How consistent brand messaging moves you beyond the dollar value
Communicating the best parts of your business, products, and services can be challenging. For organisations in the business-to-business (B2B) space—especially those that sell complex, high-value products or services—it can be particularly difficult to communicate simply. It’s one thing for your sales team to have face-to-face conversations with prospective customers where they can take the time to deep-dive into the key differentiators of your business. However, it’s another thing entirely for your marketing team to quickly communicate those same elements to the media and wider industry.
And, then your teams don’t communicate with each other about the brand messaging they’re sharing with the market and your customers, it can create a disconnect. This can leave customers and other key stakeholders feeling confused about what your business offers. For example, your sales team might be saying one thing in meetings with prospective customers but, when those same customers visit your website to do their own desk research, they might be met with entirely different messaging.
This is further complicated when businesses are easily commoditised. Audiences base their understanding of your business and its offerings on everyone else’s messages, and customer decisions come down to price. As such, using your brand messaging to effectively communicate what sets you apart from your competition, beyond your price tag alone, is crucial.
Communicating with the market: how to refine your key message
You won’t always have a lot of time to communicate your differentiators to customers, so it’s critical that your key message is clear and succinct. It also needs to be consistent across all of your channels, including all paid, owned, and earned media, especially if you invest in omnichannel marketing. Refining your brand messaging is essential, as it ensures that you can present clearly defined differentiators to the market, including current and prospective customers, stakeholders, media, and more. And, it helps to align your sales and marketing teams, bringing them squarely onto the same page. This ensures that no matter who your teams speak to, or where your customers get their information about your business, it’s always the same information.
To refine your key message, you need to start with a message strategy that lets you unlock siloed internal expertise in your organisation. Different departments will each have their own agendas and, often, these will be disconnected from each other. What’s important to your sales teams is different to your C-suite, your finance teams, your marketing teams, and even your research and development (R&D) function. Bringing all these people into the same conversation lets you achieve a more holistic view of your customers and their pain points, as well as how each different branch of your business functions to make miracles happen for your clients.
However, refining your brand message isn’t as simple as taking all of those messages from across your business and tidying them up. Ultimately, you need to build a consistent key messaging framework that is prescriptive, and that everyone in your organisation can access and leverage when they need it.
Bolster your brand messaging with a key message framework
Your customers want to know that you understand their challenges. They also want to know that you have solutions that map directly to their challenges and function within their specific business and industry. Your message strategy needs to communicate this to your audience while ensuring they receive this information in the right way, at the right time.
Developing a key messaging framework needs to be a cornerstone of your message strategy. It will help you to:
- bring your key stakeholders together
- identify your values and differentiators
- communicate your brand to the market.
Most importantly, it will help you develop a brand message that is consistent, train your teams to tell—and sell—the same story, and encourage alignment and engagement across your teams.
However, building a message house and creating a key message framework can be an overwhelming task, and it’s difficult to tackle this on your own. Working with a specialist third-party provider to craft your brand messaging can help you fast-track the process and go to market quicker than if you walked the path alone.
Unlock opportunities with the Key Message Development Program
Outsource developed the Key Message Development Program to help businesses just like yours refine their brand messaging and accelerate their business growth. Importantly, the Key Message Development Program helps guide businesses to create compelling key message frameworks that clearly and consistently articulate their differentiators to the market, including how products and solutions specifically map to key customer pain points.
When you unlock your siloed internal expertise and better align your sales and marketing teams, you can genuinely and more successfully differentiate your business from competitors in the market. This will help you shift sales opportunities and deals away from pure price points and towards more value-driven conversations to increase the quality of your leads. This is critical for businesses wanting to achieve greater levels of growth.
For more than 35 years, Outsource—part of The Recognition Group, Australia’s leading group of PR and marketing specialists—has been helping B2B companies that sell complex, high-value products or services to build and execute powerful marketing campaigns. Their specialist B2B and ICT marketing consultants are also experienced in creating successful and strategic key message frameworks that make a difference.
For more information on how you can increase high-quality leads and prove to prospective customers you have the solutions they need with the support of consistent brand messaging, contact the team today.
