The Importance of Great Messaging

Companies spend a lot on marketing. According to The CMO Survey, marketing now accounts for roughly 11% of the average company's total budget and more than 9% of its revenue, and that share has been climbing in recent years. When you're spending that much, the competition to make every marketing dollar count is real.

When you're investing that heavily in marketing, it's critical to get things right. There will always be campaigns that didn't work great or ads that didn't bring in the quality leads you wanted. Trying new offers, new copy, and new ideas is a natural part of marketing.

However, every new marketing effort needs to stand on a firm foundation: great messaging. If your marketing doesn't have the fundamentals of great messaging down, all of it is hit or miss. And that gets expensive.

Great messaging starts with understanding your "why." Simon Sinek argues that a company has to "Start With Why" to be successful. When you can lock down the "why" of your business, it becomes easier to clarify the value you provide to customers, beyond the tangible products and services. You sell flooring, or flooring installation services. That's easy to say. But when you think first about why your company does what it does, you start to look behind your product or service to find the unique value your customers enjoy because they hired you.

So far this might sound like self-indulgent navel-gazing. It isn't. Throughout this article, we'll get specific about what great messaging and a strong message framework look like, how to develop a foundational message and vocabulary, and what types of content align with the different parts of that framework.

The Basics of the "Why" and Its Core Message

Using Sinek's framework, the "why" is your company's vision: why it does what it does. In today's marketing world, a company is never just a company. It's also a brand. Broader than mere reputation, your brand is the feeling and attitude people associate with your company.

When you're doing marketing right, people respond to your brand the way you intend. So you need to be intentional about your messaging. What values does your company represent? What promise are you making to your customers, vendors, staff, and community? Answering these questions with specificity is how you start clarifying your "why." Most importantly, you need to answer why that "why" matters to each of those groups.

With a clear "why," you can start detailing the "how": how you deliver on your company's values and promises. You're looking for real-world applications of your unique value, not just words. Say one of your company values is being trustworthy. How does trustworthiness show up in your actions? Does it mean providing accurate quotes and budgets? Does it mean schedules and deadlines are met?

That's how specific your answers should get. From there, you'll step back up to find the vocabulary that expresses both the "why" and the "how." An effective way to start building that vocabulary is to write short, core content like a vision statement, tagline, or slogan. Done right, these express your "why" and "how" in a simple, memorable way.

These short pieces of content are the ideal place to start a message framework because they force you to be concise and precise with your language. They also form the core of all your other messages, which can vary in detail for different services or campaigns. That's what makes this initial "why" and "how" messaging your core messaging. Every other message, communication, and interaction should be built on this foundation.

Whatever values, promises, and image you want your company to project, all great core messaging shares two necessary qualities: it's memorable, and it's used consistently.

Memorable means it does more than deliver information. The message delivers a feeling and an expectation that sticks with people.

Consistent means it's used throughout all communications. Even when the exact tagline or value statement isn't an explicit part of the communication, the essence of the core message and its promises are there. Everything, even seasonal specials, customer phone calls, and how-to videos, is steeped in your core message.

Achieving this kind of strategic messaging framework takes some upfront work, but it makes delivering effective marketing, sales, and customer service much easier in the long run.

Before Any Words: Clarifying Brand Values and Promise

Part of clarifying your company's unique value and brand promise is understanding who you're trying to reach. Building buyer personas and characterizing your target market are essential steps to developing a promise and a language that resonate with them.

As you detail who your buyers are, pay particular attention to their fears and concerns related to flooring work. Whether they're homeowners, house flippers, or general contractors, what worries them about buying flooring or having it installed? On the flip side, what could a flooring installer do that would make their lives easier? How can you add unexpected, welcome value to the sales, delivery, or installation process?

A scary part of this process is finding out how your company is currently perceived by its customers, its prospects, and the community. You can do this through surveys and by reading online reviews. Interview a few past vendors and prospects who didn't end up contracting with you. You may find your brand perception isn't at all what you want it to be, or you may be surprised by what people most appreciate about your team. All of it, the good, the bad, and the ugly, is instructive. Pay particular attention to the words people use. That will come in handy when it's time to build a brand vocabulary.

Combine this target-market information with competitor research. The purpose is to differentiate your company. What are other flooring companies doing? What are their core messages? What are they promising? How do you differ? What can you provide that they can't?

You might discover your company has distinctive values or promises. Great! You may also find that some competitors touch on values that animate your own "why." Using our trustworthiness example, you don't need to cede that ground just because another local flooring company also touts being trustworthy. You'll need to find a unique (and better) way to communicate and live that value for your customers' benefit.

Finding the Right Words: Developing a Lexicon for Effective Messaging

An effective message starts with one simple theme. Marketing messages that are too messy or complicated get ignored or forgotten. People have a lot going on in their minds, and they aren't going to take the time to decipher a long, wide-ranging, or muddled message.

As you draw on your core messaging to build more specific messages for different services, products, and campaigns, keep each one focused on a single idea. Don't dilute it by throwing in other themes.

Since messaging is how you talk about your company, the exact words matter, even if the point isn't to get people to memorize your slogan (though that's nice too). When you're first formulating your vision statement or short company description, start by getting the ideas on paper. From there you can refine them into the actual words you use.

Keeping a marketing message concise helps you stay on theme. It also forces you to choose high-impact words. When you draft a tagline for a product, you should know why every word is there and how it strengthens the message.

High-impact words are the ones that spark an emotion or an image in someone's mind. People don't connect with facts. Facts and validation are useful to support a message, but they aren't the message. People connect with how they feel about something and what they envision that message means for them.

You also want to make sure those high-impact words and phrases are meaningful to the intended audience. Remember the discovery process for finding out what prospects, customers, and others think about your company? Now that you're ready to build a messaging vocabulary, the exact words you heard during that process will be invaluable.

Paying attention to how people talk about what matters to them helps you communicate in their own language. For example, if people described poor scheduling as a pain point when working with home contractors, you may have heard that frustration expressed as a desire for companies to "respect my time." There's no reason you can't work that phrase right into your messaging.

Once you've completed your core messaging, you probably have a list of discarded words and phrases. They were on point and descriptive, but just didn't fit into a concise statement. Those words are the start of your lexicon. You didn't think I meant it when I said you'd build a messaging vocabulary, did you? That's exactly what I meant.

We often develop detailed style guides for clients. You can create a company style guide with outside help or put together a short one on your own. Either way, a list of preferred words and phrases that hit the right tone for your brand is integral to consistency across all your messaging. Equally important is specifying the words and phrases you don't want used because they clash with the messages you want to deliver. For example, your company may always offer "best pricing" or "highest ROI," but never "cheap" or "low" pricing.

Hopefully you can start to see how having core messages and a message lexicon makes creating targeted marketing messages so much easier. I've been dancing around this process of building a strategic message framework and using it to develop more targeted messages. Now it's time to get to it.

Exploring the Building Blocks of a Message Framework

The foundational core messages are the company-level messages. They bring together the "why" and share the top-level "how" and "who." You don't need every type of foundational core message, but you do need at least two so they can ground the rest of your marketing messages. Common types of core messaging are a vision statement, brand promise, tagline, and slogan. Positioning statements and elevator pitches are slightly more detailed forms of core message content.

• WHY
  • What does your company value?
  • What promise do you make to your customers?
• HOW
  • Determine how you demonstrate your why in daily operations.
  • Develop a brand vocabulary, and include your why in your mission and vision statements.
• WHO
  • Develop buyer personas that describe their pains and challenges.
  • Identify their goals, motivations, hobbies, and where they hang out online.

Your core messaging should deliver the why, how, and who in concise language that sticks with people. It should reveal the values that animate your organization. Let's look at Southwest Airlines' purpose and vision statements:

"To connect People to what's important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel."

"To be the world's most loved, most efficient, and most profitable airline."

Through its purpose statement, we instantly know what drives the company. In these two short statements, Southwest speaks to three constituencies: its passengers, its workers, and its shareholders. They clearly reflect its values of treating people well, working hard, and working smart. (You can see more of their core messaging here.)

After you've gone through the process of setting out your organization's values, purpose, and vision, and are ready to build a core messaging framework, the result should look something like this:

You can certainly have more than three core values. However, if your value list grows quite long, look at where some touch on the same deeper value and group them together. You can use a similar framework to express this more detailed picture of your values in your style guide. That might look something like this:

You can use a similar format to present the full lexicon you developed for each value, no matter how many values you identify. Once you have these frameworks built for your core messaging, you can start spinning them out into greater detail for different circumstances. For example, each of your personas should have its own messaging component.

After you've built your persona frameworks, move to your primary offerings. Say you're a flooring company. One of your core offering message frameworks might look like this:

You can keep drilling down and create messaging frameworks for specific campaigns, such as a promotional special or a premium content piece like a lead generator or white paper. The goal of a more detailed framework is to identify a clear audience, a clear message, clear metrics for success, and a working lexicon for the campaign. Some additional questions these lower-level frameworks should answer include:

• What value(s) does this campaign or content represent?
• What problems does it solve for the customer or prospect?
• What is this campaign's single core message?
• What is the goal or call to action?
• What personas are targeted?

Consult all the relevant higher-level frameworks as you build out the message framework at a more granular level. This ensures you embed the values and achieve the messaging consistency that's so vital to maintaining your brand promise and creating a consistent brand experience. Nothing undermines your efforts to build a solid brand reputation like inconsistency.

Making Sure Your "Why" Shows Up in All Your Messaging

The cascade approach to message development ensures that the "why" you specify is the root and seed of all your further messaging. The "why" is fundamentally who you are as an organization. It's the personality the market attaches to you, the thing that lets people feel like they can connect with you. They aren't going to connect to a hardwood floor. Customers and prospects buy from and work with people. When your why-based, strategic messaging personalizes your organization, you can connect with audiences in ways that inspire them to take action.

Getting your messaging right is foundational work, and it pays off in every campaign, ad, and conversation that follows. If you'd like help clarifying your "why" and building a messaging framework your whole team can use, our team can help.

This is part of our guide to marketing your small business online.