Strategic Messaging
What is strategic messaging and why is it important?
Strategic Messaging is a communication framework that communicates product value to customers through describing the solution to problems the product provides. It is important to ensure that your strategic messaging strategy is aligned with your customer journey each step of the way. Your strategic messaging framework should appear across all mediums at which your brand communicates with customers: Social media posts, blog posts and articles, product descriptions, etc.
Strategic messaging should be carefully crafted and straight to the point. It is important to address your ideal customer in a way at which they self-identify themselves, the common pain points your product or service addresses, and your unique selling proposition. Furthermore, strategic messaging goes beyond headers, captions, and text. Brand’s should have strategic messaging in mind when creating content. Photos and videos used in advertising campaigns and displayed on a brand’s digital assets should relay strategic messaging without necessarily having to use words.
Here’s how we help brands increase their revenue with strategic messaging:
9th hour starts by running a high-level strategic messaging session with clients either via Zoom or in person depending on client location. In this meeting, we break down issues with the brand's current strategic messaging framework. Next, we refine their strategic messaging framework and test it in several compelling narratives. Next, our team will begin testing your newly developed strategic messaging framework in several different forums, including focus groups, polling, or through online panels. The only way to determine if messaging is effective is through testing. Based on the results of testing, our team will continue refining your messaging until your team and ours feel it communicates effectively with the audience we need to influence. Finally, we provide our clients with a suite of materials to help convey the brand’s messaging across their brand assets
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Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
A USP is an assertive, focused statement that differentiates your brand and products from the competition. It should take brand positioning into account, but also be slightly focused on your products and services. Your USP should be front and center, the first impression for customers when they head over to your website or social media accounts. A brand’s USP should set the tone for what is to come next in a brand’s strategic messaging framework, similar to the role a thesis plays in a research paper.
Target Audience
As previously discussed, a brand's target audience is defined by demographics, consumer behavior and interests. However, in order to accurately communicate to a target audience, brand’s must create a buyer persona. This can be created in several ways with the goal in mind of further discovering consumer intent, desires and needs. This data can be compiled through surveys, research, and strategies that create engagement on social media. Strategic messaging is optimized through crafting a complete understanding of your customers.
Brand Storytelling
Today more than ever, customers make purchasing decisions based on the degree to which they resonate with a brand's story. This includes how the brand was founded, why their products are manufactured in a specific way, how the mission statement came to be, and the future outlook on what the team hopes to achieve. Providing this information to customers will help build a stronger relationship with customers and a unique level of trust.
Creating a strategic
messaging framework:
A strategic messaging framework is a document brands should reference each time they plan to create new content, in all mediums, that they plan on pushing out to their audience. Whether it be a product photoshoot, a Tweet, or a website revamp, everything you publish on behalf of your brand should be deemed relevant in the confines of this framework. Strategic messaging frameworks should include:
