WHAT IS KEY MESSAGING?

Key messaging is all about creating a strategy (with an accompanying document) to use as a quick reference guide for communicating about your brand. This is not about creating a catchy tagline or an advertising headline. This is meant to be an overview piece to be used internally and with external partners to help ensure your brand is providing consistent messaging in marketing campaigns and more.

 

THE KEY TO BRAND MESSAGING

 

A good key messaging document includes:

 

  • Positioning statement – Think of this as your brand’s elevator pitch. How do you describe what you do for your customers in two sentences or less?
  • Personality – Try establishing four to five personality traits you’d like your brand to emulate and incorporate those traits throughout the document.
  • Target audience – You don’t have to go into great detail, but provide a general framework of the audience you are trying to connect with. If you want to go above and beyond, you can develop key messaging in conjunction with persona research and create messaging specific to each persona.
  • Differentiators – What makes you different? If your sales team or spokesperson can’t answer this question quickly, they won’t be effective.

 

The real key? All of this should fit on one standard piece of paper — this should help you stay concise and be direct in your messaging (and make it easy for employees and others to print it off to hang at their desk).

 

RESEARCH, RESEARCH, RESEARCH

 

It can be intimidating to just sit down and try to write key messaging, and that isn’t even the best way to do it. Start by spending time talking to others in your organization, including leadership, customer support and sales, to identify what they think makes the company unique. If available, you can also review your organization’s mission and vision, past customer research, as well as reviews and feedback. Starting with research will help your resulting key messaging be effective and, more importantly, accurate to the customer experience.

 

From there, venture into your target audience and brand personality sections. Once you’ve got alignment on those pieces, the positioning statement, differentiators and any other key messaging can be developed.

 

>> Download our Key Messaging template to get started!

 

DON’T BE AFRAID TO ASK FOR HELP

 

Want to get started on your own key messaging? Contact us for help from our team of copywriters and strategists, or download our template to get started on your own.