition is exactly what it sounds like: a proposal about what makes your company stand out.
Before you craft your messaging, you have to solidify what it is about your product or service that makes you stand out from the competition. By identifying your unique value, you give your leads the opportunity to gauge their interest in you more decisively.
A clear and effective unique value proposition draws the right leads in, and weeds the wrong leads out.
How Can I Reach My Target Audience: Use Targeted Messaging Throughout Your Marketing Funnel
Targeted messaging is all about utilizing the information you have about your target audience in a strategic way in your marketing funnel. Messaging should be tailored accordingly to what step of the sales process they’re in. One of the biggest mistakes people make in marketing is sending the bottom of the funnel messaging to the top of the funnel prospects.
Prospects at different levels of the sales process or funnel are often referred to as “top of funnel” when they are getting to know you, “middle of funnel” when they are interested and learning more, and “bottom of funnel” when they are very engaged and have a need for you.
For instance, a top of the funnel prospect needs to be alerted of your presence and educated about what you do. Language at this level of the funnel should be more generalized, but use just enough specific content to garner your prospects’ interest.
Prospects in the middle of the funnel have interest in you—but need more information to trust you. Draw them in with examples of your credibility like case studies and testimonials and the goal is to encourage them to learn more about more intricate parts of your process.
A bottom of the funnel prospect is presumably already interested and has a need for you— they’ve engaged with you enough that they will engage with prompts to reach out and book a call. Your messaging here should be to convert your leads to customers.
Once you’ve figured out how you will take your leads through your marketing funnel, use data about your target audience to strategically reach them. . For example, older prospects might be best reached through email or phone — while younger prospects frequent social media platforms.
At its core, marketing is all about finding the right way to show your market you’re worth doing business with. You want your brand message to be clear, address your prospects’ needs, explain why your product or service matters, set you apart, and give your prospects the next step!
Need help with your brand message?
Learn how Ajax Union can help you craft targeted messaging that generates leads and referrals for your business using marketing funnels, click here.
