Are Your Messages on Message?

By Heather C. Conover
Conover + Company Communications

Whether you are selling a product or a service, messages that articulate your brand and market position are vital. Stakeholders – whether potential customers, new and prospective employees, abutters to a development, volunteers, or others – need to understand why they should choose to buy from you, work for you, or endorse your project. They also need to trust that you can and will deliver on your promises.

Early in the message development process you should identify your target audiences. List all the audiences that need to know about your organization, your products, and services. In thinking about these audiences, include all those internal and external audiences that make decisions that will have an impact on your future progress, success, or failure in achieving your organization’s goals. Once you’ve identified these target audiences, describe the actions or decisions you want them each to take or make, respectively.

These steps are critical to developing core and key messages. Core messages are broad messages that convey your company’s overall mission and business objectives. These messages should be consistent, repeated over and over again, and utilized in all marketing and communications to your stakeholders. Your conversations, speeches, correspondence, brochures, web site, and employee newsletters should all contain your core messages. You will also have other key messages customized and targeted to individual stakeholder groups. These messages should be developed based on what you want each of these audiences to know and understand about your company or organization, your product, your people, etc.

In developing your key messages keep them relevant to your audiences. Develop messages for the audiences that you need to keep, as well as those you need to win over or sell in some way. By learning as much as you can about your audiences, you can craft effective messages that speak directly to their needs, pain points, and desires.

Learning about your target audiences also enables you to select the appropriate communication vehicles with which to reach them. Knowing where they get their information, the sources they most trust, their attitudes and beliefs, past experiences with your competitors and you, and more – all provide you with the ability to develop messages that relate to them.

When developing your messages, change your point of view and ask yourself why your audience cares about what you have to say. If you can’t clearly articulate why a message is important to your audience, you don’t have a good message. Stress benefits and results, not features. Features talk about your offerings – what you’re promoting or selling. Benefits speak to your audiences’ needs – what’s in it for them. Results take benefits a step further and show your target audiences how your product or service will improve their lives or their situation.

Fall 2005 -Volume 15, Number 4

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