3 Messaging Mistakes No One Talks About

By Brittany Lieu, Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing

Good messaging is an art, but effective messaging is a science.

Done right, your messaging should not only be indicative of your brand value but also differentiated, persuasive and proven.

If your team has developed a messaging framework, you’ve likely done your due diligence and created a narrative that starts with your ideal customers’ biggest pain points and ends with compelling persona-specific benefit messages. The story you tell with this framework not only guides your content strategy but informs the voice behind all your marketing and sales efforts. 

So how do you make sure the story you are telling is not just good, but effective? Although there isn’t a definitive formula to ensure your messaging is perfect, there is a science behind strengthening your strategic approach. 

Here are three mistakes to avoid in refining your messaging. 

Relying on A Compelling Message

As Matt best puts it, the “most compelling messages fail because they aren’t unique.” Your challenge and benefit message points may resonate with your audience but have they heard it all before? In order to stand out from the crowd of like-minded competitors, you have to challenge the status quo. Think about how you deliver value differently than others. Go beyond features and capabilities and showcase how your brand drives business outcomes differently. To compel your prospects to act, you have to take a third-person perspective on your approach to identify your competitive edge.

Inconsistency

With a compelling and unique message, you have something that both resonates with and intrigues prospects. As a guide for your content strategy, it’s equally important to share that valuable message with consistency.

What does that mean?

Consider the concept “mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive” or MECE. Used by strategy consultants, MECE is a method to organize ideas in a way that is easy to understand and reiterate to others. To break it down further, you want your messaging points to be (1) mutually exclusive or each distinctive without overlap in ideas and (2) collectively exhaustive or comprehensive of all possible ideas. In practice, this translates to clearly identifying how your brand stands out from others and the value you deliver simply and holistically. This structure leaves little room for ambiguity and ensures your prospects get the full and accurate version of your messaging across all your sales and marketing channels.

Staying Inside the Box

In developing our messaging framework, you want your template to be as intuitive and clear as your messaging points. Using a simple template, like the one mentioned here, is an easy way to visually organize your points and present your ideas. However, staying inside these predetermined boxes may be limiting. 

Don’t be afraid to adjust how you approach a template based on your messaging needs. Are you developing messaging for multiple different products? Different sized companies? Tailor how your messaging framework is presented to make the most sense for your messaging objectives.

Take a step further out of the box and socialize what you’ve created with people outside of your team. Sometimes it takes fresh eyes to point out gaps or redundancies in your messaging that you may have overlooked. 

Elevate Your Messaging

Like the market and your customer, messaging must be dynamic. With these tips, continue to refine how you express your brand without falling into common pitfalls.  

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