Last week, I did a post looking at how companies shouldn’t underestimate the importance of messaging that clearly articulates who they are and why people/consumers should care about what they make or offer. At a time when the attention span of many consumers is shrinking, good messaging is a must to capture their attention.
Another important element of messaging is how it can play a significant role in helping a company establish their strategic focus, as well as the what needs to happen from a communications, marketing and sales perspective to attract business.
One of the things I have discovered in working with a growing number of companies on messaging recently is how it makes them examine who they are and how they have positioned their products or services to do business.
In some cases, the messaging process has exposed that a company’s strategic focus is misaligned. The target audience they thought made sense turns out to have less appeal because the service really wasn’t interesting to meet their needs.
Then what? Either the messaging has to change, or the company’s strategic focus needs to shift.
In many cases, companies that take messaging seriously recognize that once they really understand who they are and why people should care, it can have a dramatic and, hopefully, positive impact on what they sell and how they go to market.
Rather than trying to put a round peg (existing messaging) into a square hole (consumers who aren’t interested), companies make an adjustment strategically to embrace the realities that a messaging exercise can expose.
One of the realities of exploring messaging is it’s not an easy or straightforward process. Instead, it is a subjective exercise in which entrenched ideas may need to stripped away to provide a fresh start. It means accepting the fact a company’s identity may have been wrong or misaligned. It means embracing concepts that may seem foreign.
Messaging is also an iterative process. The initial ideas may have little ressemblance to the end result. It doesn’t mean the original ideas were bad. In fact, they’re important because you have to start somewhere, and having something is a lot better than nothing. In other words, you can’t get to point “C” without starting at point “A”.
Finally, messaging continues to evolve; it’s not static.
The market changes, consumers changes, new technologies are developed, and companies shift their strategic focus to take advantage of new opportunities. It means messaging must be refreshed from time to time, which is a good thing.
(Note: Messaging is part of the digital marketing and communications service offered by my company, ME Consulting)
