What is a Messaging Strategy Anyway?
Outside of the professional communications realm, not many folks spend time thinking about messaging strategy. Businesses often overlook messaging strategy as another pesky and unnecessary start up project that distracts from productivity and growth. “I know what I’m offering,” many think. “I can talk about it clear as day. Now let’s get selling!”
Wait… slow down! You’re not ready yet!
A messaging strategy is key to success and long-term growth. A clear and consistent message is critical to your brand and story. Without it, businesses are liable to misrepresent products, underrepresent services, confuse audiences, or lose their buyer’s attention. Regardless of your business or industry, you must clearly tell your prospective customer who you are, what you’re offering, why you’re different, and how you can help them. And you must know how, when, and where you’re going to communicate this information.
Everyone has their own style of communication, and even individually your communication style changes over time. This means that whether you are a team of 1 or 1,000, your message is subject to a whole lot of interpretation and variability. A strong messaging strategy keeps you and everyone on your team focused on the core brand and story. It supports an effective and consistent messaging approach for years to come.
By mapping out five key aspects of your brand identity, you can begin to frame your messaging strategy. This includes your core values, value proposition, positioning statement, mission statement, and vision statement.
1. Core Values: What’s important to you.
A company’s core values are the principles upon which it operates. They are the values that determine how employees make decisions about products, services, and processes. While they are critical in forming a healthy organizational culture from an HR perspective, they also bleed into your engagement with customers and the marketplace.
By clearly documenting your core values, you reinforce how you want your team to engage with colleagues and customers alike. You are able to guide these engagements with a common set of unifying principles.
2. Value Proposition: Who you are to your target customers.
A value proposition is a big picture description of how your products of services provide value to your targeted customers. It should articulate the problem you solve for customers, how your solution is unique, and why they should choose you. It is written to and for the customer, with the goal of influencing how they see you and persuading them to buy from you. (Eventually your messaging strategy will also include messaging “pillars” that lie beneath the value proposition, addressing specific selling points that flow down from the top-level value proposition.)
One established, you’ll subtly reference your value proposition throughout your sales and marketing content, leveraging it to convince your target customer to buy from you. Practically speaking, it is not a statement you announce to the world as such – but it is an internal point of reference around which all your content is focused.
3. Brand Positioning: Who you are to the market.
A positioning statement describes how your brand fits into the marketplace. I like to think of it as a map that pinpoints the intersection of your customer base, brand, and marketplace. Since it involves a few more layers than the value prop, this one can be as long as 3 – 5 sentences. A positioning paragraph, if you will.
Like the value proposition, the positioning statement is another internal reference tool that you’ll use to align your branding, messaging, and general marketing activities. It identifies your target customer, what you provide to them, the benefits they receive from your product or service, and how the product and benefit is unique in the marketplace. It should be a reference to ensure everyone on your team is speaking to the right audience, about your core features, benefits, and unique differentiators.
4. Mission Statement: Who you are today.
Unlike the value proposition and positioning statement, a mission statement is a public facing declaration of your company’s broad purpose. It is relevant to everyone involved in your business, from customers to employees, board members, and investors. The mission statement asserts what you do, how you do it, and why you do it.
Unlike the value proposition, the mission statement doesn’t seek to persuade or convert an audience; and unlike the positioning statement, it does not reference competitors or other market factors. The mission statement simply and frankly states what your business mission is today. This provides a unified and succinct description that is relevant to each and every stakeholder.
5. Vision Statement: Who you want to be tomorrow.
Lastly, a vision statement is simply a mission statement for the future. What does the world look like once you’ve achieved your mission? What are your loftiest goals and aspirations for the future?
If you’re a non-profit fighting a chronic disease, your vision will be a world where that disease is eradicated. If you’re a New York based transportation company, your vision may be to enable every New Yorker to travel to and from their destination efficiently. If you’re a home furnishing retailer in Texas, your vision may be a more comfortable home for every Texan.
With these statements, you have the foundation of your messaging strategy. From here, you identify how you’ll leverage these core messaging statements in all of your public facing content. What mediums will you use? How will your tone vary in each? How frequently will you reach out to your audience? And so on. Building a comprehensive messaging strategy is a necessary and valuable stage in your business planning and development efforts that sets the stage for effective sales and marketing initiatives.
