You may feel you’ve cracked your overarching brand strategy and value proposition (if not we have blogs on them too – just click on the links 😊) – but is your team still wasting time creating (and re-creating) for some of your brand’s key messaging over and over again in different comms? Or worse you hear different people within your business describe your offering and it’s benefits in completely different ways?
If so, maybe it’s time for a messaging matrix?
Defining and developing a clear messaging matrix could be the best way to ensure more compelling and consistent communication across the business and reduce inefficiencies – freeing your team to land them in the most efficient way across the most appropriate channels.
It’s something we’ve developed recently for a few of our clients. And it’s really helped them dial up the quality and consistency of the comms as well as saving lots of time – so we thought it was well worth a blog!
What is a messaging matrix, and how is it used?
A messaging matrix is an internal living and breathing internal reference document that includes specific articulations for all the key areas/pillars of your value proposition to use in longer and shorter form copy. It’ll help your team translate your brand positioning into key messages so that all your marketing communications reinforce your value proposition, and tone of voice regardless of the channel or medium. It helps a business stay on track by;
- Ensuring that all communications are consistent the customer journey
- Providing a quick reference for internal teams when creating communications
- Making copywriting easier and quicker as you don’t need to start from scratch
- Providing everyone with a single ‘source of truth’ to track the success against
It serves as a handy reference guide that ensures everyone from leadership to agencies speaks about your business in the same way so your content can better align with your core value proposition, no matter what.
How to create a messaging matrix in 6 steps
There are a few steps you can take to ensure you create a matrix that will help you reach your goals. Here’s how to get started:
1. Assemble your brains trust. Get key stakeholders from marketing, sales, support, product, and elsewhere in a room to brainstorm and inject valuable customer knowledge and insights into the messaging process.
2. Remind the group of your brand’s core value proposition. Your value proposition brings your offering and mission together in a way that succinctly gets across which problem of your customers it solves and why they need it solved now. It’s your brand’s ultimate answer to “why should I care?” and overarches the messaging development. (For more information on creating a Value Prop, check out the Moreish article on how to write a powerful value proposition).
3. Identify key target audiences. Once you have your key message pillars you can identify how differently this needs to be applied to your different target audiences taking into account their personas, key psychographics, content preferences, and other distinguishing factors. We’d suggest keeping the audience groups as simple as possible to start with. And depending on your business, you can create a different messaging matrix for each audience, or fit them all into the one chart.
4. Create your content requirements into a matrix. Now that you have identified your key messages and target audiences, you can start developing a matrix of all the copy areas and formats you need to communicate regularly to support your customer and brand proposition across different channels efficiently. You will likely have a number of key messaging pillars that will each need a summary statement, a variety of headline options, with specific reasons to believe (RTBs) and each of those RTBs may also need additional supporting copy too.
5. Populate the matrix template. Now you know what you need to say, it’s the hard job of crafting and “translating” each pillar into persuasive copy. This will take time (and/or a skilful agency!) but will increase efficiencies in the longer term and give you the best chance of making your comms resonate – rather than rushing from communication deadline to deadline with different copy.
6. Revisit and refresh regularly. Finally, the last step is to make sure you, and everyone else who needs to, can access the document and actually uses the information – this might take some behavioural change. This likely means uploading it to your shared file drive or company wiki, along with making a quarterly recurring meeting with your stakeholders to review and update it regularly.
Final thoughts
With proper use, your company’s messaging matrix will become a key pillar of your overall brand messaging strategy. It will serve as the starting point and reference for all communications, ensuring you consistently build long-term brand equity while shortening sales cycles.
By aligning everyone around a cohesive narrative tailored to your core audiences, a messaging matrix is a simple but powerful tool for driving consistent, impactful brand messaging.
Moreish have plenty of experience in running a clearly defined process to create and hone messaging matrixes, if you’d like to see how we can help your brand – get in touch here.