Messaging is a key part of your marketing strategy, and actually of your business as a whole.
Messaging is the next step after developing your Persona Profile and Journey. If you haven’t yet, be sure to read our articles about what a persona is, how it’s helpful for your marketing, and what the persona journey is all about.
Imagine telling a story about your business. Your persona is the main character, and the journey map is the storyboard. Your business is the supporting character who equips the persona to achieve their goal or get where they want to go. In this story, your messaging is the conversation happening between you and your main character.
Messaging is the collection of key points about your business and offering that you want to get across to your audience. It’s the bullet points that if given the opportunity to speak for 1 or 2 minutes to your ideal client, you’d want to make sure they fully grasp.
While these messaging points are about your business, they aren’t really about your business. What do I mean by that?
These value statements will be written from the perspective of your persona - what they are feeling, what they are experiencing, and what they are doing. When done correctly, your messaging will demonstrate how your business assists them along the way.
3 Reasons Why Messaging is Beneficial
It makes you more efficient. Next time you sit down to write a social media post or update your website home page, you won’t have to start from scratch. You already know the main point.
It makes you more effective. When you put the work into developing messaging that will resonate with your audience, you know that when you use it, it’s going to work.
It makes you more consistent. Achieving brand recognition and recall awareness takes a lot of effort. People today are constantly being inundated with messages. In order to stick in people’s minds, you should reiterate the same message over and over. The repetition may feel boring to you, but your target audience needs this level of consistency in order for your message to get past all of their filters.
If you’re thinking that these 3 points sound very similar to the reasons why a Persona is helpful, you’re right! The Persona Profile is the beginning. This messaging work is another step forward.
Now, some parts of your messaging will dictate that certain phrases should always be used. After a lot of research and work (starting with your Persona Profile Development), you might decide that a specific combination of words precisely conveys what you want people to think about your business. Those key phrases should be kept at the forefront of your messaging documentation and in all of your communications. But you’re going to need more than just those few phrases! The rest of your writing will need to creatively develop your key points.
Your messaging is the springboard from which all of your copywriting, content writing, or any other kind of writing will launch. It will inspire and guide your website, emails, advertisements, social media, and even your 30-second pitch at networking events.
I like to think of messaging as the point you’re making, and copywriting as the specific words you’ll use to make that point clear. There are countless possible combinations of words that could all get the same point across, but your words will fit the messaging that your persona needs to hear in order to work with you.
Curious how you can get started on developing your persona-focused marketing strategy? Grab your free copy of the Persona Profile Worksheet here!
This is another blog in our series, Marketing Foundations. Be sure to check out the others:
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