The Role of Messaging

TL; DR Summary

• Messaging is Key: Effective messaging is the foundation of all successful marketing efforts, ensuring clarity and consistency.

• Avoid Confusion: Without proper messaging, your content can become disjointed, leading to wasted resources and missed opportunities.

• Consistent Communication: Messaging provides guardrails for content creators, aligning all marketing materials with your brand’s competitive position.

• Real-World Impact: Case studies highlight how strong messaging can elevate a brand, while poor messaging can dilute its value.

• Ongoing Maintenance: Regularly updating messaging ensures it remains relevant, supporting your marketing strategy over time.

Have you ever decided to deliver bad news? You may have received a failing grade on an assignment, or maybe it was time to end a relationship.  Did you go to your parent or partner and rip off the bandaid?  If you were like me, you agonized over how you would break the news.  You considered the audience, estimated how they would react, and then chose a time, place, and tone to deliver the news to lessen the impact as much as possible.  In its most basic form, that plan you developed is messaging.

Interestingly, many organizations completely ignore this step of the process or treat it like a necessary evil. Stopping a meeting to ask, "Who are we talking to?" "What are we trying to say?" and "How are we trying to say it?" is often met with eye rolls, huge sighs, and grumblings "that we don't have time for this." 

Messaging takes time, but proper preparation is necessary to proceed with appropriate messaging to avoid confusion, wasted time and resources, and, worse, missed opportunities. Let me explain the role messaging plays in a marketing initiative and share some experiences I've had serving as a messaging advocate.

The Role of Messaging

The role of Messaging is to serve as an internal marketing resource to get all content creators on the same page.  Often, a large-scale integrated marketing campaign or a tier-1 product launch will have multiple work streams of copywriters, product marketing managers, social media managers, public relations, and a wide variety of other marketing resources working together to produce enough assets for the launch.  Since they can't all sit in the same room every day until launch day, they need a way to know whether or not what they are writing is on message.

Messaging creates the guardrails for content creators to know how "creative" they can be.  When someone makes a new piece, a reviewer should be able to put the messaging brief next to the asset and draw connecting lines to each paragraph, each section, and each diagram to something in the messaging document.  If a section doesn't connect to something in the messaging brief, it's not "on message."  Revise it or remove it. With clear messaging captured in a document, you can finally have objective conversations about the work during content reviews. 

As a result, all work created for your organization will be consistent with your competitive position in the market. The more harmony your content creates, the more online authority you create, the more believable you are to your customers, and the more effective your content will be in winning in the market.

The Risk of Not Having Messaging

If effective messaging increases the market performance of your content, then not having messaging decreases its performance and actually starts wasting time and energy and increasing costs.

Case Study: Watered Down Brand Value

In the fall of 2023, I did some messaging consulting for a small Texas medical device manufacturer.  As I reviewed their website to determine whether they had a clear message in the market, I found that while they had great content, each page had a different focus.  Confused, I asked them for their messaging brief.  They didn't have one, and it showed.

My final report found that on their homepage, solution page, product pages, and contact page, there were four competing messages.  They were the highest quality, the fastest, the cheapest, and had the best customer service in the market. So, why weren't they the market leader, then?  Why didn't they have the lion's share of the market?  Because you can't be all things to all people.

Each marketing message has certain proof points that resonate with a specific audience.  So, trying to occupy these different positions watered down their message and showed me there wasn't enough content to make any of their claims believable.  This problem, spread across multiple pages, meant visitors never read the same message twice.

Case Study: Confusing Copy, Missed Opportunity

I took over a competitor attack campaign built with haste by a technology company I worked for.  Anecdotal evidence uncovered at an analyst meeting had produced an opportunity to attack the market leader in a way we had not done before.  Leadership wanted to strike while the iron was hot and gave the content team a week to launch.  Amazingly, they got it done and went to market, investing thousands of dollars in digital advertising to produce leads right away.  While the program delivered a stack of leads, most weren't quality, and the actionable leads were small opportunities that did not warrant the massive initial investment in ads.

When I took over, the first thing I asked for was the messaging brief. I received an email of comments from leadership with bullet points that said nothing in particular. As a result, the campaign's anchor asset, an e-book, made no sense. It read like a middle school text thread, full of complaints about the competitor and he-said-she-said statements from unnamed customers who claimed to be unhappy.

To fix this, I organized the bullets into a basic messaging framework that spoke to people who were unhappy with the competitor and simplified the proof points around three ways the bullets suggested that the competitor failed to live up to expectations.  Then, to support these proof points, I created messages that spoke to the implications on their business when a vendor fails to live up to expectations.  Finally, I completely re-wrote the e-book and took out all the gossip. Then, we aligned the landing page and other online assets around the messaging brief.

Unfortunately, having blown their investment on the confusing copy, they were left with an organic campaign that would take months to show results.  By this time, I'm sure the competitor discovered the attack and started working to defend the weakness.  I doubt the campaign produced any measurable success.

Messaging Done Right

You're familiar with messaging done right.  The most prominent brands in the world, like Apple or Nike, have strong messaging and positioning that communicate to customers where they are in the market.  We're not talking taglines here.  While a corporate tagline like "Just Do It." should be on message and influence what I'd call "downstream messaging," Nike's message in the market is about athlete empowerment from the elite all the way to the novice.  Apple is about user experience and simple design.  Look at any ad, page on their website, presentation, or television commercial they produce, and you should see these messages subtly permeating the copy and the imagery.

Case Study: Tradeshow Messaging

One of my clients for the 2024 summer is a global consumer technology manufacturer who has enlisted my help in producing messaging for an event they'll be showing at in early 2025.  My first three questions were, "What do you want to say?", "How do you want to say it?" and "Who are you saying it to?".  Like most technology companies, they wanted to focus on artificial intelligence and align with approved AI messaging from a previous event where executive leadership had spoken.  They also gave me the message brief from the prior year's tradeshow and notes from leadership meetings discussing target market growth areas.

Receiving these materials was great because we were more than six months ahead of the event, so I had plenty of time to work. I took the executive keynotes and leadership's requirements and researched their website, videos on YouTube, and the event's 2025 website, so I had enough to work with.  From there, I produced two new messaging briefs for each theme they considered.  My briefs contained a description of the theme, three target areas of focus and proof points aligned with previous messaging, assets on the web and YouTube, and executive leadership keynotes.

The clients were ecstatic.  Now, they could pass the brief on to other external agencies and internal resources to build out the show.

Green is the Color of Messaging

Evergreen, to be exact.  Once you finally have approved messaging, it's not like Ron Popeil's "Showtime" rotisserie chicken oven.  You can't just "Set It and Forget It."  It needs to be referred to and updated regularly.  Healthy hygiene for messaging is to review your upstream, top-level messaging once a year or along strategic planning cycles—your big stuff, like brand-level messaging and strategic corporate messaging.  You should review your downstream, bottom-level messaging quarterly—your more minor stuff, like campaign messaging.  Since the organization is growing and changing, what was relevant to say yesterday may not be how you say it tomorrow.  Keeping your messaging up-to-date ensures you don't leave loose ends of your story atrophying in the market.

Case Study: Hard Pivot in a Different Direction

Once, while working at a telecommunications company, there was an executive leadership change, and with it came a difference of opinion about how we should go to market with a particular product.  I led an installed base migration campaign, encouraging existing on-site users to use our intermediate step to migrate from their existing platform to our new cloud-based technology.  We promoted three concepts:

• "Get Current" - access new, innovative features their end-of-life platforms didn't have.

• "Do More" - establish a future-ready technology strategy that could facilitate integrations with other tools they needed in a timeframe they could control. and

• "Migrate to the Cloud" - ensure that when they eventually decide to migrate to the cloud, it would be a seamless experience that wouldn't disrupt operations, unlike most migrations with disruptions and massive learning curves.

Despite that I was starting to get organic traction in the market after months of content development, the message came down that my campaign needed to promote only the "Migrate to the Cloud" portion and to include a "managed-service offering" that wasn't actually cloud.  It raised tons of red flags.  The hard pivot meant confusion in the market because rather than promoting a seamless path to the cloud, we would teleport migration-resistant customers into the future. We would cause discord internally because I had already trained the sales and marketing teams on our existing campaign.  We were putting a huge target on ourselves because we were billing a service that wasn't technically cloud as cloud.  It was a gimme for our competition.  And finally, we were ignoring what we'd learned from the campaign: customers wanted control and to migrate on their own time, not have a vendor pressure them into migrating.

I asked for six months to make the pivot. Executive leadership denied my request, so I put my badge on the line and said, "No."  They were making the wrong decision at the wrong time, based on what they wanted to sell and not what the customer wanted. I built a proposal that detailed my position and mustered a coalition of supporters to stand beside me. One of the Senior Directors took my proposal to the executive meeting and advocated my case.  

After a month, executive leadership decided to take a different approach, and my campaign could continue. I got to work building new messaging that bridged my campaign's current direction and leadership's desired direction. When product marketing finally implemented the managed services plan, our story to the market looked like we'd planned the pivot all along.

Strategy changes occur in organizations all the time.  Sometimes, you have to make a hard pivot, but abandoning messaging in favor of new directions can create unforeseen problems in the market and open areas for competitors to attack.  Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and we avoided big mistakes internally and externally.

Messaging is an Essential Part of Marketing

As we've seen, messaging isn't just an optional step in your marketing process—it's the foundation that supports everything you create. Without it, even the best ideas can fall flat, leading to confusion, wasted time, and missed opportunities. But with it, your team can work in harmony, your content will resonate with your audience, and your brand will stand out in the market.

Yes, messaging takes time and effort, but it's an investment that pays off in consistency, clarity, and success. So, the next time you plan a campaign or launch a product, remember to ask yourself those crucial questions: "Who are we talking to?" "What are we trying to say?" and "How are we trying to say it?" By making messaging a central part of your strategy, you can ensure that every piece of content you create is on message and on point.

Ultimately, the time spent on messaging isn't just another task—it's the key to unlocking your full potential in the market. Don't underestimate its power.