Your Authentic Brand Self

With a barrage of constantly churned out content splattering all over the interwebs on the daily, it's becoming more and more challenging to garner attention for brands. Today's consumers are hit at all angles with slick marketing messages, content being created by influencers, and ads. It's become so much that our brains can't process all of the content being thrown at us so we start to ignore the nonsense automagically.

The Humanity of it All

Some brands have a tendency to speak their own language. They do this because its the path of least resistance, it's easy. They craft messaging points about their bundles, or their products that are riddled with engineer speak or worse yet, lawyer speak. This is the stuff that becomes noise, this is the stuff that today's consumers will simply ignore.

Heroes Of The Day

The brands that are breaking through are the brands that make their consumers/prospects the hero of the message. They don't obsess about the details of their products in their messaging, rather, they focus on the impact of their goods on the target consumer. The end result, the brand triggers an emotion in the prospect, that emotion leads to a stronger connection, that stronger connection could lead to a sale, or at least, be top of mind for the consumer when they are ready to buy.

A Fine Line

How can your brand be more authentic? It starts with defining what's at the core of the business. What drives the business, why does the business exist, what does the brand care about? Articulating this "stuff" into the brand's messaging, social media content, ads, and most importantly, internally, is mission critical. Ensure that your internal messaging and reality matches your external messaging and reality, this is often the trap where consumers start to see chinks in the brand armor.

It's also critical to know your customer. What fuels them, what will make their life easier, how can we save them time, money, and aggravation? Weaving that knowledge into our brand footprint allows us to always put the customer first and ensure that any messaging point puts them first.

The Feel Good

When your prospects feel good about your messaging, or an ad brings a smile to their face, you win. You many not win this second, but you are changing something within them. That's what true marketing is, changing the way that someone feels about something. That's what we're after in all of our messaging and in all of our interactions. The brands that ask themselves, "self, how can I spark joy today" already set themselves up for success.

The Bottom Line

Be human, be sincere, be genuine and always put your customers first in all of your messaging. Striving to be different for the sake of being different will almost always result in tripping consumer bullshit detectors. Thanks for reading and sharing!