What Is Brand Messaging, and Why Does Your Website Need It Before Anything Else?

There's a question that comes up in almost every brand conversation I have, usually somewhere between "we need a new website" and "can you just start writing?" The question is: do we have our messaging nailed down first?

The honest answer, most of the time, is no. And that gap between what a brand is and what it says is usually what's making everything else harder than it needs to be.

So let's talk about brand messaging: what it actually is, what it's not, and why it has to come before the website, the ads, the email campaigns, and anything else your brand is putting out into the world.

Brand Messaging Is Not a Tagline

People hear "brand messaging" and they think of a catchy slogan. Something clever, something quotable, something to put on a t-shirt. And while a good tagline can absolutely be part of brand messaging, the two are not the same thing.

Brand messaging is the foundation. It's the set of decisions, deliberate, strategic, sometimes hard-won, that shape how a brand talks about itself across every touchpoint. It includes your positioning (where you sit in the market and why that matters), your mission and values (what you stand for, beyond the product), your voice (how you sound, consistently, whether you're writing a homepage or a social caption or a customer email), and your core value propositions (the specific reasons someone should choose you over the alternative).

When all of those pieces are in place, the rest of the writing gets easier. Not easy, but easier. Because you're not starting from scratch every time. You have something to work from.

Why It Has to Come First

Here's where people get into trouble: they start building before they know what they're saying.

They hire a designer. The designer makes something beautiful. Then someone has to write the words, and suddenly no one knows quite what the brand is supposed to sound like. The homepage becomes a guessing game. The about page turns into a generic string of phrases that could belong to any company in any industry. The value proposition is vague because no one ever really decided what it was.

The website launches. It looks great. It converts terribly. And then the post-mortem begins.

This is not a hypothetical. It's a pattern. And it's almost always traceable back to the same root cause: the messaging wasn't figured out before the building started.

Brand messaging is the brief your website copy needs to be good. It's the filter your marketing team uses to decide whether a campaign idea is on-brand or off. It's the thing that keeps your customer emails from sounding like they were written by a different company than your homepage. Without it, everyone's improvising, and improvised brand communication tends to confuse people, even when it's well-written.

What Good Brand Messaging Actually Includes

A solid messaging framework doesn't have to be a 40-page document. But it should give you clear, usable answers to a few core questions:

Who are you for? (Specifically. Not "small businesses" but who, exactly?) What problem do you solve, and why does that problem matter? What makes you different from the alternatives? What do you believe? How do you sound? What do you never say?

When those questions have real, considered answers, your brand stops sounding generic. It starts sounding like something. And that's when people start paying attention.

The Website Question

So why does your website need messaging before anything else?

Because your website is doing more work than any other piece of your marketing. It's usually the first real impression, the place where people decide if they're in or out, and the thing every other channel is pointing back to. If the words on that site are fuzzy, generic, or inconsistent with how you talk about yourself everywhere else, you lose people. Quietly, quickly, and without explanation.

Good website copy doesn't come from a good writer alone. It comes from a good writer who has clear messaging to work from. Those two things together are what make a homepage feel right, like it actually says something, like it knows who it's talking to, like it earns the next click.

That's the goal. And it starts with the messaging.

If you're not sure yours is there yet, that's a fine place to start. Most brands aren't. But the ones that take the time to get it right first tend to find that everything after it gets a lot more effective.