Early-stage technology companies should publish content because it helps them get a foot in the door and then seal the deal.
How Branding Translates to Messaging and Language for Tech Companies
John Himes
May 12, 2024
To build trust and make sales, your tech company needs messaging that speaks to your customers. Figuring out your tagline, value proposition, and elevator pitch is essential for sales and marketing. It’s also key to fundraising.
“Assessing communications skills is one of my startup founder evaluation hacks,” says Jim Thorson, Principal at Free Radical Ventures. “Do they use appropriate grammar, write well, and have clear messaging? And outlier in either direction is meaningful.”
What most companies don’t take into account is that this core messaging and language is an exercise in branding.
People often equate a brand to a logo. But the truth is that a logo comes out of branding. A logo, just like core messaging, is a feature of a brand.
Branding is actually much more conceptual. It’s your company’s identity, and it includes understanding foundational elements like your core purpose, your vision, your values, and your capabilities.
This is the tech startup’s guide to brand messaging.
Core messaging for technology brands
Everything we do in marketing comes out of brand, and there’s a lot of different things we can create that will put that message in front of your customers. But before we start writing web copy, blog posts, case studies, or anything else, we need core messaging.
The first piece of language that comes out of branding is the value proposition. At least in B2B, this is the sentence that clearly and concisely conveys how your solution creates tangible business results for your customers. It’s the result of solving a problem.
Another aspect of core messaging is the tagline. This is a big challenge because you have very few words. These words shouldn’t be too complex, but they also need to stand out. A tagline needs to be simple without being simplistic.
Don’t expect to nail it on the first try. You might think you’ve come up with something brilliant only to receive confused looks when you start using it. That’s okay. Coming up with a great tagline is almost always an iterative process.
Not only can your tagline evolve as you learn more about your customers, but you can also have different taglines that you use for different types of customers (more on that in the next section).
The final piece of core messaging that tech startups especially need is an easy way to help people understand what your technology actually does. If your market is academics or other engineers in your field, that’s one thing. But most tech brands need to communicate with decision-makers that aren’t nearly as technical.
One of my favorite techniques is the analogy. Give someone a clear and concrete image that they’re familiar with, and then use that prior knowledge to lead them to understanding.
Fill in the blanks: “Our solution is like a _____ for your _____.”
Audience segmentation
Let’s start with a definition. This one’s from Mailchimp: “Audience segmentation is a marketing strategy based on identifying subgroups within the target audience in order to deliver more tailored messaging and build stronger connections.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself. But what does this actually look like in practice?
Segmentation can happen to varying degrees. Today’s digital marketers can even go as far as hypertargeted personalization, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here. For startups that are just beginning to get a handle on branding, it’s better to start smaller and focus on your buying committee.
What roles are involved? Common answers include the CEO, the CFO, and the CTO, but it really depends on your solution and the industry you’re looking to serve.
It’s also worthwhile to think about both the people who will sign off on the purchase and the people who are actually going to use your technology—they may not have the same buying power, but don’t underestimate the value of having someone advocating for you on the inside.
Once you have the roles in place, stereotype them into profiles that marketers call personas. Basically, this is a generalized caricature of the buyer; often it includes things like age, technical proficiency, goals, and pain points. Personas will also have some stock imagery so we can “put a face to a name,” so to speak.
Now that we have personas, we can think about how those people talk and how they like to be spoken to. What diction, or word choices, will sound natural to them? Will they relate to idioms, or will they think you’re off your rocker?
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Brand messaging beyond the tagline
Just like brand doesn’t equal logo, brand messaging doesn’t equal tagline. Logos and taglines are both foundational representations of the brand, but they are not the brand itself.
A brand is an identity.
Take the analogy of your personal identity. Your facial features, your voice, and your mannerisms are all ways that people may recognize who you are, but they’re not your identity itself.
In the same way, logos, taglines, and the like signify your brand identity. That’s why understanding the larger concepts that go into branding—and figuring out your company’s unique way of presenting those concepts—is the basis of all messaging.
For instance, Dynamic Tech Media’s core brand essence is humanity in technology. Our tagline, “We translate tech speak into plain English,” is a clear reflection of this, but you can see this same dynamic at work in the other content we create. The Colorado Tech Spotlight tells the human stories of local innovations in our community, while topics like indigenous data sovereignty and the ongoing conversation about AI put technology into a human context.
Of course, we’re a marketing agency, so we also create materials like the blog post you’re reading now. But the point I want to get across is that we don’t end there. By creating messaging and content that goes beyond talking only about what we do, we’ve built a brand that represents something bigger than “just another marketing agency.”
Your tech company can do this too. Your brand can be so much more than just a face for your products or services.
Where do tech startups use brand messaging?
Conceptualizing a brand may be a largely theoretical exercise, but it’s also good to look toward the endgame. Let’s talk about the materials your brand might create to convey your message.
Many startups begin with a pitch deck. They’ll follow that up with a website, a one-pager, conference materials, and maybe even a case study or an infographic. They’ll also write up a profile on social media sites like LinkedIn, and they might create a few initial posts.
As they grow, they’ll expand that repertoire to include other types of content like blog posts, white papers, and sales collateral. We can expand the circle even further to include advertisements and earned or sponsored media placement in reputable publications.
The point is that everything you ever create to market your products or services is going to rely on your brand messaging. And while that messaging will almost certainly evolve, the name of the game is consistency.
Especially in B2B, there’s no “buy now” impulse purchasing. So your audience needs prolonged exposure to your brand and your message, and that message needs to be consistent in order to stick.
Develop your brand messaging by understanding your Core Brand Elements
Ready to get started? The first step is laying out your Core Brand Elements, the key concepts that define your brand. We promise it’s not as scary as it sounds.
We made it easy by putting together a free Core Brand Elements Template. So grab a pen and paper, sit down with your cofounder, and take 10 or 15 minutes to go through this simple exercise. It’s a small lift that pays big dividends.
START HERE:
DOWNLOAD THE FREE CORE BRAND ELEMENTS TEMPLATE
Take the first step to branding your tech company. Use our free template to crystallize the foundational elements of your brand.
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