11 Steps to Creating a Message Strategy That Captures Attention

From using your audience’s language to ensuring your message resonates, here are 11 answers to the question, “What are some crucial steps you take to create and deploy a messaging strategy that captures your target audience?”

• Write How Your Target Audience Speaks
• Listen Before You Speak
• Ask About What People Need
• Incorporate Empathy
• Refine Each Buyer Segment’s Messaging With A/B Testing
• Invest Heavily in Keyword Research
• Clearly Articulate Your Value
• Look for Unique Channels
• Find and Work On Your Tone-of-Voice (TOV)
• Get to Know Your Product/Service 
• Make Sure It Resonates With Your Target Audience

Write How Your Target Audience Speaks

Make sure that your brand voice matches up with how your target audience would typically talk. For example, if you are marketing primarily to Gen Z, try to incorporate lingo that only Gen Z would use as opposed to Gen Xers or Millenials. This way, your target audience will feel more connected to your messaging.

Maegan Griffin, Founder, CEO, & Nurse Practitioner, Skin Pharm

Listen Before You Speak

The best way to ensure your messaging resonates with your target audience is to first listen carefully to the people you hope to sell to.

Digital tools have made marketing research incredibly easy to carry out. So do a survey and conduct some customer interviews. Maybe even some non-buyer interviews. If you don’t have existing customers, survey and interview people who are in your target market.

Look for recurring themes and language that you can use in your messaging. Your target audience will provide you with much better messaging than you could ever dream up on your own.

Frank Prendergast, Brand Strategist, Frank and Marci

Ask About What People Need

There is power in curiosity, and the best way to understand what message will resonate is to simply ask. Go deep into stakeholder interviews and inquire about desires, needs, barriers, challenges, and ultimately, how your brand can be a solution or “hero” for all.

Sentari Minor, Vice President of Strategy & Chief of Staff, evolvedMD

Incorporate Empathy

Create a sense of empathy in your messaging. Let your target audience know you understand how they feel. This will make them trust your brand much more, which is a powerful feeling. Be sure to instill this feeling of trust before you present your call to action (rather than after) so that your messaging does not seem too pushy.

Miles Beckett, Co-Founder & CEO, Flossy

Refine Each Buyer Segment’s Messaging With A/B Testing

Use A/B testing to ensure your messaging is sticky for each buyer segment. There is no better way to know how audiences will receive content and messaging than to let them choose which content they prefer.

Eventually, this testing creates a wealth of data to help your marketing team strategize on which messaging angles and content to prioritize for each segment. Understanding what drives value for your audience is essential.

Whether through discounts, informational content, or exclusive offerings, create brand messaging that leads with that intended value to ensure optimal click-throughs and conversions.

Zach Goldstein, CEO & Founder, Public Rec

Invest Heavily in Keyword Research

For any messaging strategy, whether social or content-led, you need to invest heavily in keyword research.

Utilizing the data from external tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Keywords Everywhere is one of the best ways to understand just how popular given search terms are on not only search engines, but sites like YouTube too.

You can then use this data to align your messaging strategy with keyword optimization, which can lead to organic development across marketing channels alongside your messaging reach.

Gary Warner, Marketing Manager, Joloda Hydaroll

Clearly Articulate Your Value

Conveying value is crucial to creating and deploying a messaging strategy that resonates with your target audience. Simply put, your target audience needs to see the value in what you’re offering before they’ll be interested in your product or service. 

To do this, you need to clearly articulate the benefits of your offering and how it solves the problem or meets the needs of your target audience. Once you’ve done that, you need to ensure that your messaging is consistent across all channels—from your website to your social media posts to your email marketing campaigns. 

Only then will you be able to create a messaging strategy that resonates with your target audience and drives results.

Jim Campbell, CEO, Campbell Online Media

Look for Unique Channels

Your messaging strategy should include unique ways to reach your target audience, in addition to foundational channels like your blog. Unique channels can add power to your message when you find ones that your competitors are not using. 

Why not consider guest posting on micro influencers’ blogs, or submitting pieces to industry publications? Try services like Terkel to find opportunities to add quotes in third-party articles, or see if there are any shoulder industries where you could sponsor an event or newsletter. 

If your competitors are not yet saturating a channel, then maybe it’s an opportunity for you to stand out.

Lisa Banks, Chief Content Strategist, SaaSpirin

Find and Work On Your Tone-of-Voice (TOV)

This is the key to getting your message across in a way that engages and entertains your audience. It also helps you come across as an expert, making them more likely to trust what you have to say.

So how do you find your tone of voice? It’s not as difficult as it may seem. Just think about who you’re trying to reach and what kind of language they use. Then, try to emulate that in your own communications.

For example, if you’re targeting young people, using a witty and engaging tone of voice will work best. But if you’re targeting business executives, using an expert and media-pitch style will be more effective.

Jamie Irwin, Director, Straight Up Search

Get to Know Your Product/Service

The crucial step of messaging strategy is to actually understand the product or service you are offering, the industry you are in, and your target audience. The messaging must resonate with your target audience and must make them feel you understand them and have the solution. All within just a few words and there is no other way than by actually understanding your offerings, industry, and target audience.

So get to know your product inside out, what problems it solves, what customers like the most, or see the biggest benefit from using your product/service, and spend time on target audience research. Go on forums, read blog posts, and social media, and get to know your potential customers.

Eduard Dziak, CMO & Founder, B2BDigitalMarketers.com

Make Sure It Resonates With Your Target Audience

Communicating the right message that resonates with your audience is one essential thing you should do as a marketer. Many understand the importance, but only some execute it properly.

The right message can make all the difference in whether your audience will take action on your marketing efforts. However, if your message doesn’t directly address the audience’s pain points without fluff, you may as well forget about it.

It’s almost like trying to sell a product to people who don’t want it. Most of the time, it doesn’t work. You need to plant a seed that evokes emotions, realizations, and declarations in the audiences’ minds.

Then, finally, craft a message that clearly shows why your product or service is the only one in the market that can solve their problems.

Brendan Aw, Content Marketer, SEO Specialist, & Content Creator, brendanaw.com