“Convey thoughts,” “evoke an emotion,” “share news,” “exchange ideas”—these phrases describe person-to-person communication, but they can also describe good brand communication. They encompass everything your brand imparts across its various communication channels.
While a brand isn’t a person, it should feel human. The more authentic it is, the more it can resonate with your customers. You might convey your brand’s “thoughts” through blog articles, evoke emotion with a relatable brand voice, share news by posting brand updates on social media platforms, and exchange ideas by responding to audience questions on social media.
Brand communication is a powerful tool for building lasting customer relationships. Once you develop a strategy that supports your business goals, the opportunities are endless. Here’s how to create your own brand communication strategy and tips for strengthening your approach.
What is brand communication?
Brand communication encompasses what, how, and where your brand communicates with its existing and target customers. It includes your brand identity, product or service offerings, and marketing messages you convey through your communication channels.
A strong brand communication strategy ensures all brand communication activities inform, educate, engage, or influence your customer base. The end goal of brand communication efforts is to create loyal customers who trust your brand, continuously purchase your products, and advocate for your company to other potential customers.
Elements of good brand communication
Here are the key elements of brand communication:
Communication channels
Communication channels are the digital and traditional media outlets where you share brand messages. Digital channels include social media platforms, digital advertising campaigns, email, and your website blog. Traditional channels include print media, public relations, and television commercials.
Target audience
Your target audience, or ideal customer, is who you’re trying to reach through your brand communications.
Unique selling proposition (USP)
Your USP describes what sets your brand apart from your competitors and makes you unique. It speaks to how your product or services solve your audience’s pain points.
Desired customer action
Desired customer action describes what you want your customer to do as a result of your brand communications. Whether it’s that a customer interacts with your ecommerce shop, shares a link to your site with a friend, or leaves a positive review, a call to action (CTA) directs customers toward taking these steps.
Brand identity
Brand identity is your brand’s unique personality conveyed through visual branding (color, images, logos), brand voice (how it sounds), and messaging (what it talks about). It defines how you want your target audience to perceive your brand after interacting with it.
Benefits of effective brand communication
Here are three primary benefits of an effective brand communication plan:
Improve brand recognition
In a competitive market, strategic brand communication can set your brand apart from the competition, carving out market share. Brand messaging that highlights your USP and authentic brand identity can make your brand feel unique.
For example, Meow Meow Tweet stands out in a sea of skin care products with visual branding featuring unique illustrations its co-founder creates for each product. It also offers a USP speaking to customers who want products driven by an earth- and animal-friendly ethos. Its ecommerce store includes messages that highlight that brand’s offering: “Vegan personal care for everybody. Always ethical, low-waste, handmade & cruelty-free.”
Build trust with customers
Consistency in what you talk about, how often you talk about it, and how you talk about it builds trust. For example, if a cookware brand consistently emails a shopping list and recipe for a Sunday dinner, customers learn they can count on the brand for a timely dinner idea. This consistency in content develops trust with customers by showing them that positive experiences with the brand are the norm.
They can count on the brand for a tasty recipe and helpful instructions. Therefore, they can count on its products or services.
Establish authority
When you consider any product category, a few brands likely come to mind first. These companies have established authority. They’re perceived as industry experts so much so that people seek out their brand even when similar products are available.
For example, cookware brand Made In has established authority with a thorough brand communication plan. Content includes instructional videos, an email newsletter, a blog and recipes on its ecommerce site, and a presence on multiple social media platforms.
By establishing the brand as restaurant-quality cookware, endorsed by its “Chef Customers,” Made In can gain the top spot in the minds of home cooks.
5 steps to develop a brand communication strategy
- Research your audience
- Design your brand identity
- Determine your communication channels
- Define success
- Use a pre-flight checklist
As you begin to develop your brand communication strategy, ensure that your approach ties back to your business objectives at every step. Here’s how to get started with your strategy:
1. Research your audience
Knowing your brand is step one. Knowing your audience is step two. A deep understanding of your audience helps orient your brand communication strategy toward its specific needs and desires. The more your audience feels seen and understood, the more likely they are to trust your brand and become loyal customers.
Gather insights on your target audience through competitor and market research. Research what types of content and communication channels similar brands in your industry are using, compare competitor product features against your own, and investigate customer forums and reviews to identify opportunities your competitors aren’t delivering on.
You can also develop buyer personas representing each of your target audiences and imagine speaking to each person when creating your messaging to enhance this connection.
2. Design your brand identity
Just as people have personalities, you can develop a brand personality. This process helps create guidelines for what you say and how you say it in your brand communication strategy. It also helps tell the story of your company, making it feel more human, relatable, and accessible. Here are a few important elements of a brand identity:
Brand values
Your brandvalues are the core beliefs you will always stand by. They allow you to build your USP into a narrative that tells customers why your company exists and why they should care about it.
Brand story
To write your brand story, lean into the real reasons you started your business and tap into your brand’s authenticity. For example, food brand, Flourist uses its brand values in its story to explain how the two founders created the brand to solve a problem they encountered personally: a whole grain gap in the farm-to-table movement.
Brand voice
What does your brand sound like? Flourist employs a polished yet friendly voice that comes through in the straightforward, positive way it describes its products. Everything sounds proper, but nothing sounds complicated, which makes the brand feel like a confident friend you can consult for advice.
Visual identity
Think of it as your brand voice in the form of color, graphics, images, and logos. Every visual choice you make communicates an attitude, mood, or feeling just like your brand voice. Flourist’s visual style incorporates rustic imagery with an emphasis on photography that makes it feel like you’re getting a peek into the brand’s personal kitchen—an inviting, friendly appeal.
3. Determine your communication channels
You don’t need to invest in every channel for effective brand communication. Whether it’s social media, digital advertising, or a robust blog with your own content creation, invest in the channels that align with your business and provide the greatest access to your target customers.
For example, if you sell a service, a blog might be a good investment as a place to describe your services and their value in detail—a task that is more difficult to do in visually driven social media platforms.
On the other hand, if you run an in-person vintage shop, sharing new pieces on social media and email roundups of what’s available in-store might be a better use of your resources.
Most brands use a combination of paid digital advertising, social media platforms, and email marketing to get the word out. Pay attention to which channels draw the highest numbers of your ideal customer and focus your resources on those channels.
4. Define success
Identify the desired customer actions for each channel in your brand communication strategy. After collecting data over a given period, evaluate each channel’s effectiveness and use your insights to refine your brand communication strategy.
Here are examples of success metrics by channel:
- Social channels. Likes, comments, reposts, brand tags, and user-generated content (UGC).
- Ecommerce store. Cart additions, checkouts, product browsing, and reviews.
- Other content channels. Email sign-ups, blog article reads, clicks on email links, and social media shares.
- Digital advertising. Site visits, purchases, and ad shares.
5. Use a pre-flight checklist
There are many moving parts to a comprehensive brand communication strategy. A pre-flight checklist for all messages going through your communication channels ensures alignment with your plan, brand identity, and business goals.
Here are examples of questions to add to your messaging pre-flight checklist:
- Does this align with our brandvalues?
- Does it reflect our brand voice?
- How does this acknowledge our customer?
- Is it suitable for the intended channel?
- How does it support our business goals?
- How does this fit into our communication strategy?
- Is there a clear desired action?
Tips for improving brand communication
Here are three tips to improve your approach if you already have a brand communication plan:
Be human
Many effective brand communication strategies use tactics that make the brand feel human and relatable. To achieve this in your messaging, show vulnerability, avoid jargon, and use humor. You can show vulnerability by talking about the company’s challenges or mistakes it’s learned from.
Embrace social media
Social media is an especially effective channel to showcase your brand personality and encourage customer interaction because it’s already a space where people interact and share their lives. It’s a natural place to highlight the human aspects of your brand, such as profiles of your team and your brand story.
Social media is also a more casual, anything-goes environment compared to formal formats like blog articles or long-form emails. You can use slang, emojis, and memes as forms of brand expression. Just like texts to a friend, they help display your brand’s personality.
🌟 Memes, ASMR, and the latest dance challenges—find out what’s hot on TikTok today. And, learn how you can create content around top trends to attract customers and grow your business.
Build credibility
Credibility is essential for building trust with your audience. Here are a few ways to improve your brand’s credibility to strengthen your overall communication:
- Authenticity. Sharing what makes your brand authentic helps your audience see your solutions are deeper than just marketing.
- Consistency. When you ensure consistency, you’re showing your audience that they can rely on your brand.
- Clarity. Clear, easy-to-understand messages make your audience feel like you’re speaking directly to them. Avoid jargon and demonstrate your expertise so your audience can trust you.
- Third-party credibility. User-generated content (UGC), testimonials, brand partnerships, and influencer content can help build third-party credibility—trustworthiness established by an independent external source. Real customer feedback is especially valuable, as audiences see it as unbiased and trustworthy.
Brand communication FAQ
What are the basic steps for brand communication?
The basic steps to develop strategic brand communication are to design your brand identity, research your audience, determine your communication channels, define what success looks like for your business, and outline a preflight checklist that helps you stay consistent.
What makes brand communication effective?
Often the most effective brand communication employs an authentic, human brand voice, shares consistent messaging across communication channels that make sense for the brand, and always speaks to its audience in a way that shows the brand understands their pain points.
What is an example of effective brand communication?
An example of effective brand communication is a brand like Apple, which has an extremely loyal fanbase and is a beloved brand worldwide. Apple has an unmistakable brand identity, from visuals to voice; it speaks to its customers through multiple communication channels, but with a consistent presence and message.
