When was the last time you drove a vehicle blindfolded? Trying to grow your business without a marketing message strategy will yield similar results, and nobody wants that.

You may have all kinds of great content to share with your audience, but without a marketing message strategy, it’s easy to share a whole bunch of random information and lose your audience in the process. In this article, we’ll explain why you absolutely need a strategy to make sure the content you share is relevant to your audience. This is how you use content marketing to grow your business.

But First, What is Marketing? 

Marketing Messaging is Part of Your Strategy

Before we get into the marketing message strategy, let’s go one level higher and take a look at the overall marketing strategy. Every business needs a strategy to enhance marketing efforts. Three elements that your marketing strategy should include are:

The Purpose of Your Marketing Messaging

Your Message Must Consistently Communicate What You Do, For Who, And How

You never want people wondering what you do. If that’s happening, your business growth will stall. As marketers and content creators, we may think that everyone has heard what we have to say before, but that’s not true. You’ve heard it all before, and you will continue to hear it because you are creating and communicating it. Your audience, on the other hand, isn’t paying that much attention to anything outside their day-to-day existence.

The goal of your marketing message is to connect with your audience on an emotional level which will snap them out of the day-to-day and into paying attention to what you’re saying. You can do this by using your ideal client’s language in your marketing messaging. 

The key to any messaging strategy is to educate your audience  about the problem you solve and share what sets you apart, and what they can expect when they work with you. When done well, by the time a lead becomes a prospect, they are ready to put their trust in you and purchase your solution.

We recommend collecting ideal client language in a spreadsheet or database. This ideal client language bank will become invaluable to your marketing efforts. Collecting ideal client language isn’t a one-and-done exercise. If you want your marketing message to always connect with your audience on an emotional level, and we’re here to tell you that you do, you will always be collecting ideal client language as long as your business is operational. We go into more detail about the ideal client language bank in our Get Clients to Come to You With These 4 Steps You Can Take Right Now post.

You’ll also want to make sure that every piece of content has a call to action. This is clearly informing your audience how they can take the next step with you. Your calls to action will vary from referring to a past article, video, or podcast of yours where they can go deeper on a topic to telling them how they can schedule a discovery call with you and everything in between. 

We recommend making a list of all of your calls to action so you’re never left wondering what to use.

The Know-Like-Trust Factor

Your audience needs to know, like, and trust you before they’ll ever be ready to purchase anything from you. You’ve likely heard this before. It’s through your marketing message strategy that you develop the know, like, and trust factor with your audience. This is done through various types of content and marketing. One of our favorites is live events. Whether live and in person or live streamed, there’s no faster way to build the know, like, and trust factor.

We teach our clients to develop content that leads to the live event and plants the seeds of wonder and curiosity in the minds of their audience so that by the time they promote their event, their audience is excited to attend.

Elements of an Optimized Marketing Messaging Strategy

The Power of Topic Categories

There is so much that you could say in your marketing messaging; how do you decide? We’re big proponents of defining what your topic categories are. We recommend that you determine 5 - 7 categories for you to use that help organize your messaging and make content creation a breeze.

Topic categories are industry-specific, and they can be thought of as the overarching themes that all of your content falls under. Below are some examples.

Encore Empire’s topic categories are:

A health coach might have the following topic categories:

A copywriter might have the following topic categories:

When you look at the examples above, you can see that the topics are broad and industry-specific. Those are the high-level topics. From there, you brainstorm all of the sub-topics that can go underneath. Those sub-topics become your content ideas.

You can now build out your content plan to focus on one category at a time for one week or month. This allows you to start a conversation with your audience around the chosen topic. It also makes content planning and creation much easier and more systematic. 

Hope, Conviction, and How-To

Now that you know what topics you’re going to focus on and when you need to mix the context of your messaging. It’s easy to get into creating how-to content. With How-To marketing, we want to help our audience understand how to do something, but our audience needs more from us than that. 

Your audience needs to know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel regarding the challenges they’re facing. This is where Hope Marketing comes into play. You want to make sure that your audience knows that there is a solution to their problem and that you’re the one who can provide it for them. You want them to know, among other things, that if they keep going, they will reach their goals.

You also want them to know what you stand for. Conviction Marketing is where you take a stand for or against something. You may believe that your industry peers miss the mark on one particular aspect of how they serve their audience. Instead of keeping that to yourself, you want to make your stance known. By doing so, you’ll attract people who believe the same. If you keep your conviction a secret, you blend in with all the others in your industry. Blending in is not what we want. As entrepreneurs, we want to stand out and attract the right people, not just any people. 

Conviction Marketing allows you to stand out and attract the right people. It can also be polarizing, which means that you need to be ready to take some heat if your stance on something might ruffle feathers. There’s no need to back down; just go in with eyes wide open.

Having a Solid Marketing Message Strategy in Place Will Help You Grow Your Business

Marketing is more than posting on social media, writing blog posts, or creating videos and podcasts. You need a master plan, and that’s where strategy comes into play. Strategy in business and marketing is essential for achieving growth.

 
We hope that you’ve gained some insight into how you can implement or improve your marketing message strategy. If you’d like more guidance, we invite you to join us during our next Marketing Methodology Workshop, where we spend 30-60 minutes a day for five days, walking you through the process of developing your marketing plan for the next twelve months. The workshop is free of charge and only requires an investment of your time and intention.

Learn more and register now.