When it comes to graphic design and marketing for your business, church, or non-profit, clarity is king. If you’re unclear, your customers will veer. They’ll veer away from your messaging, your marketing, and eventually your brand.
How do you know if your brand messaging is clear enough? Here’s a quick way to tell.
When you go to your website or pick up your marketing materials, can you identify the following 3 things within five seconds?
- Who are you?
- What do you offer?
- How can you make your customers’ lives better?
Those three items need to be clearly written out and need to be read and understood within the first 5 seconds of someone coming to your website or picking up your company flyer. Let’s break these items down a little further.
WHO ARE YOU?
This is crucial. This part of your one liner is often your first impression to a potential customer interacting with your brand, so you need to make sure that you’re communicating it clearly. I’ve been to too many websites where the first sentence above the fold reads “We have the best customer service in Lakeland, Florida.” Well, that’s wonderful that you have great customer service, but it doesn’t indicate anything about who you are or what your company does.
This part of your one-liner should instead read, “We are a roofing company in Lakeland Florida” or something like that. It needs to be OBVIOUS who you are. Remember, you know EVERYTHING about yourself, your company, and your industry, but your potential buyer knows nothing.
WHAT DO YOU OFFER?
After you clearly identify who you are, the next key step is to identify what you offer. What do you do? This needs to be as clearly written out as the first item in your one liner. An example of what you could write here could be “We are a roofing company in Lakeland Florida that uses state of the art equipment and offers premier customer service.”
Note a few things that we mentioned up to this point. Your potential customer now knows that you’re a roofing company. They know that you’re located in Lakeland, Florida. They know that you use state of the art equipment. AND they know that you offer premier customer service. They haven’t even finished the first sentence on your website yet, and they already have learned so much about you!
HOW CAN YOU MAKE YOUR CUSTOMERS’ LIVES BETTER?
This is potentially the most important part of your entire one-liner. Too many businesses and organizations are self-focused, making themselves the hero of the story. They want to tell stories of how their great grandfather started the company and how they have the best talent in the industry. Those things are great, but your customers don’t want to be part of a story where they make you look good. They want YOU to make THEM look good. They want to be the hero. This final part of your one liner needs to help your customers understand how you can make their lives better. An example of what this could look like is “We are a roofing company in Lakeland Florida that uses state of the art equipment and offers premier customer service when fixing your roof so that you can go back to spending more time at home with the people who matter most.”
Now, our example one liner isn’t perfect. It’s a little wordy and a little long. But you get the idea. Our customers have learned so much about us by reading one sentence. They know who we are, what we do, and how we can make their lives better.
A majority of missed sales and opportunities come from miscommunication, from people simply not getting it. When you’re intentional with your brand messaging in your graphic design, website strategy, and marketing materials, you’ll be more likely to bring in more customers and win the sale.
