What is a messaging framework?
A messaging framework is a framework that tells your brand story to the target audience and helps align their world view with that of your brand or your personal brand.
Video Script: In the previous video in this series on personal branding, we looked at what story building is the fundamentals of story-building, and how it applies to personal branding. In this video, we talk about the messaging framework. You as a personal brand need to be telling a story. And the story is made of two components. One is the origin story – which is how you came about to be, where you are today and where you’re going into the future. The other part is the personal brand story that aligns with the kind of persona your target audience that you are trying to communicate with.
Where do you start with your messaging framework?
In personal branding, you start with your personal essence. This is to do with your purpose, your vision, mission, core values, and so on and so forth. The next one is the story-building. The next step of that process is communication which is made up of your message and the media. That means you need to first identify your messages and then you select the kind of platforms that you want to use to broadcast that message. But the message needs to be carefully crafted. Your messaging framework is nothing but how you tell the story and the content of what you say and what you do. So to get the right kind of message, to craft the right kind of message, you need to ask yourself a series of questions.
These questions are really well put together by the Social Media Examiner who has some great content on how to market on social media, what social media is, different strategies, and things like that. And I found these six questions to be really relevant to this process of personal brand building. These questions tackle the various stages of the personal brand building process.
Where does your personal brand building process begin?
Your personal brand building process starts with defining a problem. What is the change you want to bring to this world? What is the problem that you want to solve as a person and as an individual? And this could be in your career path or this could be as an entrepreneur. So defining the problem is the starting point. Once you define the problem, it then leads you to identify the target audience.
The biggest mistake that an entrepreneur or even a career path person could make is really trying to target everyone which is targeting no one. And it’s the same in business. It’s the same for brands and it is the same for individuals. If you go on LinkedIn or if you go on any of the social media channels, you see people trying to build their personal brands. The fundamental mistake is that they are trying to target everyone with their messaging framework. They’re trying to address everyone. You can address a broader range of people down the line once you have become a personal brand, once you’ve established your personal brand. But to start with, you need to really identify a niche kind of audience, a specific set of audience. And of course, those audiences are determined by the problem that you want to solve.
Identifying the problem is the first step that will then lead to identifying the target audience. And this target audience will determine how and what kind of message that you’re going to broadcast. And once you have identified that, you become an ambassador of that problem that you’re trying to solve. So you bring in your passion and you become an authority and an ambassador. You become an ambassador of the problem, not an ambassador of the solution. The solution is what you will tell in your stories. It’s what you will communicate, but you become an ambassador of the problem itself.
That means you need to show your passion for the problem and of course you need to then tell your story and talk about the solution. So part of becoming an authority is really amplifying the problem. And when I say amplifying the problem, I’m not talking about making unnecessary noise about a particular problem, fear-mongering or, making unnecessary noise. Amplifying a problem does not mean that you try to create a problem where there is none or you sort of use fear-mongering.
You are essentially laying out the foundation for the journey that you want to take your target audience on so that they would understand why you are an authority on that subject and why they should seek you out, why they should reach out to you, and why they should work with you. It’s about why they should build a relationship with you. You do this through your messaging framework.
How did I build my personal brand?
I had to identify a problem. And the problem I saw was the lack of knowledge in terms of entrepreneurs and, and people who want to build businesses and building brands. I know how to solve that because of my 20 plus years of experience working with entrepreneurs, working with brands, helping build brands, building brand strategies, positioning strategies, building visual brand identities, building an agency, a branding agency, and then incubator and all that. So all that was my origin story and that gave me an authority status and I could become an authority because of all that experience behind me.
And the target audience obviously from that problem were entrepreneurs who were looking for knowledge. They were looking to learn how to build robust brands, and how to build brands that were successful – brands that were not in the red ocean, but brands that were in the blue ocean. Then I became an ambassador to that problem.
So if you look at my social media footprint online, and if you look at my blog, if you look at the videos, if you look at anything I say or do online is all about that problem, I’m always talking about how you need to educate yourself to be able to build a robust brand. It’s not just enough to know about your market segment, your product, or your service. You may be extremely good at the service you provide or the product that you’re creating. But you need to educate yourself on brand strategies – how to build a brand, how to position your brand, and understanding who your audiences are.
Then I amplify the problem through articles, and videos I create. And once I’ve amplified the problem, I tell the story of the solution. And that’s where my personal brand thrives. Day in and day out, the content I put out, the kind of stories I pick, the kind of things I talk about, they’re all the solution to that problem. So that completes the circle.
Conclusion
The first video was just about what personal branding is, why you need it and a bird’s eye view of how to create a personal brand, right? The next one was about your personal brand essence, your, your personal essence. This was about your purpose, purpose, vision, mission, core values, and all that. The third video was about story-building. What story building means that why you need story-building in your personal branding. And of course, today’s video is about your messaging framework. So how do you tell your stories? And how you go about becoming that personal brand is. And the next one is about picking the right platform or platforms that could be one or more, and, how to pick those, and what to do on those.
