In this article, we do three things in order to create impactful brand messaging. We use brand archetypes and buyer personas to give us perspective and ideas. Then, we create messages that give value to our buyer personas with the tone of our brand archetypes. If you want to learn more, you are in for a treat! Let’s begin.

Different Points-of-View Help Create Effective Brand Messaging

Impactful brand messaging can get very complicated, but it’s based on something you already know quite a lot about. Face-to-face conversations are a great example of how your messaging can be incredibly impactful. Let’s break down what impactful brand messaging and face-to-face conversations have in common. Then, we will put together strategies and tactics that you can use to create your own messaging.

Conversations are all about points of view. Whether we are trying to share a funny joke, an emotional experience or have an intellectual conversion, we are always limited to our own point-of-view. If we aren’t open to understanding other points of view, we will never be able to affect someone else with our humor, wisdom, love, or any other form of communication. Trying to understand other points-of-view is the first step in creating impactful brand messaging. We obviously know who we are, but do we know who our brand is? Knowing our brand’s voice is the first step in creating impactful brand messaging.

Use Archetypes to Define Your Brand Voice

We use brand voices to better understand how we should communicate as a brand to ensure our messages are impactful. These voices are based on 12 archetypes created by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology in the early 1800s. His work provided us with the classic archetypes we see in our favorite stories today.

The Hero archetype uses its inner strength to set the world right. Characters like Luke Skywalker from Star Wars, Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings, or Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story are all driven to see the evil in their world come to an end, so others can live better. 

The Sage archetype uses their inner wisdom to help guide people through rough times by remembering who they are. Characters like Spock from Star Trek, Yoda from Star Wars and Proximo from Gladiator help others along their journeys with advice and introspection that often awaken and empower others. 

If you are a skincare company, you can market your products like they are the weapons people need to fight unwanted skin conditions by invoking the Hero archetype. On the flip side, if you are a disruptive skincare company, you can channel the Maverick archetype whose sole mission is to buck any system that doesn’t work anymore. 

These archetypes are what we use to create brand voices that help businesses just like yours to discover, leverage, and grow their own brand. Once we know who we are as a brand, it’s time to get to know the people we are talking to, our customers or ‘tribe’.

Get to Know Your Tribe

How do we get to know our customers? We get to know our customers by creating buyer personas. These buyer personas represent the different types of people that will be interacting with our brand.

A buyer persona is a short biography of one of our different types of customers designed to describe their goals, challenges, and ideas on how to best communicate. Defining our buyer persona is a way to get to know the customer quickly.

Think of it as a resume when we’re looking for a new job. As business owners, we want to make sure we get the right people for the right job. 

Buyer personas offer insights on how to market to these customers effectively. For instance, we know the most about the closest people to us. The better we know people, the better the communication is. We understand each other’s humor, likes, and dislikes. 

One often unseen hero of these buyer personas is the type of buyer they help us avoid. Referring back to the hiring example, we want to find the right people and make sure we’re weeding out those that don’t qualify for the position or match your company culture. 

For example, a commonly referenced buyer persona found through user testing, research and survey is that males from 18-75 purchase products once a year around a particular holiday in February, Valentines Day. Can we guess what this company sells? Yep, flowers. We didn’t need any extra “consulting” help to figure that one out. Also, we probably don’t need much help coming with solutions to help this demographic solve their challenges. 

Do we poke fun at Valentine’s Day to activate the jokesters? Drop hints months in advance that all lead up to delivering a romantic experience? Remain extremely exclusive and only let a selection of people know about the best holiday deals? Market anything but chocolates and flowers to attract consumers that go against the norm? All these types of situations and tactics come from creating buyer personas for our business.

Digital Marketing Strategies to Get Your Brand Message in Front of Your Buyer Persona

So now we have a target (buyer personas), a scope (brand archetype), and now we need a projectile (impactful brand messaging) to launch with the hopes it hits the target right in the bulls-eye. The quality of the branch archetype and buyer personas directly contribute to how easy it becomes in creating impactful brand messaging.

An example of this is the Jester brand archetype (loves to use humor). Say our ideal buyers rent a vehicle for work-related travel once a month. But, they have a hard time finding the right vehicles for their work and often settle with a smaller, less useful substitute. Our brand messaging should include jokes around how size matters when picking the right rental company. 

So you’ve got all the pieces to the puzzle. Now what do you do? How and where do you start using your brand messaging? Following are the top 10 digital marketing strategies to begin using to get your brand messaging in front of your buyer personas.

1. Social Media Marketing
2. Mobile Phone Marketing
3. Blogging
4. Viral Marketing
5. Search Engine Optimization
6. Email Marketing
7. Influencer Marketing
8. Affiliate Marketing
9. Content Marketing
10. Search Engine Marketing and Pay-Per-Click

If you are looking to partner with an agency that can’t stand bland marketing, then we should chat over some tea. Just make sure it’s Earl Grey and hot. If you want more information on brand archetype, buyer personas, or the process we take to bring it all together check out our other blog posts or our flagship product, The Rulebook. 

If digital marketing is a game you need a good set of rules.