How to Create Compelling Marketing Messaging to Help Your Business Soar

Effective marketing messaging is essential for your business. It helps you build rapport, trust, and loyalty with your audience. That’s why it’s so important to learn how to craft an effective message - and not to mention be able to choose the best channels to deliver it while upholding the messaging hierarchy within your company.

Your company’s marketing message is all about how your business talks about itself and what it does. A powerful marketing message should reach your audience on a deeply personal level.

Effective marketing messages are targeted to a specific audience. They make the target audience feel like the message was created just for them. This will help your company build trust with your clientele and boosts customer retention.

What Makes Marketing Messaging Work?

Your marketing message isn’t just what you’re saying – it’s how you say it. It includes the tone of how a company communicates what customers want to know about the brand. Together, these build up a brand identity, the “why” of your company – your mission, vision, and values. It unveils your brand’s beliefs, ideas, and ethos to your customers and helps people decide whether they want to do business with you or not. This helps customers decide between buying from just any company or buying from an authentic, engaging company that speaks to their worldview.

Gen Z (people born after 1995) is a great example of this concept. Gen Zers are very in-tune with the critical issues surrounding their generation, particularly social justice and environmental issues. As consumers, Gen Zers know the power they wield. They want to make sure the beliefs of the companies they support match their personal values. Paying attention to your marketing message is essential to help you keep up with the times as Gen Z’s market share increases.

As you develop your company’s marketing messaging, take time to craft it carefully. Make it specific to the audiences you’re trying to reach. Address their unique pain points and present your business as a holistic solution, not just an isolated product. This is a valuable opportunity for your company to take an honest look at who you are and to play that up.

Qualities of Effective Messaging

It gets to the point.

Bad marketing messaging tends to ramble, while effective messaging quickly expresses its most essential points.

Poor Marketing Messaging

“In today’s fast-paced economy, every company needs our app to thrive by making their communications more efficient.”

Good Marketing Messaging

“Our app halves the amount of time you spend on written communication.”

It feels informal.

Bad marketing messages sound unnatural and overly stiff, like talking to the most boring guy at a party. Excellent messaging feels off-the-cuff, improvised, and effortless. It’s charismatic.

Poor Marketing Messaging

“The most salient part of our shipment strategy is to ensure each and every shipment reaches its destination by the allotted time and date.”

Good Marketing Messaging

“Never miss a deadline again.”

It takes the customer’s viewpoint.

Ineffective messages focus on how the seller sees the world. It’s self-centered and self-serving. Effective messaging focuses on the customer’s viewpoint.

Poor Marketing Messaging

“Our world-class engineering team works day and night to support you.”

Good Marketing Messaging

“It takes 5 minutes to learn our app.”

It says something unique.

Bad messaging feels like it could have been cut-and-pasted into any product or service’s messaging, but good marketing messages are one-of-a-kind.

Poor Marketing Messaging

“Our groundbreaking product line will decrease your costs while increasing revenue.”

Good Marketing Messaging

“Each of our products targets specific parts of your manufacturing operations, maximizing efficiency every step of the way.”

It showcases results.

Don’t just tell people what you offer will benefit them. Show them how. Will it decrease the time they spend doing a specific task? Decreasing their error rates? Specifying what outcomes you’re selling will massively increase your conversions.

It demonstrates why you’re different.

Your messaging should make it clear how your approach and what you sell differ from your competitors. Do you offer a different perspective on a problem? Tell your audience that, then communicate why your solution beats everyone else’s.

It’s self-explanatory.

Bad marketing is clunky and confusing. Effective marketing makes sense intuitively. Don’t make it hard for your audience to understand what you’re telling them.

Poor Marketing Messaging

“We’re the triple ace up your communications sleeve.”

Good Marketing Messaging

“Get the right eyes on your ads.”

Creating a Compelling Marketing Message

Quickly identify the person or audience you’re targeting.

This is always the first place to start. It’s tempting to go too broad to appeal to a universal audience; don’t fall into that trap. Instead, focus your efforts on your target market.

Know your customer’s pain points.

Your audience should feel like your message was written especially for them – because it was!

Grab your audience’s attention immediately.

According to Facebook’s analytics, people spend an average of 1.7 seconds looking at each piece of content on their mobile devices, compared to 2.5 seconds when scrolling on their desktop. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, viewers will leave a website within 10 to 20 seconds.

Make your first impression count. You’ll rarely get a second one.

Using a Message Map to Build Your Messaging Strategy

A message map is a handy tool that can help you frame your message to make it the perfect size for your audience to process. It includes one main idea supported by 3 reasons to believe it, along with 3 or more proof points to help each key point.

Present how your solution solves their problem.

Answer the question “what’s in it for me?” Ultimately, that’s what your audience wants to know about you.

Communicating your message this way helps drive an on-message story for all your communications. This makes it easy to keep your messaging consistent across all media, platforms, and audiences.

Having a consistent message can massively improve your market positioning. One IAB study found viewing a brand’s consistent message across more than one communication channel increased consumers’ intent to purchase by 90%. It also improves the person’s perception of that brand by 68%. Those are the kind of numbers you can’t afford to ignore.

With patience (and a lot of training), you can eventually get everyone in your company to use the same message map. When your company tells your customers, employees, investors, and influencers one consistent, memorable story, you can earn a spot in consumers’ minds that you can’t earn any other way.

Answer The Big Question

Everyone wants to know one thing: what’s in it for them? The main topic in your message map should answer that question.

Building Your Critical Points

Marketers have determined that three is the magic number when it comes to reinforcing a message. It’s the smallest number possible that humans can still find a pattern in, and it’s concise enough to absorb information easily. If you can, distill all your brainstorming into just three critical points.

Messaging Is a Team Sport

This process is done best with a motivated group of contributors. Messaging development is a team sport. Keep your team small and purposeful, so it’s easy to share ideas, reach a consensus, and keep the project moving forward. But try to have a unique array of opinions to cover all your bases.

When you start, have access to a whiteboard or paper so you can capture, organize, and play with ideas.

When running the meeting itself, start by deciding on your main overarching message – the one key point you want your audience to always walk away with (your “what’s in it for me?”). Once you have that, brainstorm the best three critical points to support your main message. Then come up with as many supporting points as possible for each of those.

At the end of your session, ask your designated scribe to fill in the message map and distribute it to the team for final review. Programs like Google Docs can help you review and collect feedback.

Final Words

Effective marketing messaging for your business is essential to success. Without it, you can’t possibly build rapport, trust, and loyalty with your audience. That’s why it’s so important to craft an effective message, choose the best channels to deliver it, and uphold the messaging hierarchy within the company.

If you want to learn more about business marketing and related topics, visit our website at www.skillspot.org. You’ll find many more resources like this to help you grasp and take advantage of business marketing fundamentals.