At Content Empire we regularly work with clients to develop and refine their key messages. Why? Because businesses and brands that nail their key messages can communicate more effectively with their customers.
What are key messages and why are they important?
Key messages are the foundation of all communication. They articulate the information and ideas you want your customers, clients or other target audience groups to hear and understand. They help audiences understand who you are, what you offer and why you’re better than your competitors.
Simply going through the process of creating key messages is a powerful activity for any business, as it will help define what you want to say to your clients or customers, and how you want to say it.
With key messages in place, you can empower your entire business with an agreed language for communicating both externally and internally.
How are key messages used?
A strong set of key messages can be used right across an organisation or business to inform numerous communication touchpoints, including:
- Website and blog/news content
- Social content
- Customer support channels including helplines and web chat
- Speeches
- Media releases
- Email marketing
- Publications
- Point of sale collateral
- Internal communications
- Advertising.
Why is audience important?
In any organisation, key messages may vary depending on the target audience. For example:
- For a university, key messages for prospective undergraduate students will be different to key messages for prospective postgraduates.
- For a hospital, key messages for patients will be different to key messages for doctors and nurses.
In today’s cluttered content landscape, knowing your audiences – whether they are internal or external, customers, clients, stakeholders or members of your community – is vital to creating key messages that resonate and achieve cut through. Building audience personas is an excellent strategy to help you envisage the people you need to engage with.
The difference between key messages and taglines
While key messages and taglines share a similar intent, taglines are limited to just a few words, while key messages allow for a more descriptive approach.
A tagline example many of us would be familiar with is ‘The Fresh Food People’. Yep, that’s Woolworths. But underneath that tagline sits a number of key messages. We are not privy to those exact key messages, but based on the way the company advertises and communicates to their audiences, we would suggest that these might be some of them:
- At Woolworths you can feed your family for less. Woolworths offers great value, fresh ingredients in store for family-friendly meals, supported by a monthly recipe magazine.
- Woolworths is proudly Australian. We are an Australian company supporting Australian producers.
- Woolworths provides friendly customer service. We employ locally, we support and train our staff and put our customers first.
All of the above key messages are complementary to the Woolworths tagline, but speak to a range of audience needs.
Learn more about taglines and see them in action.
How to create powerful key messages
Impactful key messages are clear and audience focused. They convey the unique selling points of your business or brand and appeal strongly to your target audiences.
Make sure your key messages are:
- Concise: one sentence per message is ideal.
- Relevant: ensure you strike a balance between what you need to communicate versus what your audience needs to know.
- Compelling: key messages should help drive audience action.
- Simple: use plain English and avoid jargon and acronyms.
- Tailored and sincere: adapt your key messages so that they truly resonate with your target audience(s).
The Content Empire team regularly run workshops and discovery sessions to help our clients formulate, articulate and define their key messages. Can we help your business craft a compelling, audience focused set of key messages? Let’s talk.