How to Build an Airtight Messaging Framework: 5 Common Mistakes to Avoid
This article was originally published by Masthead.
ARTICLE | 2-MIN READYour campaign is ready for go-time. After months of brainstorming, strategic planning, and creative development, the train can finally leave the station.
Anyone who works in marketing has likely experienced the buzz of Launch Day. But what happens next doesn’t always go to plan.
You might be able to relate to the following scenario: The campaign goes into the wild and—poof!—the intended storyline splinters across different channels and eventually loses its thread, and maybe even its early relevance.
From a product launch to a major brand campaign, the struggle is real to make sure various stakeholders—from marketing to sales to delivery—stay on track with the story that matters most to the business. You know, the one that you’re putting all those marketing dollars behind.
The Missing Link: A Messaging Framework
In good news, many organizations DO get in front of this challenge by preparing a messaging framework for a marketing campaign before launch.
What does that mean exactly?
A messaging framework is an internal resource that equips relevant stakeholders with guidance for how to communicate across their marketing efforts.
I think about a messaging framework like a toolkit: It includes plug-and-play language that can be used across brand channels and by various teams, from marketing to sales, so that everyone has what they need to champion the most strategic and airtight brand story.
While there’s no one-size-fits-all template for messaging frameworks (they should be built to support specific campaign and team requirements), the following components are common to include:
Tagline and positioning statements
Core campaign messaging
Supporting messages for key audiences and channels
Proof points
Direction around voice and tone
Any amount of work to document core messaging will go a long way to increase the impact of a campaign. But in practice, not all messaging frameworks are created equal.
To craft effective and campaign-proof messaging, here are some common missteps to avoid.
1. Don’t Lock in the Messaging. Do Keep Things Flexible with an Agile Messaging Framework.
Core messaging can be an anchor for predictable, consistent communications. But here’s where that notion gets tricky: Many industries don’t have the luxury of predictable or consistent conditions—and arguably any new marketing effort comes with some level of uncertainty.
That’s why a messaging framework should always remain a work in progress.
“When you’re in a domain that’s sensitive to market shifts or socio-political changes, an agile approach to messaging development can help teams adapt more easily and map out multiple scenarios in advance,” said Michael Dumlao, Vice President of Global Marketing and Communications at Abt Global.
Whether it’s anticipating the effects of an election, a recession, or a public health crisis, he added that organizations can “plan the impact or risk of different events on the brand so they’re not caught unprepared when they need to pivot their communications.”
This agility can take different forms: what-if messaging scenarios, flexible language that can withstand shifting markets, and regular messaging reviews. In all cases, it requires a strong feedback loop between teams across marketing, sales, and delivery to troubleshoot or adapt messaging in real time and over the course of a campaign.
2. Don’t Make Your Messaging All About “We.” Do Focus on Your Audience and Their Needs.
Imagine that you call a friend and spend an entire hour talking about yourself, forgetting to pause to ask how that friend is doing (or asking but then not listening to the answer). It’s not a great look for you—and that friend may think twice before answering your next call!
If you want to build or maintain a strong relationship with someone, you need to signal that you genuinely care about them. And that same rule applies when you're communicating as a brand with customers.
Sharing messaging that's just about your product launch or service offerings—and not about what your customers are experiencing—is almost guaranteed to drive them away. And at a minimum, it won’t inspire them to continue the conversation.
That’s why effective messaging is never all about “we.” Rather, it directly addresses what organizations know about target audiences:
Their unique operating environments and day-to-day priorities
What’s keeping them up at night
What success looks like for target roles and titles
When the stakes are highest, an organization can ask customers to provide insights during the messaging development process so they can help shape the key points. In many cases, however, internal teams can build core messaging based on what they know to be true about their audience—through on-the-ground experiences and industry or segment research.
3. Don’t Water Down Your Messaging. Do Get Specific Enough to Signal Your Authority.
A messaging framework must provide value to a range of end users: sales and delivery teams, marketing specialists, and channel owners. Therefore, it should be broad enough to serve as a common denominator to all those groups—and not get too technical in nature or dive into the weeds about a particular topic.
But in the effort to avoid getting too narrow in the messaging, organizations sometimes end up with watered-down language about otherwise substantive themes.
Here are a few usual suspects:
High-level language about how an enterprise is “an industry leader”
Talk of “transformation” that’s aspirational, but not demonstrative
Offering a “promise” that is achievable only under specific circumstances
Vague or generic messaging won’t help customers understand what an organization does—or most importantly, why they should pay attention.
There are some simple ways to demonstrate your rich technical expertise or understanding without turning away your broader audience.
“It helps to use signals in your messaging that speak directly to the target audience,” advised Dumlao. “Whether that signal is using a keyword from a community’s lexicon or adding a term of art—strong messaging gets just specific enough to show people that you get them and are a trusted authority in their space.”
4. Don’t Assume You Need Messaging to Fill a Book. Do Build a Framework Your Stakeholders Will Use.
A messaging framework should never span 25 or 50 pages—or at least, almost never. In cases with complex and very targeted communications (e.g., when geared to investors or elected officials) you might need lengthy messaging to cover different possibilities, scenarios, or lines of questioning.
But for typical marketing use cases, a strong messaging framework is:
Curated, featuring only the level of detail that stakeholders need to activate the campaign.
Accessible, developed for diverse users with different levels of subject matter expertise.
Practical, prioritizing messaging that can be pulled directly as boilerplate language.
That way, stakeholders are far more likely to use the framework as a strategic advantage—and your messaging won’t be on a shelf collecting dust.
5. Don’t Forget to Train Teams on How to Use the Messaging. Do Create a Plan for Internal Activation.
Speaking of not letting your messaging collect dust, it’s wishful thinking to assume that key stakeholders know how (or when) to use a messaging framework.
Some common questions I’ve heard are:
“Do we share the messaging framework with our customers?” (No.)
“Can we tailor the messaging or add more substance to support specific use cases?” (Yes.)
“Won’t the messaging constrain us by limiting what we can communicate about?” (No.)
Before rolling out a messaging framework, there needs to be clear communications to internal stakeholders about its value to the business and team goals, the expectations about how to apply it, and who the intended users are.
But like with any new initiative (or like any great marketing campaign), an effective communication plan isn’t one touchpoint. It happens over the course of a thoughtful rollout to different stakeholders—starting before the messaging framework goes live.
Here’s an example of what this might look like in practice:
Pre-Launch Heads Up: Two weeks before the messaging is live, there can be high level communications to all need-to-know stakeholders about the new messaging framework and what to expect. If there is a plan to offer “office hours” for briefing out the new messaging and answer questions (strongly recommended!), here is where you can add a link for people to sign up in advance.
Launch Announcement: You’ve already laid the groundwork for people to anticipate the new messaging so now it’s time to make it official. The executive sponsor for the initiative can send an email communication about the launch, drum up excitement about the impact expected, and give stakeholders their toolkit to go forth and conquer. The toolkit can be a set of resources that are shared on the organization’s intranet: final messaging, an FAQ to anticipate common questions, and some ready-to-use assets e.g., slides that can be used in customer meetings or material to have on-hand for events. This touchpoint is also another reminder to sign up for office hours.
Cascading Communications: In the month after launch, this is when the messaging (and links to the toolkit) can be integrated into individual department and team meetings that are already on the calendar. The team responsible for the messaging should know when relevant discussions are happening—from an upcoming all-hands meeting to a town hall—and assess with each team whether the new messaging could be a relevant topic on their agenda.
From here on out, it’s important to keep the conversation going with the “super users” of your messaging. Like I mentioned earlier, these users (often in sales, delivery or account-based marketing) can test the messaging on the ground and share back real-time feedback about what’s resonating and what might need to change over time as market conditions evolve.
A North Star for Your Brand
That list of “dos and don’ts” should not be a barrier to messaging development—once you know about them, they’re easy to sidestep.
Ultimately, a messaging framework (by the way, an emphatic “Do!”) serves as a North Star for a unified campaign rollout: from a digital activation to a key customer meeting to a big trade show.
It’s important to note that a sustainable messaging effort requires clear staffing responsibilities throughout the development lifecycle. Your organization can assign individuals or teams to take on different parts of the process: informing the messaging, putting pen to paper on the storylines, training internal teams, disseminating it on the ground, and participating in the feedback loop over time.
But it all pays off. Instead of your stakeholders reinventing the wheel with their own messaging—or promoting contradictory messages—an effective messaging framework provides the foundation for teams to move quickly into market, stay agile, and champion the most compelling brand narrative.
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