Translating Vision and Values into Clear Messaging

Ready for your business to speak with one voice? Build a brand messaging strategy aligned with your growth goals in 6 steps

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, my framework for a business to unearth its brand story or its ‘soul’ can be summarised in three steps:

Finding your vision
Defining your values
Pinpointing your Unique Selling Points

The next, and most crucial step, is to give that soul a voice through a systematic messaging framework. Using your brand story means the messaging framework will reflect and communicate the vision, values and USP of your business, and at the same time align with your overall growth strategy.

A messaging framework contains a structured system of benefit-driven messages, product features, case studies, statistics, testimonials, and other proof points to communicate about the brand. Having one makes it so much easier for consistent messaging across the brand: from marketing to sales, customer experience to business strategy. It makes content strategy and creation much more focused and streamlined.

Consistent brand messaging can also shape outside perceptions of your business to better align with your strategic vision and objectives.

In this article, I set out how businesses can turn your brand stories, visions, and values into a clear messaging strategy.

Why Frame the Brand Story with Messaging?

In one of my blog posts from last year, I wrote this about focusing the narrative:

“One of the most powerful ways to bring order to chaotic content creation is to focus the narrative. Many artists and writers thrive under self-imposed limitations – constraints that spark creativity. It’s no different for businesses and brands.”

A useful way to focus the narrative is to create a structured messaging framework. Building a messaging framework can take months of collaborative work, including rounds of feedback from your team, community, and partners, but the results will deliver exponential returns in clarity, cohesion, and efficiency.

Framing and backing up your brand story with messaging means that the strategic vision and values of your business become your north star.

Your team will speak with one voice. They’ll save significant time by reusing and adapting messaging across teams, channels, and formats. Your content will be more consistent and comprehensible. And, as public perceptions of your brand align with your vision and values, trust and interest will grow among your audience – thereby supporting your strategies for business growth.

6 steps to Formulate a Messaging Strategy Framework

1. Make it a collaborative process

The most important part of making a messaging strategy is to get input (and buy-in) from anyone who might have skin in the game. This might include your team, business partners, customers, brand ambassadors, and other stakeholders. These people work on or with your business on a daily basis and can provide valuable insights.

For example, employees from your sales and marketing teams can tell you what positioning and messages seem to generate the most interest in your products and services. Customers are likely to tell you how your products or services solved their pain points – fantastic jumping off points for messaging and storytelling about your brand.

By including important people in messaging creation, you can also increase familiarity of and buy-in to the usability of the framework (helpful for when you reach step 5).

Practically speaking, gather information via team brainstorming sessions, interviews, surveys, Product/NPS feedback, social media, customer complaints, sales CRM entries, event retrospectives, project debriefs, board discussions, etc.

2. Decide on the Structure

The way you structure your messaging framework is really up to you. The information you gather in the first step might reveal a pattern of topics to organise by. Or, you could organise the framework by specific categories (e.g. brand values, unique selling points, customer segments, markets, or product categories).

Organising by values is a good way of keeping the focus on the guiding principles that frame your strategy and your culture. They should represent how you want your customers to experience your products or services, so emphasising them supports a best practice strategy of good customer experience.

3. Organise and Clarify Messages

By now you should have a structured framework organised by topics or categories, and a whole lot of brand messages and ideas for talking points. It’s a good time to start allocating these messages to the relevant categories in your chosen structure.

Clarifying your ideas is also a good idea at this stage. Think like a storyteller – focus on the problems your products or services are solving for your customers – and frame the messages as solutions and advantages. If possible, prefer benefit-driven messages to product features in your messaging strategy. People are often led by emotions and feelings, so brand stories that mirror back to them their challenges will be more likely to get them interested in trying out your solutions.

As you go through the process of organising and clarifying the messages, you will likely find message repetition, information gaps, and unproven claims. Avoid repetition by combining messages and make a note of information you need to fill gaps or back up claims. This will help immensely with the next step…

4. Find Proof Points

Having a messaging framework is an essential part of brand storytelling and an incredibly potent way to compel people to buy your products and services. However, storytelling without integrity can be disastrous for brands. That’s why it’s important to provide proof points to back up as many of your brand messages and claims as possible.

Here are some ways you can add evidence to your messages:

Research statistics, indices, and rankings,
Gather evidence by survey or focus group,
Conduct experiments or trials, if relevant to your brand category,
Write up authentic case studies based on your customers’ experiences,
Request reviews and testimonials.

Treat this step as an ongoing task so you always have up-to-date proof points for your brand messaging.

5. Make your Messaging Framework Official

You want the framework to be used. So it needs a bit of fanfare. This will ensure it is recognised and respected by your team.

Launch it internally in an official and fun manner. Format it for ease of use (branded, in pdf, and on any relevant team intranet page). Make it easy to find in shared folders or via an accessible link. Share it in online and print hard copies, including big posters for putting on the wall. Get t-shirts with the main messages for your team members or challenge them with a quiz about the messaging framework. Recognise and reward publicly those using it well.

6. Distribute the Messages Relentlessly

Start using the messaging across your website, blog, presentation templates, campaigns, social media, and email channels. Initially, this will require a lot of content creation, but over time, the efficiencies gained from having the framework will pay you back in spades.

Repeat the messages relentlessly across channels. When you think you’ve repeated the messages too many times, say them ten more times again.

Final thoughts

The most powerful messaging strategy is one that is used.

Commit to this six-step framework and relentlessly distribute benefit-driven, proof-backed messages. In doing so, you’ll ensure the strategic vision of your business not only has a voice. It will have a voice that is heard, understood, and trusted.

Done well, aligning the brand story (the soul) with the messaging strategy (the voice) can transform brand storytelling from a creative exercise into a potent driver of business growth.