It’s as good a time as any to review and revise key messages for your business. Consider the 3 steps we share to help with creating successful key messages.
Are key messages important? Do team members care about them, in the daily operations of running your business? Will customers actually listen to and believe them?
Yes, they definitely are!
Let us begin by defining what a key message is. A key message is the master story and narrative that you want a target audience member to take away post-engagement with your business or brand. It is a precise statement and summation that explains what you do, how you are different and the value that you bring to a target audience member.
The purpose of having good key messages are multi-fold. Brands can use key messages to prioritise information distribution; ensure that the information shared is accurate, consistent, and aligned with the business. It can be used to measure and track engagement. Key messages can help company representatives stay focused when interacting with a key audience member, for example, a customer, journalist or investor.
Having an updated set of messages aligned with the environment your business is operating in is important.
It is just as important for these messages to be aligned with business goals. Most goals are categories into revenue, profit, volume or scale. Ensure that key messages reflect the goal you are aiming for in the current lifecycle of your business.
For example, if you are looking to increase revenue by selling more services to a customer, a negative message to send out is that the business is looking to raise prices because of increased operational costs or that 1 business unit is subsidising another unit.
We have compiled 3 steps that are important in creating your key messages.
Step one – Figure out and understand your customer persona
A customer persona is an image that represents characteristics and traits of an audience segment, based on data collected through user research and small-group engagements. Keyword research and social media observations can help provide a more complete picture when combined with the earlier data.
Your business can profile your audiences (for example: customers, partners, investors, stakeholders) by running polls, surveys, focus groups, and other direct response methods of speaking with actual audience members.
Building personas by researching real people will help provide a detailed impression of the hypothetical audience member. This can include profiling emotions, enabling your business to understand their motivations, preferences and how they calculate value.
Put all the gathered data and points into a (virtual) box and look to complete an information card about the target audience member. Pay attention to what they spend time on, followed by what they spend on as these point out priorities. Negative preferences can be more informative when considering the entire persona.
Step two – Articulate that you understand their challenges, issues, and pains.
Once you have built a persona to ‘speak’ to as a business, you must demonstrate that you understand why they are unhappy with the status quo (with reference to your business area).
You can discover your customers’ pain points during the earlier research stage by understanding what their priority is when approaching and avoiding areas and topics.
Frame these pain points as concisely and clearly as possible in your key message. Make sure the persona knows that you are dealing with specific challenges or issues.
Be authentic and demonstrate empathy in identifying the challenge and why it is important that the current approach of dealing with it is insufficient. Provide examples of the situation or the problems caused by the situation.
If your business is unable to empathise with the challenge, it could be that you are selling to the wrong persona.
Step three – Provide a solution that works directly for the persona.
This is not the time to be everything to everyone. Do not dilute your efforts and try to provide solutions for everything; especially those personas you have decided are low (or not) priorities.
If your research was done well, your persona captures specific challenges and issues of an audience segment. Your key messages should be used to address the persona, and by doing so, answer the issues the audience member is going through.
Ensure that your key message provides an explanation about why your product or service will solve the problem. Describe this with practicality and with simple language (this means no technical jargon) to prevent any misunderstanding of your messages.
Stick to short statements that can be remembered easily. These are usually between 10 – 15 words and cover one aspect of the problem and solution at a time. Prepare paragraphs to explain and defend (if needed) your position. Keep these away from the key message statement. Save it as an appendix or otherwise.
A recommendation: Try to provide hope, and not create fear when sharing key messages
Your business can be practical and direct about solving problems, while still providing the persona (and by extension your target audience) a glimpse and understanding of what it means when the challenge or issue is solved.
Remember to explain why your product or service is the correct solution. There is no need to disparage your competitor to do so. Your key messages will explain the points of difference to your person in a practical manner. Let your target audience member decide for themselves whether you have explained your solution well.
WBU offers key message workshops where we bring clients through the various areas outlined in the article above.
· We interview stakeholders prior to the workshop to obtain an overview of the business needs.
· During the workshop, we work with clients on a message house, develop 2 – 3 key messages with supporting paragraphs.
· Post-workshop, we refine the messages and provide a walk-through on the areas and scenarios to use them going forward.
We are Brand Utility is a business consultancy.
We offer strategy and tactics to support growth outcomes - revenue, scale, regional expansion and market entry – for our clients.
Areas of support include:
· Branding: Messaging, positioning, approach to market
· Marketing: Content, social media, email, community amplification
· Lead generation: Digital advertising, social media advertising, social commerce, e-commerce
· Integration of marketing with business operations: Secondment as a marketing or public relations function
Discover more about our services at our website or book a free consultation through this link.
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