What’s your main marketing message

AS a business owner and marketer, you know how important it is to have a marketing strategy. You also know how crucial it is for your strategy to align with your audiences’ needs and interests, and the required approach for each channel you use, whether it’s social media or email. Having a marketing strategy helps you create the content your audiences want to see and share it where they’re most likely to see it.

But, when you have this strategy, how do you figure out what to say in the content you share with them? What you need is a marketing message, and it’s just as important as your overall strategy.

You can think of it like this: if you know you want to post about a new product launch on Instagram, how will you prove to your audience that they need to buy this new product? Your marketing message. Essentially, no marketing message means no way to execute your strategy.

A marketing message refers to words to use to communicate with your audience to convince them to do business with you in a nut shell.

When your message speaks to their needs, you’ll build trust with your audience and inspire customer retention.

Every business engaging in marketing needs a marketing message, whether you sell B2C or B2B, software as a service (SaaS), or clothing.

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How to craft a marketing message

A well-crafted marketing message converts your audience into customers. All businesses should aim to have one.

Know your target audience

Just as with most marketing practices, you can’t begin creating your marketing message without identifying your target audience. When you know who they are, you’re not marketing to customers you think are interested in you, but rather to those you know are interested in you.

In brief, your target audience is a group of consumers with similar characteristics and purchasing intent, and stand to gain the most value from your products. While your overall target audience is probably defined by the industry you’re in, it’s important to have a deeper understanding.

Overall, what you want to learn from identifying your target audience is understanding what they “look” like. This can be simple demographic information, like age and location, to what they like, desire, and want from the businesses they buy from.

Having this information then makes it easier to personalise your strategies and create a marketing message that will resonate with them, especially when addressing their pain points.

Understand your audience’s

pain points

Your persona research should tell you about your audience’s pain points and challenges.

As a refresher, pain points are issues that affect your target audience’s day-to-day routines, business tasks, or general life desires. These challenges are typically things that your audience is actively seeking solutions for.

For example, if you’re a business selling marketing SaaS, you may discover that your audience has trouble managing their campaigns because they use multiple platforms throughout their process. When you create your marketing message, you should speak to your ability to streamline their efforts with your easy-to-use, all-in-one platform.

When you understand pain points, you don’t have to guess why your customers need you — you’ll know why they need you. As a result, you can create a marketing message that addresses their needs.

The first two steps involve gathering the necessary background information, and the following steps will help you begin crafting your message.

Make value propositions

Value propositions highlight your product or service’s unique value and tell customers that your brand is tailor-made to meet their needs. It clearly says why they should do business with you instead of a competitor, and that is precisely the point of a marketing message.

When creating your message, present your product or service as a cure for their pain points, and prove it.

Prioritise clarity and concision

Even though your marketing message needs to say a lot, you need to say a lot while saying a little. You shouldn’t beat around the bush. Instead, get to the point and explain how your product is a solution.

Customers should read your message and find answers to their questions without needing to over analyse your statements. Prioritise being clear, concise, and easily understood, as you want your words to speak for themselves. To reiterate, get to the point.

You can think of it like this: I said a lot in this explanation just to tell you to get to the point. If this were a marketing message, you would’ve moved along already. However, if I wanted to follow the tips I’ve mentioned, I would simply say, “Tell me why you’re the best — no ifs, ands, or buts”.

Even though your customers are in your industry, you shouldn’t assume that they know or understand the technical jargon related to what you sell. Therefore, it’s important to sound conversational and use language that is familiar and palatable to most audiences. Your message copy should be simple, straightforward, and not require an industry-specific dictionary.

Aim to write as people speak during conversations, maintain a friendly tone, and make customers feel welcomed. Technical language may be confusing and lead them to think that doing business with you will be complicated and confusing as well.

Showcase your brand’s originality

Your marketing message’s overall intent is to attract your target audience, but it’s also to set you apart from your competitors. Given this, a key pillar of your final message is originality.

Your marketing message is unique to your business, your solutions are unique to your business, and your words should prove that.

There are a variety of consumer behaviour models that explain how people make purchasing decisions. Some models say that it’s through logical reasoning, and others say that it’s purely emotional. In reality, it’s probably a combination of the two, and you should use this to your advantage.

Through tactics like humorous copy, you can showcase your brand’s uniqueness to appeal to customer emotions, and use value propositions to appeal to logical reasoning and show customers how you’ll solve their problems.

The key takeaway here is that your marketing message should convince your audience to do business with you.

Focus on showcasing your brands’ individuality, creating an emotional connection, and clearly showing your customers what’s in it for them. If you do this, you’ll likely find yourself with a marketing message that speaks directly to your target audience and helps you grow your list of clients.

Disclaimer: The views given herein are solely for information purposes; they are guidelines and suggestions and are not guaranteed to work in any particular way.

Use familiar, conversational

language Appeal to customer emotions and logic Use your marketing message to speak to your customers