Join us every Wednesday at 2pm EST in the Furlough Community Discord for our Mastermind session hosted by Joe Casanova & Ophir Gadot. Our guests change every week and range from experts, entrepreneurs and creatives to influencers, brands, nomads, investors and more!

 

In this session Joe Casanova, Ophir Gadot and Bogdan Popa take you through the steps of how to craft an unforgettable brand messaging. 

 

You can also watch the replay of the mastermind here:

 

 

Joe Casanova 

How to create your brand’s messaging. And the importance of actually crafting this messaging. If you guys are following along and actually answering these questions and doing these exercises, as we go through these presentations, I promise you guys, you’re going to get a ton of value. And it’s going to take your brand to the next level, what we’re going to be doing is showing you step by step, what you need to answer for your specific brand. And exactly what Furlough answered. So you guys have a kind of an example of how to answer this. Okay, let’s get this started. Yes, we will be sharing a link right after this presentation. I’ll show you a spreadsheet that is public, all you guys have to do is actually make a copy of it. And then you could go ahead and swap that information. But for the time being everything on that sheet is going to be on this presentation. And if you’re watching this on YouTube, it’ll be in the description after. So that being said, let’s break it down. We’ve got your messaging and parts, okay. And this specifically in this exercise, we have our brands that we focus on the personas that we speak to, and the product, which is a service that we offer them. And it’s that unique value proposition for each product, we always want to start with the brand, the vision and the mission, and all that and we kind of work our way to the personas and work our way to the products, we go top down with this one. So let’s start with the brand. And to answer all the questions of the brand and the brand voice in itself. These are the five things that you need to be able to articulate starting at your vision, your mission, your overall value proposition as a brand as a whole, the tagline and the company description. 

 

Brand Vision

 

So we’re going to go through this one at a time starting with the vision, which is an aspirational picture of the world in the future, and how your brand fits in there. Okay, whether it’s personal or professional, what impact do you have? This vision is quite powerful, and quite important, because it is a grand picture. And just to use some examples like SpaceX, it’s to make humans a multiplanetary species, right? It’s so grand that it pulls people in that direction. And that’s ultimately what SpaceX does to make that vision happen. So Furlough’s vision of the world where digital marketers are connecting and collaborating for growth in their personal and professional lives, right? This is just a sample that has been constantly refined. And we’re still getting there. Okay, can visions be changed over here?

 

Ophir Gadot 

Of course, it’s changing all the time. Facebook just changed their name after becoming one of the top three companies in the world. So it’s like, always changing.

 

Brand Mission

Joe Casanova 

And that is the beauty of a rebrand. Next up, we have your mission. So you have your vision, which is an aspirational picture of the world, how are you going to make that vision a reality? And of course, with Furlough, how are we going to make a world where digital marketers and digital professionals are working and collaborating together with personal professional growth in their careers, it’s by creating a new standard of digital education through collaboration, right? 

 

Brand Overall Value Proposition

 

So the mission is how you make that vision a reality, you have your overall value proposition. And this is exactly that. I didn’t think I needed a definition for that. In this case, Furlough provides the digital professionals a place to learn, collaborate and grow. Pretty straightforward. Guys got that quite simple.

 

Ophir Gadot 

As to be straightforward. Just saying something like a value proposition needs to be understood in one second, and you speak to someone who doesn’t know about your business. This is your sales pitch, no big words, no terms, glossarie, just straight to the point.

 

Joe Casanova 

Bingo. And the vision can be aspirational, it could be big, it’s a vision. The mission needs to move the heart of how things are going to be turned into a reality needs to be a little bit of a reach. But the overall value proposition is direct, just simple, straight to the point. Love it Ophir. Thanks for that contribution.  

 

Brand Tagline

 

Next up, guys. We’ve got your tagline. And this one got to have some fun with it, got to  make it a little spicy. Okay. And this right here is a catchphrase. It’s a slogan you use to describe your company or product. And it can be fun. It can be simple. Ours, growth through collaboration. And before we got here, we had a few. We started off with “The Next Era of Influencers” followed by “Growth Happens Here”. And “Where Digital and Reality Meets”. And it really felt like “Growth Through Collaboration”, just kind of hit it on the head.  

 

Company Description

 

So last, but definitely not least, the brand. This is what you need to describe your brand, your voice, the vision, the mission, the overall value proposition and the tagline and the company description. And this needs to just simply describe your company. And it has to be straightforward and its essence Furlough is a community of entrepreneurs, marketers and students that empower each other through growth, through collaboration. So straightforward. And most of the time your audience, your personas, which we’re going to go into now, your audience, your personas don’t really see the majority of the brand messaging, right, the brand especially and brand identities and books. They’re really over-utilized, over and under. Over-utilized as internal resources for your team, your social media team, your email marketing team, your advertising team, they all need to be on the same page exactly who you speak to, how you speak to them, and what you do for them.

 

Personas

 

Now we’re going to move on to the personas. With the personas, you’re most likely targeting multiple people, right? These are the people that you’re targeting that you provide value to. In our case, our personas are three things; apprentices, entrepreneurs and experts. So identifying the different types of personas that your business, brand, ultimately service, understanding who it is that you’re speaking to, and it goes back to all the sessions that we were talking about this week about mapping those customer journeys. And just this is before everything, this is really part of that research phase, because you’re grabbing all the research that you’re doing, and you’re putting it in this little exercise.  So once you have your core personas, you go into the personalized value proposition This is different from the overall value proposition vs. your brand as a whole. These are the value propositions for that specific persona. Okay, so we’re getting a little more granular with this exercise. And with the apprentice, we accelerate your learning and get real world experience, working with real projects, building your portfolio, resume and network. See how we service an apprentice, one of our personas, how we service another persona is to collaborate with other like minded professionals and gain real time insights and feedback on your project, you see, clear, precise, direct to the point. If an entrepreneur was reading this right now they knew exactly what we bring to the table for them. Last but definitely not least, experts like my expert over here, Ophir Gadot, like my expert over here, Bogdan Popa get recognition for your expertise while paving the way for the future of digital marketers while being able to troubleshoot day to day challenges. So these personalized value propositions, okay have to be just like the overall one. Very direct, to the point; What you do and who you do it for. When you understand what exactly you do for the core personas. Then you have the use cases. And these are actual situations of the persona, using the product or service. So back to the apprentice, you have a list of different ways that they could actually benefit from us. Same with the entrepreneur. Feedback from your work, brainstorm ideas, collaborate with others, find co founders, and down to the experts, get recognition, build your credibility, expand your network, increase your leverage and become an authority. 

 

Product

 

So we’re right there. And now the product side, this can get fun and can get exciting. When you have your product, right. You already have your brand, who you speak, who you speak to, how you speak to them, what your brand is as a whole and what your brand does for individual people and personas. Okay, now we go into the product that’s able to make all of this happen, starting with your product and feature name. In case of these products or features. Right. It’s the official name of the product. Okay, the academy happened to service our apprentice persona, the community happened to service our entrepreneurship persona, and the mastermind happened to service our experts persona, when you can map these features and products to specific personas. This is where you could ultimately have impact and great flexibility with your customer journey. Okay, so this exercise is by far amazing because I’m going to show you some of the other benefits that we actually use after doing this exercise. So you have your top level statement, basically a statement describing the benefits of the product or feature. Okay, straightforward. And the case of the academy builds digital skills by gaining real world experience working on projects, building your portfolio resume network, similar to what we said about the apprentice. Going to the entrepreneur collaborate with other like minded professionals and gain real time, insights, feedback and support on your projects. And then followed by the mastermind showcase your expertise while building your authority in your network with other like minded professionals. Okay, and this top level statement for each one was basically an explanation of what that product or feature is. And then this is how we talk about said product or features, which is the themes that set your product or feature apart. And the beauty about this, okay, it’s the academy builds real world experience, builds your portfolio, expands your resume and your skills, these were actually helping us with structuring our advertising campaigns. Right. If we go to the community, real time support, bounce ideas around, get feedback now, find new projects, we were actually thinking, we weren’t thinking, we can now create creatives, advertising created for each one of these messaging pillars. Okay, same with becoming an authority, that recognition, showcase your expertise and stage to share your story. These messaging pillars are how we speak about what we’re the product. Great part is the persona itself is the demographic of who we’re targeting. So this exercise is fantastic if you’re going to, you know, get into the advertising world for your business or brand, and you don’t know where to start.  Now, the last thing here are the proof points. All right. And the proof points are the details in differentiators that support your messaging pillar. And that once again, is awesome use cases for how you could put out content into your content marketing strategy, right? The Academy the Proofpoint is you have to start as an intern out elsewhere. Here you don’t, you don’t have to start with busy work, you actually get real world experience, you build your portfolio, you don’t become an intern, you become a specialist. Right? And the same with the community, there’s no place to go. It’s hard to find professionals. The turnaround time is slow, right? You go on LinkedIn, you post a question, you’re not going to get an answer. And if you’re lucky for 24 hours versus here, you can get answers in real time, these proof points and all the way down to the experts. They’re often overlooked, especially when you’re talking about those D-level positions.

 

Ophir Gadot 

There’s so many experts out there that are not being recognized on a daily basis. So many good talents out there, they’re not getting the attention or being compensated the way they should. They’re stuck in one role, the company takes them for granted. … get your for granted, your team take you for granted. And I mean, this is something I’ve worked on for a while like these statements were specified a long time before we started working on the messaging app. Kind of creates consistency across the board. And messaging per persona across the board is aligned with all consistent with the brand voice and the brand interests. It’s not like when we did this practice, we reinvented the personas, we reestablished the needs of each and every persona, all the messaging pillars are organized and made us be so focused on what to do with each party, how to engage with them, and how to have it all in one place. So we can communicate with designers, copywriters with team members. Have it all going in the same direction like in a machine rather than mixing it all up. So this is the biggest value here, just having that consistency, one place, and purpose throughout.

 

Furlough Brand Identity

Joe Casanova 

Amazing, amazing stuff, guys. We have a very, very special, special little surprise for a lot of you. And this is still working progress. But let’s show you guys right now, what the current Furlough brand identity does look like. And this all really came from specifically that brand exercise that we just showcased. So once you’re able to get the start off an Excel spreadsheet, we got this to a designer, showed them some inspiration and references and ultimately ended up with this. And Angeles. Amazing job, Sam appreciate your direction in producing this. So without further ado, guys, there we go. So got Furlough, you gotta leave off the obvious textbook definition here. Okay. You see what we did there, we got the vision, we got the mission. The slide is going to be refined, but it does capture the messaging and showing it and this is the identity. So we’re all on the same page. And anyone that’s new to this can quickly come to us and understand it. And pretty much keep it rockin. So this is the mood board, the vibes, the feels, different things, do what you love, level up, wake up, kick ass, repeat, so on and so forth. This is where it starts getting spicy, you guys like it, that palette has all the brand colors on one side to the right side, followed by actual use cases of each one of these colors. Super excited about that. And you could see the range that we have here on the actual colors and adding that purple and adding that pink really did a whole other element and gave us so much range to this. The typography presentation. All right, Sorana is our main one. But we have different variations of Roboto to show the type of fonts that we use on our landing pages on our websites, even on our social media posts. Okay, very important. Now, we have our graphic elements, alright, and these are logo derived and how you can tweak the logo and use the logo in different variations. And also it shows you auxiliary shapes and layers of different kinds of colors that you can use, specifically in this range. So I’m pointing out the light. So you’re still using the brand identity, the brand colors, but also, you know, being able to switch it up. I love it. This is the fun part. Okay, and this is something that is very new, as much as I’m the founder of this community. I truly believe the people who make this community are the ones that own it, you guys make this community so we have the ability if you do not have a personal brand, and it’s to launch your own sub brand, so that you it’s still different. It’s still unique there, but it still has a tie to the furlough brand and shows as somewhat of a uniform that we’re on the same team. So in this case, we broke it down into masculine and feminine and leaving the masculine ways is yours truly myself and leading the feminine ways is Roslyn Fawns, so… … the brain or heart showing how cool this type of stuff is. I mean from here we went in and dove into the individual use cases of banners and graphics and tools and complementary colors. Of course, we went into some of the social media edits on how you can use the context of these designs, down to thumbnails, even business cards if one needs them. But these are going to be refined and we’re going to improve upon them, especially the thumbnail portions. Okay. Continue to more variations of said pieces. And following up bridging the gap between influencers and digital marketers. A copy is going to be refined, like I said, this has been the first debut. We are not there yet. But we are getting there. This next slide will actually bring it more closer to the end of the deck itself because it talks about how the academy and the community how these two, when they’re bridge together, it’s the mastermind, right, the mastermind is the bridge of the academy and the wonderful community here. And I think at this point of the deck, and it’s important to understand storytelling with brand books and brand identities, is the person that’s first being introduced this brand, they have no idea what the academy is, they have no idea what the community is, they have no idea what the mastermind is. So when you look at these next slides, this is such an incredible way of showcasing the Academy. And this is what we’re going to be building most likely top of the year. And it’s making education a game, get points for learning and grow skills by working on real projects with real companies. So right here, after that we have the key bullet points, we’ll go ahead and switch out this imagery for something else, you know, then we got the community. And what I’m going to do with this specifically is I’ll actually switch out the pillars and switch off the discussions. And what we’ll end up doing is building a slide dedicated for our pillars in our discussions. And these are going to be primary subjects and secondary subjects. I think it’s a very important thing to explain our pillars and our areas of expertise that we focus on and on the discussions and we could use that real estate on this slide to actually showcase the videos of people actually collaborating and some of the screen sharing there as well. So you have our same thing or key bullet points here. And last but definitely not least, we got right here, the one and only mastermind every day, every weekday at 12 o’clock now streaming to YouTube, right key bullet points for each one of the masterminds, close it out with a bang, experience growth through collaboration. Hey guys. Very excited to roll this out. Have it really for internal use if this never sees the public eye, but everyone that’s part of this community understands the messaging and how we speak and what we’re doing here. I consider this a complete win. And I would strongly encourage you for other people to implement in their practice.