We’re the first to admit that we’re primarily visual designers.
From sketching on paper and mocking up options on our whiteboards to pushing pixels and perusing websites, we live for the visuals. But sometimes we need to take a step back.
Sometimes we need to focus not on how we’re conveying our message, but what that message is. And sometimes, we need to focus on the words in those messages themselves.
Words and visuals play equally important roles.
While visuals may drive home a message, words speak to the essence of a brand. Words convey a brand’s voice. If your brand were a person, what would he or she look like? Would he be at a coffee shop on a Friday night? Would she be in the office at 7AM on a Saturday? Sometimes we overlook these questions, but the truth is the right words strengthen a brand’s storytelling capabilities. And what is marketing if not telling a story?
Yet we tend to stray away from considering the possibilities of our words.
There’s almost always someone in the room who points this out (or is at least thinking it)—that people don’t like to read or, even worse, don’t read at all. But we read. We read all the time—from Tweets on the phone in our hands to the menu boards hanging at Starbucks—we’re always reading. We just need to read the right words for a message to stick.
And that brings us to our office challenge this past week.
In the midst of a prospective client proposal, we were stuck on how to end our presentation. That’s right – we were at a loss for words. Our visual presentation was extremely strong and full of surprises, but our closing remarks were a bit lackluster. We needed a better way to end our presentation on a strong note. We wanted to give the viewers chills with our closing remarks. We had put in the effort up until this point and weren’t going to stop now.
After a lot of little tweaks, we finally found the words that created a compelling message—one that not only fit the proposal for the client’s brand, but was also uniquely our own.
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