How to Sell: Build Your Brand Messaging Around Your Customer
TL;DR
Clarify your brand messaging by sharing what you offer, how you make customers’ lives better, and why they need your app
Include strong calls-to-action to create engagement and drive sales
Continue to refine this messaging around your target audience as your business grows
Storytelling is key to your success, but customers care a lot more about their own story than they do your personal story or brand narrative. In order to be successful, you must understand that your customer is the center of the story.
How to Build Your Brand Messaging Around Your Customer
In order to be successful, you must position your app as a way for potential customers to meet their needs.
Your messaging should answer the following questions simply:
What does your app offer?
How will your app make consumers’ lives better?
Why do consumers need to purchase your app?
Here’s the framework for developing your messaging, in which your target customer has a problem and discovers a guide (you!) who gives them a solution (your app!) and provides a call-to-action to help them avoid failure, resulting in success:
1. Target Customer
Remember, the customer is the center of the story, not you or your brand.
Ask yourself:
What does my target customer want?
What is my target customer looking for?
This messaging must be clear and focused on the one major solution you offer.
To figure out what your main solution is, brainstorm all of the things your target customers want from you. For example: lose 10 pounds, create healthy long-term habits, develop better body confidence, etc. Then, pick one as the main focus for your brand.
Ask yourself how your target customers would complete the following statement:
“I want ______.”
For example:
I want to get stronger
I want to tone my body
I want to work out in under 30 minutes
2. Problem
What problem are you known for solving? What do you want to be known for solving? While companies tend to create and sell solutions to external problems, customers tend to buy solutions to internal problems.
When talking about the problems your target customers face, you need to dig deep and explore both external and internal problems.
An external problem is the main issue your target customers are facing. For example, let’s say your target audience is made up of postpartum moms who want to lose excess baby weight.
An internal problem is how this problem makes your target customers feel. For example, your target audience of postpartum mothers may suffer from low self-esteem due to carrying around extra baby weight and not quite feeling like themselves.
When selling your app, you must use language that acknowledges both the internal and external problems of your target customers, while describing how your app solves those problems.
For example:
“You deserve to make time for yourself as a new mom, which is why I designed my 20-minute workouts to be squeezed into any spare time you can find in your busy day. I believe you can have the best of both worlds, which is why my workouts can be done at home with minimal equipment.”
The deeper you dive into exploring these external and internal problems, the more you will connect with your target audience. Keep asking these questions and refining your answers, and over time, your messaging will become clearer.
3. Guide & Solution
To put it simply, your potential customers expect a clear path to solving their problems.
Without any confusion, a potential customer should be able to understand:
What your app offers
How your app will make their life better
What action they need to take in order to subscribe to your app
To do this, your messaging must describe what kind of workouts can be found in your app, the results that can be achieved from subscribing to your app, and how people can sign up for your app.
For example:
“My fitness app is designed to streamline your workouts in just 30 minutes a day. I offer both home and gym programs that will help you burn fat, define your midsection, and get stronger every single day. Link in bio to sign up for my app. Try 7 days for FREE!”
5. Call-to-Action
Your call-to-action (CTA) must communicate a clear and direct step your customers can take to solve their problems. When you create the right kind of CTA, a potential customer will be moved to engage with your brand and make a purchase.
Here are some great CTA examples to add to your messaging that are known to convert sales:
Buy Now!
Subscribe
Sign Up
Learn More
Swipe Up
Limited Time Only Offer
6. Avoid Failure
It’s not enough to give potential customers a reason to do business with you — you must also clearly show potential customers the cost of not doing business with you.
Create a sense of FOMO to let customers know what they’ll miss out on by not signing up for your app.
For example:
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to train with me. Get 7 days FREE!
Struggling with _____? I’ve got the solution. Sign up for my app for just $8.33/month!
Stop making excuses and start building a better you TODAY! You’ll be glad you did a year from now. Train with me — try 7 days free!
7. Create Success
To really drive the messaging home, explain to potential customers just how your brand can change their lives for the better.
For example:
My workouts will help you build strength and get toned and lean.
My 4-week challenge will help you build a bikini body in just 30 days and includes daily workouts and a guided nutrition plan.
My fitness app is designed to help you create healthy, sustainable habits. My easy-to-follow home and gym workouts are designed to get maximum results in minimal time.
This is also a great opportunity to use social proof, as you can use customer testimonials and reviews to show how other people have been successful using your app.
Once you’ve completed this brand messaging exercise, you can use the information to build your sales website.
Include a Lead Generator in Your Brand Messaging
Even once you nail your brand messaging, keep in mind that not everyone who visits your sales website will be ready to make a purchase right away. Remember, on average, it takes between 8 and 10 touches to make a sale.
Use a lead generation tool — like a free email newsletter signup or free e-book download — to be able to reach back out to those who are interested in your app. This is a very simple way to remarket to potential customers, as you provide them with a freebie in exchange for their email address, which is incredibly valuable in your remarketing efforts.
Once you’ve captured these leads, nurturing them through your sales funnel requires very little work on your part through email marketing. According to Gartner Research, lead nurturing can potentially bring a 10% or greater increase in revenue over six to nine months.
Here’s a great example of lead generation from Playbook creator Nick Bare, who offers a free cookbook e-book download on his website in exchange for an email address:
Note: Take a look at Bare’s website here, which is an excellent example of brand messaging built around his target customer.
3 Key Sale Skills to Leverage
Once you have your brand messaging nailed down, use it to maximize your income with the following tips.
When it comes to selling, you must become great at:
Selling Value. Tell your potential customers exactly what they will get by subscribing to your app, including the content in your app, its key features, and what users can achieve by subscribing.
Selling Price. When selling your value, you must reiterate that potential customers get all of the features you’ve just described for an incredibly reasonable price: 7 days for free and $0.27/day with an annual subscription after that.
Selling Community. Community engagement is key when it comes to selling your app, as you can use this social proof to show how current app subscribers are using your app and how it has improved their lives.
Playbook’s Creator Services
Clear brand messaging will not only make the customer journey smoother, it will also lead to more sales. If you find yourself stuck creating customer-focused brand messaging, we’re here to help!
We understand that marketing your business can be time consuming and you might not have enough hours in the day. That’s why we offer a number of Playbook Creator Services, including one-on-one business coaching.
The program is designed to help you become a successful fitness entrepreneur, and includes a kickoff consultation, custom business, marketing, and brand messaging plan, as well as biweekly check-in calls.