Most companies spend countless hours crafting taglines, boilerplates, and elevator pitches, aiming to nail a complex product in just a few words. While at the same time, communication fatigue is leaving fewer opportunities for marketing messages to resonate with their target audience. C-levels and advisory boards convene to mull over the nuances of ‘elegant’ versus ‘efficient’ software, ‘engineered’ versus ‘designed’. Often, there are too many cooks in the board room and key messages end up muddled by what is perceived as important rather than what tells a compelling story.
Good brand messaging takes your competitive positioning and brand strategy to the next level. It hones in on what is significant about your solution to your target market and communicates it consistently and successfully. Effective messaging is critical. A CSI Insights Survey discovered that companies with world-class market messaging:
- Had 25% higher quota achievement rates
- Had win rates 20% higher than average
- Closed three times as many deals
- Discounted products 1/5th as often as competitors
Developing marketing messages is one of the most important steps you take toward market dominance, so with all that in mind, here are some tips to get you started.
Be succinct and KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)
Albert Einstein once said “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Does your brand message connect with your core capabilities? Is your sales team able to easily find and reuse the messaging components they need to quickly communicate with buyers around their business issues? Get your message down to the fewest possible words that can convey whom your product serves and what it does. Sticky brand messages usually simplify something that in reality is very complex.
TrustYou gets kudos for being to-the-point:
“Smarter travelers. Better experiences. TrustYou.”
TrustYou enables travelers with the most important thing: better travel experiences. And our passion to improve travel, tourism and hospitality experiences strengthens by the day. Finally, everyone can find meaning in the millions.
Don’t overthink and miss the mark
Ensure that positioning and messaging addresses customer pain points and what customers want. Too often, messages get hung up on attempts to appear uber-innovative as opposed to letting the product speak for itself. Remember, you can make your audience respond without getting overly abstract and forgetting the point.
Groupize Solutions does an impressive job of making their target market want to know more about their product, without overshooting or overcomplicating their value proposition:
“Groupize Makes Booking Group Travel More Productive and Rewarding for Planners & Hotels.”
Groupize Solutions is passionate about solving the small to mid-size group booking dilemma for hoteliers and planners. Through the development and delivery of a highly intuitive group booking platform, Groupize Solutions empowers hotels to win and manage more group business thus delivering better service and ultimately increasing hotel revenues.
Target the message
A lot of messaging casts the net too wide, hoping to reach the greatest number of possible people, but the travel and hotel industry has different segments with different needs. When the message is too broad, it does not reach anyone. If you find your company trying to appeal to travel intermediaries and hotels simultaneously, it may be time to look more closely at your product. Divide and conquer. Sometimes this means creating two different products, and sometimes this simply means creating two distinct messages for different buyer personas.
For instance, Flip.to has an opportunity to serve a wider audience than just hotels, but they have chosen to focus their product, which is abundantly clear in their messaging.
“Turn travelers into your strongest advocates.”
Flip.to helps hotels boost brand awareness and earn new guests with the help of their most trusted, untapped marketing juggernaut- their guests!
Conduct interviews with customers and prospects to drive rich insights on value proposition, perceived benefits and messages that resonate with the target audience and use their feedback to craft your positioning.
Use the voice of the customer
Technology should be driven by the people who will benefit from it. Too much tech jargon, especially in an industry with plenty of non-technical people, can be a turn-off.
What all of the above companies have in common is that they are clearly conveying what their unique value proposition is and its ability to serve the people who use it. Whether that is through increased business efficiency, more intuitive software or tools that make marketing more successful, the benefits need to be meaningful to your customers.
Give your audience something that speaks to them. Know who is buying your product and what problem you are solving for them: a GM, a marketing director, an HR person, a catering manager, and so forth. Then decide at what level your message should be written.
Your brand messaging feeds all of your communication with your market. Use it in your sales literature and tools, your website and all of your campaigns. Test key messages with customers and tweak as needed based on results. Remember: your messaging strategy must start and end with the customer.
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