Average vs. Great Messaging

You’re tired of reinventing the wheel when talking to new people about your brand and offerings.  What you need is a framework for how to talk about your business. You need great messaging.

What is messaging?

Messaging is the “word bridge” between your brand and your most ideal customers. It’s an intentionally crafted story that you can use to communicate with customers to inform, persuade and inspire action. 

It’s not just an outline. Messaging is an intentionally thought-out narrative centered around your customer’s journey and needs. When we work with our clients to deliver a new message to them, we meet with their team AND a few of their customer to ensure the message we’re developing resonates internally and externally. 

A great messaging guide will give you a full narrative for your business, a one-liner for quick conversations, and might even include word banks or optional messages for a few different customer types.

Don’t settle for average.

Average messaging can be a turn-off to your customers or they might gloss over it because it doesn’t speak to them like it should. Common mistakes in messaging to avoid that prevent you from sticking out to your ideal customers and make you look average are:

Imitating your competitors

While you can look at competitor sites to see industry best practices it’s not a good idea to copy exactly what they’re doing, even if you reword it a little. Doing that will make your messaging so close to your competition that you won’t be distinguishing yourself from them. Your customers will look at the two sites and feel like they’re very similar rather than saying, “Yes, this is who I want!.”

Speaking to a wide audience of “everyone”

Your messaging shouldn’t say, “Everyone needs X. We’ve got offerings for everyone out there, no one needs to miss out!” The reality is that you have an ideal customer. While you might be able to work with just about everyone, you still prefer or work best with a certain type of customer. Be specific to your ideal customer persona by saying, “YOU feel like Y, YOU need X.”

Spending more than 50% of your air time talking about yourself

While talking through personal conflicts with someone else is all about your own experience and feelings, talking about your messaging is completely the opposite. You want to focus on your ideal customer’s experience, needs, and feelings. Instead of saying “We do A, B, and C and we work with lots of people who need that” you would say, “You’ve been feeling X and are having a hard time with Y. You need someone who does A, B, and C. We’re here to help.”

Make it great

Great messaging is when what you say and the content you use really speaks to your ideal customers. They come to your website or read a blog and think “Hey, that’s me!” They see themselves in your content. 

You should be spending 75-80% of your airtime talking about your customer, not just yourself. Here’s an example…6 out of the 7 sentences are centered around YOU, not us.

“What you do is complicated. Writing about it is even worse. You deserve a simple message. Even if what you do isn’t. Shed the technical talk and be understood by your audience with a message that’s clear as day. We’ve helped our clients avoid writing themselves in circles by making their message clean, clear and simple. ”

You should be positioned as an obvious choice against your competitors, not just an alternate choice. You might be thinking, “That’s a little vague.” But it’s not really. Your customers will tell you when they feel this way. Your conversations will turn from, “We’re deciding between you and someone else” to “We can’t wait to work with you, when can we start?” You might hear changes like, “I think I need someone in a different budget range” become, “Give me two months to save up for this project, and we’ll reach back out to start working with you!”

Is it working?

One of the most common questions we ask ourselves as business owners is: How do I know this will work? How do I measure this to ensure I’m getting a return on my investment?

Everything is measurable. All you have to do is set goals or specific values to what makes it worth it. Maybe you tell yourself that if you book 3 small services, it was well worth it. But you still have to jump on board to get your messaging done to be able to measure if it worked and ask yourself these 3 questions once it’s complete: 

→ Are people scheduling calls?

→ Is it attracting the right kind of clients?

→ Does it feel easy to convert sales conversations?

If you’ve tried on your own and said no to any of those questions, ask yourself if your messaging appeals to your target leads. 

If it’s not or you’re not sure, schedule a call with me. Our team starts with messaging first to ensure we never miss the mark with your content.