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Marketing Messaging

What is Messaging?

Marketing messaging is the specific words you use to communicate your value to a business in order to convince them to do business with you. What you say is extremely influential in a customer’s decision to do business with you, so making sure you speak your target audience’s language is crucial.

eMa’s Approach to Marketing Messaging

Our approach to messaging is holistic in the sense that we consider every aspect of your business and all of your ideal customer profiles. When we onboard, one of the first things we do is complete a messaging exercise so all of the copy we write across emails, your website, and assets are consistent.

The Process

Here is the breakdown of what we do:

Marketing Messaging InfoGraphic
  1. Hemisphere: The hemisphere is the broadest possible description of the area we operate in that still contains information. It’s like a two-digit NAICS or SIC code—a very high level of abstraction. Idea is to get people quickly into the right ballpark. Think of this as the highest level of our target market.
  2. Theme: An analogy that can be used to quickly communicate what we do. What would you say at a cocktail party, or to an elderly relative? It’s a bit like “high concept” in the movie business—an explanation that can be shouted across a parking lot and still make sense.
  3. Problem: The problem is the customer’s problem, the pain we are going to address.
  4. Promise: The promise is the happy future state the customer will achieve by working with us—it’s where you are and what you can do when you have solved the problem.
  5. Difference: The difference or differentiator is a core competence we are enabling for the customer. It’s the action or process or capability that we enable that makes the promise possible and solves the problem. It’s not something we sell, it’s a capability we enable. This is a lot like the idea of the Category in the Play Bigger approach.
  6. The Enabler/Application is the actual stuff we sell at the highest level of abstraction The Differentiator is what you do, the enabler is how you do it.
  7. Functional benefits are basically the benefits bullet points from the data sheet—what are the granular, quantifiable business benefits of adopting our technology and approach? You don’t really need to test this stuff.
  8. The Icing (on the cake) is messaging at the level of tag lines or web copy.

After defining all of these, we create three different elevator pitches of different lengths and depth. Going through this pyramid is a great exercise for clearly defining your goals and what you do, in addition to getting practice selling your product. It puts you in in the customer’s shoes to understand their painpoints more.

Best Practices for Marketing Messaging

  1. Focus on YOUR unique value proposition
  2. Be personable
  3. Don’t use complicated words just because
  4. Be consistent with what you say
  5. Keep the same messaging for 9-12 months before changing it
  6. Appeal to customer emotions and logic

Resources

For more information on messaging,
check out our Messaging Playbook.

Contact us for more information

Contact us for a FREE, no-obligation consultation to find out how we can propel your pipeline to generate revenue for your business.

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