Unveiling 3 Secrets to an Engaging Messaging Strategy

Many corporate representors communicate a great deal of unnecessary information, confuse the customers with mixed messaging, and then wonder if their marketing campaigns don’t work anymore when they receive little back. 

The answer lies in their messaging strategy (or lack thereof). If you struggle with creating an engaging messaging strategy for your brand or company, continue reading to find out about the solutions.

What Is A Messaging Strategy?

Your messaging strategy is a document you create to keep all your messaging efforts consistent in all deliverable formats. Your messaging strategies outline how you present your brand on the platforms you choose. Whether it is in-store signage, customer support emails, your website, a tweet on Twitter, or a caption you write on Instagram.

A messaging strategy helps raise your brand awareness and informs your target audience about who you are as a business. Bear in mind that your messaging type can be the only deciding factor customers have to decide if they want to start a business with you. 

Strategies are plans to simplify the process and not further complicate the problems. So if your messaging strategy is so complex you can’t explain it to everyone without confusing them, you don’t have a strategy. 

There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for every company, product, or service. As an example, we run A/B tests and analyze performance for all of our Email/SMS campaigns to ensure we're always achieving the best results.

You should have a profound understanding of your market and potential customers, their pain points, concerns, and motivations to provide an effective messaging strategy. If this is your first time developing a messaging strategy, start by analyzing your competitor's messages and how they position themselves in the market.

The Importance of An Engaging Brand Core

You may have seen it on YouTube. A guy walks up to a man or woman who drives a luxury car and asks them: “Excuse me, I love your car; what do you do for a living?” Sometimes he goes to the people who own the best houses in the city, knocks on the door, apologizes for interruptions, and asks the same question. 

Usually, people respond with ‘I’m in X business’ or ‘I do Y’ and that’s fine with him as a YouTuber. But not for you as a business owner. Why? Imagine this: Instead of a YouTuber approaching you, a potential lead or stakeholder asks you this: “what is it that your company is trying to achieve?” or ”what makes your products so special and different from the others?” 

What is your response? Can you describe your business and all the reasons why it’s special to your prospects in a direct and engaging manner, one that’ll have them asking for your business card? Or do you yourself not know your brand’s unique selling point, its goals, or its story?

The same strategy applies to companies when they run content promotions and ad campaigns, or when they want to communicate directly with users on social media. Until they've identified their USPs and core message, effective communication will remain a challenge.

Why Is Messaging Strategy A Challenge For Business Owners?

Too many brands try to communicate with customers every day. The competition is tough and people have numerous choices. For example, a study by ChiefMartec found that when companies want to select their marketing technology, they have 9932 different options! A 24% increase from 2021. 

What it means to you as a business owner is that it is not a realistic or feasible goal to create a product or service that everyone desires. You have to laser-focus your target audience and speak to them directly. 

Why should they do business with you? What is the benefit? It is essential to focus on your customers when you answer the question. It's all about them.

The key to business success is to consider yourself and your company as human. Deloitte found that those brands that view themselves as human entities can connect more effectively to customers. Promoting human connections makes customers loyal to a brand.

As expert marketers, JM&Co. professionals know that building a robust messaging strategy takes time, effort, research, and optimization. It is only then that you can treat your messaging strategy as a living document that matches the current evolving market.

The Three Steps To Creating Messages That Resonate With Your Audience

Have A USP And Communicate IT To Your Customers

Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is a recognizable, specific, appealing concept that separates your business from every competitor. Your USP may be part of your marketing mixes such as price, service, quality, or any exclusivity you can offer customers. There are many variations of USPs you can successfully adopt. It depends on the type of positioning you want to have:

• Some companies position themselves as having the best selection or the widest set of options they can provide. In this case, the USP is a “broad choice.”
• Other companies may offer a more limited selection, in this case, their USP might be “lower prices” or “lower markup.”
• Another company may not find it appealing to be known for the lowest prices or fewer selections. What they offer instead; is a finer (or the finest) quality at a higher price. Since they can provide a reasonable price, their quality or exclusivity is their USP.
• And still another company may offer a product at reasonable pricing, but their USP is that they provide better service, assistance, or easier process.

It is surprising how many business owners fail to consider their USP. They can not articulate in a paragraph or two what they do and why the clients should do business with them.

Your USP can be part of your marketing message or the messaging strategy itself. It is vital to make it clear to your target audience that you are not just another “me too” business.

When thinking about finding your USP and your marketing message you can search and identify unfulfilled needs in your industry. A broad selection, discounts, incomparable advice or assistance, and more convenience such as a better location, quicker service, shortest time, or immediate delivery are what you can choose from. Let’s look at some examples.

Examples of Best USP Practices from Two Brands

Stripe is an online payment processing provider. It is in the same market as PayPal. Here’s how they set themselves apart by going after the developers' market: They provide them with anything they need to manage their online payments. Therefore their USP is: “ Payments infrastructure for the internet.” 

Canva is an online design and publishing platform. Due to its friendly UI and simple tools, it is easy for anyone to use their services. Compared to its competitors like Adobe Photoshop. Adobe Illustrator or ProCreate, Canva has drag-and-drop features that enable anyone with little or no design experience to produce professional-looking documents and images. Therefore their USP also shows their positioning: “Empowering the world to design.”

Focus On Your Target Audience

Who exactly are your customers? What are their shopping behaviors? It is essential to know who you are talking to when planning your messaging strategy. A buyer persona can help you in the process. You can divide your broad audience into subcategories to find out more about them:

• Demographics (What is your target audience age group, gender, income, education level, and more).
• Media Utilization (Where can you find your target customers more? What medium or platform consumes most of their time?
• Hobbies And Interests ( What is your target audience's main pastime? What attracts them in their free time? What is not appealing to them?)
• Goals (What are the aspirations and desires they yearn for? What are the goals they try to achieve? How can you help them achieve their long or short-term goals?)
• Pain Points (What is causing headaches for them? What are the major sources of stress in their life or business? Can you provide any solutions to them?)

You may wonder if it is possible for you to know these things about them. Well, there are social listening or CRM tools you can implement to gain insights about your target customers. 

You can also research the market yourself. By gathering enough data and knowing the vast available information about them, you can adjust your positioning and your message strategies. You can differentiate yourself from your competitors by providing valuable products and services and then telling your customer about them in a convincing tone.

You may end up having several buyer personals for your target audience. Now you will understand the value of the process. You can craft, segment, and target your messages to different personas. You should not make the mistake of sending all of them the same general and broad message. It is vital to understand that each persona responds to his/her pain points that you mention in your message. 

This is very similar to watching pro salespeople when they talk to their customers. They never prepare or memorize a paragraph and utter it to everyone they meet. Instead, they listen carefully, gather information, and then talk to customers the way their customers feel that they provide the best solution possible to their problems. 

As a business owner or marketer, you should have versatile messaging strategies, too. You may attract some costumes by sending them price reduction offers, while the price offer may repel others. 

Some customers require exclusivity and they will pay more for it. Others prefer that your products and service save their precious time. Some may seek human values in your business and respond to these types of messages you send them. The more buyer personas you precisely create, the more options you have to target them with your messaging strategies.

Tell Your Brand Story

If you want to bring your marketing messages to another level, tell a story. Stories have lasted for generations, and they are always fascinating. You can get your audience engaged, and also increase the conversion rate by 30% more.

Other compelling reasons make storytelling tactics a worthwhile effort:

• In His book ‘ Actual minds, possible worlds’ Psychologist Jerome Bruner mentions that the human mind is 22 times more likely to remember facts if they are part of a story.
• Chip Heath, a Stanford University professor, did an experiment that asked his students to give one-minute speeches on non-violent crime and found that Only 5% could remember a single statistic while 63% remembered the stories. This is while only one student in 10 told a story about the subject.
• The same conclusion was made by The London School Of Business. Researchers there found that people’s retention rate is 5% to 10% if the information presented to them is in the form of statistics. However, when they hear a story, they retain 65% to 70% of the information.   

You have no limitations about your brand or your business when you start to tell stories. You can make a story about how your brand came into existence; why you make your products the way you make them; what your management mindset towards helping and serving the customers is; why you have priced your products or service that way; stories that set you apart from competitors; or about your company’s mission and vision and what it means to you and customers. The sky's the limit.

Storytelling Tips

Here are some more guidelines to help you create your brand story easier:

• Memorable stories are simple: People practically remember stories better, but if you make them complicated and hard to understand, you reduce the chance of them recalling your brand stories. Think of fables and short stories you were told as a kid. They were all simple, easy to understand, and had a convincing conclusion.

• Plan your stories for people: Your story should be able to provoke desired emotions. People should be able to relate to your stories. It is not a machine-writing process. Emotions are what control human judgment. And most importantly, your stories must include an advantage for them. Do not blow your own horns in your brand stories.

• Utilize the bolder approach: Boring stories never stick to their minds. What perspective you choose for your stories matters a lot. Don’t exaggerate but at the same time think of bigger and bolder ideas. People love to be part of a big movement or a larger community.

• The idea determines the execution: Do not select the platform you want to share a story in and then think of an idea that fits the platform. Ideas decide which platforms are better and stronger for your brand story. Find the big idea first and then execute the messaging strategy for it.

How Can A Message Strategy Help Your Business?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Not always applicable in branding, marketing, and communication. Can you imagine sending your top salespeople to your customer, holding only a big picture in his hand and saying nothing? 

No. It will be necessary to give your top salespeople appropriate language when they are speaking with your customers. Not only that, you need to convey the most interesting, entertaining, and informative message possible.

That is how critical your messaging strategy is. People love to communicate with each other, and when video or audio formats are not available, written words are the best communication tool you have. 

Do you find words to be less helpful than they seem? Then think about how human culture and education have been passed on to generations for thousands of years. By written words! Whether on a stone, on papyrus, or on paper. And think about how many written articles, books, or research are published every year.

Your business needs the right language to communicate its value proposition to customers and clients. From your websites to your corporate stationery and a simple business card, you need to use the correct brand promise and brand voice you wish to transfer to your buyers, and that is exactly what JM&Co services help you do.

Final Thoughts On Your Messaging Strategies

In our current market, people have numerous options for what they choose as a product or a service. What may surprise you is that the best products or services are not chosen every time. People buy the best-known products, not necessarily the best products. 

You need to tell stories and segment your messages for every group of your customers, too. Your messages should be so clear that you can tell them to kids and still they understand it. You can always change the results when you change your narratives. People listen, read, and follow excellent storytellers. Great businesses share great stories for people to tell. 

It is vital to constantly improve and update your skills if you want to have a great messaging strategy. When you need expert companions for your messaging strategies, you can rely on us. Contact Us and we will help you tell a brand story that remains for years to come.