As Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”
When it comes to marketing and selling, planning is essential for success. Great marketing campaigns are methodical and precise, letting creativity flourish but within the framework of clearly defined parameters.
It’s these parameters that are defined and strengthened within a key messaging document.
A key message document – or key message platform – is a comprehensive collection of persuasive marketing messages and selling statements about a product, service, or brand.
These messages become the springboard for all your future marketing and sales literature, from website copy and blog articles to sales pages, whitepapers and brochures.
Benefits of a Key Message Document
There are many core benefits associated with these centralised messaging documents, and it’s some of these benefits I want to explore today.
Let’s begin with the most crucial benefit.
1. Consistency of message
Collecting together and refining your core messaging under a single brand voice ensures your marketing messages are consistent across multiple channels.
Every piece of content created from your key message document will adhere to the established facts, core selling statements and tone of voice guidelines.
At every touchpoint with your customers, consistency of message and voice is one of the essential pillars of powerful marketing and sales.
Consistency means repetition. It’s repetition that builds reputation.
2. Focused messaging
Repetition is only powerful when you focus on particular key messages for your products and services, or business as a whole. Focus is vital.
A master messaging document contains the most powerful marketing messages and selling statements, each organised according to importance and potency.
There are key statements and secondary statements, as well as messages that answer common objections. Each is focused, streamlined, and forged for maximum impact. There’s no place for extraneous fluff.
For people to focus on your message, your message must be focused.
3. Organisational clarity
Picture every key message for your product, service or business in one single comprehensive document. That’s a Key Message Platform. It allows you to see every facet of your messaging in one easy-to-reference location.
If you want to add, subtract or modify selling statements or messages, you simply edit the document. This negates the need to rely on random notes or widespread undocumented changes.
4. A reference for your team
The organisational clarity a core message document brings also benefits your team as a whole. When one of your writers or team members needs to reference a fact, selling statement, or way of phrasing a key detail, they simply open up your key message document.
They have everything they need to create any type of marketing/sales collateral.
This ease of reference reduces stress, speeds up workflows, saves money, and leads to more effective copywriting and content creation.
5. Faster onboarding
Similarly, your key message platform also enables faster onboarding when working with freelancers or agencies. It can be a hassle bringing outside professionals up to speed on your business and brand.
When your marketing messages are all over the place, and there’s no coherent brand blueprint to follow, even the best pros will find it difficult to produce strong results.
Your master messaging document will enable quality writers, designers, and marketers to quickly understand your product/service and business’s essential details.
6. Unified internal messaging
A core messaging platform is not just for external marketing and sales. It can also be highly effective for internal communications.
With many colleagues, departments and bosses all competing to be heard and trying to work from the same company identity, it’s imperative there’s a centralised messaging document to which all can refer.
You can create a series of key message documents for different products, departments, customer groups and industry niches. These can branch out from a master document defining the overall company.
7. Cost-effective
Marketing is expensive. With ongoing marketing and selling a must, your budget needs to be robust. But when some – or many – of your marketing and sales materials are sub-par or out of kilter with your brand identity and key selling points, you’re essentially throwing away your money.
A key message platform is an upfront investment that ensures all future marketing collateral created adheres strictly to pre-determined marketing messages, selling statements and brand terminology.
This critical framework provides a roadmap for on-brand, factually consistent and cost-effective copywriting now and long into the future.
A key message document for your business
These are just 7 of many benefits a key message document delivers for a company with an important product, service or brand identity.
A master messaging document should ideally always be the first marketing communication piece you create. The platform brings all your disparate messaging together under one roof where it can be strengthened, streamlined and expanded to meet your goals.
You and your team, and any outside help you hire, can then use this Platform as the launchpad for effective campaigns.
First published on https://www.edwardbeaman.com/