Today’s customers are inundated with marketing messages — on websites, email, billboards, social media, etc. The sheer volume of content competing for their limited attention can make them indistinguishable.
You need a well-thought-out messaging strategy to grab and nurture customers’ attention. One-size-fits-all solutions won’t work. For your messaging to be effective, it must speak to your target audience’s needs and goals.
Let’s uncover how to create an effective messaging strategy that connects with audiences, helps them understand what you offer, and sets you apart from the competition.
What is a messaging strategy?
A messaging strategy outlines how your business communicates key messages to its target audience. It serves as the backbone for creating marketing content that resonates.
With a good messaging strategy, you can also ensure:
- A strong brand identity – Clear and consistent messaging across marketing channels and touchpoints builds awareness, helping customers recognize and trust your brand.
- A competitive edge – Impactful messages can differentiate your brand from the competition, helping you stand out.
Ultimately, businesses that want to succeed need a good messaging strategy. Just think about it. What’s the use of having a good product if you can’t communicate its benefits effectively and sell it in the first place?
5 Steps to create a strong messaging strategy
The good news is that anyone can create a strong messaging strategy. Just follow these steps to ensure consistent and effective marketing efforts.
1. Define your Unique Selling Point (USP)
The first step in developing a compelling message strategy is defining what makes your brand, products, and services different from similar solutions. That’s your unique selling proposition (USP). Your USP shall serve as your guide when crafting your messages to consumers. The goal is for your USP to shine through in all your messages.
Many businesses offer the same services or products. The USP is what gets customers to choose one brand over the other. It could be product superiority, a specific audience segment, or even your Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policy.
Take, for example, UpLead and Lead411. Both sales lead tools help businesses identify potential customers using advanced search filters. So, how do they differentiate from each other?
UpLead promises real-time contact verification. You would consider this vendor if accurate and up-to-date data is a priority.
On the other hand, Lead411 boasts unlimited B2B data. Choose this service provider if you want maximum outreach on a fixed budget.
Identifying your USP is complicated. It involves an analysis of your product, customers, and competitors. So, here’s a tip. The point where your product’s best features, customers’ needs, and competitors’ gaps meet gives you an unbeatable USP.
Once you’ve found your USP, you must communicate it clearly and concisely for future reference. You have a small window to grab people’s attention. If you’re struggling to come up with the perfect elevator pitch, consider using a sentence rewriter to generate various engaging positioning statements and choose the one that fits your vision.
2. Research your target audience and create buyer personas
At this stage, you already know who your target audience is. After all, audience research is one of the first steps you need to take before setting up a business.
However, when crafting your messaging strategy, you need to go deeper. Apart from understanding your audience demographics and needs, understand what motivates their purchasing choices. Knowing your audience this way can help you better position your subsequent brand messages. It will enable you to craft personalized and targeted content down the line.
Buyer personas can help you further understand your audience. They are data-driven characterizations of your ideal customer. Using demographic and psychographic data, they create a complete picture of your target market, answering questions like:
- What is their income level?
- Which communication channels do they prefer?
- What are their goals?
- What are their values?
- What language or tone resonates with them?
Check out this B2B buyer persona example.
Besides demographic information about the individual and the company, it highlights the customer’s pain points and goals. The data from the sections on the left column can guide a marketing team in developing relevant content themes.
You will need to develop multiple buyer personas for the different audience segments you’ll be targeting. Doing so forces you to think about your buyers strategically and craft personalized content for their needs.
That is especially true for B2B businesses. The IT manager you contacted for your software development platform isn’t the only decision-maker. You must create different content for the CTO and CEO.
Several tools provide valuable data for your ideal customer profile.
- Marketing data platforms collect demographic, behavioral, and transactional information about customers.
- Google Analytics tracks customer behavior on your websites.
- Social media analytics track user behavior on social platforms.
- Social listening tools monitor customer sentiment and gauge buying intent.
You can also interview and survey existing customers to understand why and how they use your products.
3. Craft your brand story
You need to tap into human emotions for impactful messaging. A Nielsen study of 100 ads showed that ads with above-average emotional responses generated a 23% lift in sales. In other words, people take action when they are moved.
That’s why you need to craft a brand story as part of creating a messaging strategy. A brand story leverages storytelling techniques to help you connect with your audience. When consumers know and relate to your brand story, they will likely take your desired action when they read your messages.
Most of the time, a business’ brand story is its origin story or their reason for being. For example, Airbnb started with two broke guys raising money to pay rent by offering conference attendees air mattresses and breakfast. Hence, “air bed and breakfast.”
But what if you don’t have an interesting origin story?
Focus on shared values between your brand and the customers. Uniqode, a leading digital business card solutions provider, does that. Their messaging indicates that they are aligned with what their customers are looking for and help to cater to that. They help you create customizable e-business cards that showcase your brand and resonate with your customers. Check the core value statement on their website that connects with customers emotionally.
You can also craft stories about your employees and the brand’s impact on them:
In this example, Sprout Social shares stories about their employees’ day-to-day lives, putting a relatable face to the brand.
Once you determine your brand story, you can ensure all your subsequent messages across all marketing channels align. So, if your brand story highlights customer-centricity as a core value, you’d know that messages that don’t put your customers front and center are a no-no. Whether behind-the-scenes videos, company blogs for think pieces, or email newsletters for company updates, you can ensure your brand story shines through.
Read more: Sales Psychology: Getting Into the Buyer’s Mind To Make the Purchase
4. Create your messaging guidelines
At this point, all you need to do is put everything together.
Messaging guidelines outline how your marketing and sales team should craft your messages. It ensures your in-house or outsourced staff is on the same page, resulting in better messaging alignment, effective collaboration, and improved consistency.
When writing your messaging guidelines, include:
- Your Unique Selling Point (USP)
- Brand story
- Buyer personas
You can also include your preferred tone of voice, words to avoid, and fonts to use, among other things. The more specific your messaging guidelines are, the better. Don’t forget to give all members of your team access to these guidelines.
To further ensure your team’s output based on these guidelines will be effective, you can use AI to analyze the content before publication. AI apps can examine the output and predict its likelihood of effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) using your company’s historical customer content preferences and engagement. It can also make recommendations on how to improve the content.
Where do you get such apps? Well, you can create it yourself. Groundbreaking tools like Writer’s AI Studio now make it easy for organizations to develop these types of apps that are connected to company data.
5. Test and tweak
So, you’ve crafted your messaging strategy. That doesn’t mean you should sit back on your laurels. Market trends come and go. What worked last year won’t necessarily work next year.
So, to ensure your messaging strategy remains relevant and meets customers’ changing needs, you must continuously test and tweak it. By this, we mean you must constantly assess (and, if necessary, adjust) all your messaging strategy components — from your message guidelines to your USP, brand story, and actual messages.
There are several ways to do this:
- Look at performance metrics
- Conduct A/B testing
- Seek feedback
You can set key performance indicators to measure the success of some of your messaging strategy components, like your actual messages. Your KPIs can include click-through, engagement, and conversion rates. If these numbers fall below expectations, make the necessary tweaks.
A/B testing compares different versions of your actual messaging to find the one that resonates with your audience.
Check out the example below.
These landing pages are identical except for one word in the headline. You can A/B test your web page copy, social media posts, and emails to see which is the best version.
You can also ask for your customers’ opinions directly. You can collect customer feedback on your actual messages, messaging guidelines, USP, and brand story. Leverage surveys, reviews, and social media comments to generate this feedback and make the necessary adjustments.
Types of messaging channels to consider
To ensure the effectiveness of your messages, you also need to choose the right messaging channel. The platform you choose to disseminate your messages should depend on a few things: your audience, the nature of your message, and your objective. Here are some popular channels to consider:
Email is a highly effective messaging channel, with an ROI of 3600%. That means every dollar you spend generates $36. It’s the channel to choose if you want to send detailed messages that aren’t as urgent.
To get the most out of email marketing, implement the following email best practices:
- Personalize email messages
- Craft compelling subject lines
- Keep the email body concise and precise
- Ensure mobile responsiveness
- Incorporate clear calls to actions
- Comply with data privacy and security regulations
You also have to ensure you send your emails at the right time. For this, marketing automation platforms like Encharge can be used. They can help drive email engagement and conversions with behavior-based emails. Randomly timed emails could potentially annoy subscribers. On the other hand, action-based emails are more likely to be opened since they deliver personalized and relevant content.
In-app messages
You can use your own software product as a channel to disseminate your messages. In-product messages refer to communication that happens precisely within a software solution. See the example below.
This is the channel to choose if you aim to reach actual product users. In-product messages are short, highly personalized, and triggered by the user’s actions. In most cases, they require urgent action.
Kontentino is an example of a brand that uses in-app messaging to onboard new users to the product. You can also use in-product messaging to upsell, announce new features, drive feature adoption, and collect feedback.
Social media
Marketers typically use social media platforms for customer engagement. It’s also the real-time channel to gauge audience opinions about your messages. It may need some reworking if you’re not seeing any likes, comments, or shares on your social content.
Here are some tips to boost interaction with your social content:
- Use visuals
- Optimize content scheduling
- Use social media analytics tools
- Engage regularly
- Incorporate user-generated content
- Engage influencers
- Utilize hashtags
Note that each social channel has unique features and caters to a specific audience. For B2B businesses, for instance, you’d need to use LinkedIn. Instagram is probably your best bet if you want to post visual content and reach highly visual audiences.
Offline channels
Offline channels are those that don’t leverage the Internet. Physical press releases, events, and billboards are examples of offline channels.
They’re the platforms to reach people who are less active or absent online.
Only invest in these channels if you have extra cash to spare. They’re more costly to use than digital channels and harder to track. Costs for printing, logistics, talent, and more can quickly add up.
Conclusion
A well-crafted messaging strategy is crucial to any business. It simplifies and focuses communication, ensuring consistent and business-aligned marketing messages.
You learned the steps to create an impactful messaging strategy:
- Find what sets your brand apart.
- Research your target audience.
- Craft your messaging guidelines
- Test and tweak
As a final tip, don’t forget to use the right channel for your message.
With a well-crafted messaging strategy, you can easily differentiate your brand and connect with customers. Best of luck!
