The Importance of Strategic Messaging

Do you want your messages and words to have more weight? To cut through the noise and truly connect with your audience? Strategic messaging can make or break the success of a business, organization, or career. Meticulous planning, sound research, and careful implementation go into conveying a sound message.

When people cannot understand you, they think your topic is not based on reason, which makes them think it is unsound, fraudulent, untrue, or corrupt.

Research suggests that your audience will view your messages with distrust and skepticism without clear, structured messages. In extreme cases, your audience will view your idea as dangerous because it is unclear.

What Is Strategic Messaging?

With strategic messaging, messages often try to convince someone what they need to do.

Strategic communication messaging is strategic because it’s planned and aims to achieve a goal by influencing your audience to take action. It’s not fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants communication. Instead, it is effective, planned, and throughout.

The act of sending a message is intrinsically persuasive. The act of sending a message almost always has a clear goal of influencing an audience.

However, strategic messaging takes this intrinsic nature of messaging a step further. To be strategic or to have a strategy, you must have a plan that creates successful action to achieve a goal.

Strategic Messaging focuses on 3 key areas:

  1. Goal-Driven:
    Strategic messaging is designed to build trust and rapport with an audience to change their behavior or take a specific action. Most of the time, strategic messaging is more than just conveying information; it’s about guiding the audience toward a desired outcome.
  2. Plan-Based:
    Unlike general messaging, strategic messaging is underpinned by a clear plan. It’s not just the creation of influential messages but involves thoughtful consideration of the audience, the message’s content, and the desired outcome. Regardless of its potential influence, a message without a plan lacks strategic value.
  3. Adaptable Based on Feedback and Metrics:
    The effectiveness of strategic messaging is measured through traditional metrics such as action on calls to action, click-through rates, impressions, and engagement levels. Ultimately, the message should drive people to act, and this should ultimately be measured. These insights guide the ongoing refinement and adaptation of the messaging strategy to ensure it remains aligned with audience needs and strategic goals.

Messaging is Part of Your Bigger Communication Plan

In larger organizations, strategic messaging is a tool within a broader strategic communication plan.

Your strategic communication plan lays the foundation—defining the brand’s voice, audience, and channels — and strategic messaging creates and delivers the messages that align with this foundation to achieve specific objectives.

Often, when you have done all the work required in a communication plan, the message becomes easy to build.

Fundamentals of a Strategic Message

The fundamentals of clear communication start with the most basic questions needed to make a clear message.

  • Who is your audience?
  • What is your topic?
  • What is your recommendation?

Some of these answers seem extremely apparent, but they are not.

Let’s use a hypothetical example. You are working on a marketing team for a health care company opening a new heart clinic in a small community.

As a green marketer, you may think that the audience is the general public and messaging needs to be created on why this clinic is good for the community and surrounding areas.

However, local primary physicians will be the biggest source of patient referrals. There are also specific rules and regulations when marketing to physicians.

Once the green marketer understands these aspects of marketing, they will see that their audience, topic, and recommendation will all change.

Characteristics of Strategic Messaging

Message Framing

Message Framing involves deciding how to present your message to best connect with your audience.

This includes choosing between emotional or logical appeals—whether to focus on presenting facts and figures or to connect emotionally by highlighting how the product or service makes the user feel.

Additionally, consider positive versus negative framing: do you underscore the benefits of taking action or highlight the drawbacks of inaction?

For instance, a campaign to promote solar energy might emphasize the positive impact on the environment and potential savings or focus on the consequences of continued reliance on fossil fuels (negative framing).

Read about message framing here.

Persuasion and Messaging

While clarity and purpose are the cornerstones of strategic messaging, the art of persuasion elevates those messages to achieve your desired outcomes. Strategic messaging skillfully incorporates persuasive techniques into a message’s structure, language, and delivery to guide your audience toward the intended action or change in mindset.

Here are a few persuasion principles commonly woven into strategic messaging:

  • Social Proof: People are more likely to follow the actions of others. Highlight testimonials, success stories, or the popularity of an idea to demonstrate its value.
  • Reciprocity: Offer something of value upfront (information, a solution) to create a sense of obligation in your audience.
  • Authority: Establish your expertise on the topic through credentials or well-researched content to build credibility.

A Continuous Loop of Feedback

Strategic messaging isn’t simply about crafting a persuasive initial message. Ongoing feedback and analysis play a crucial role in ensuring your messages continue to resonate with your target audience.

Here’s how to incorporate feedback into your messaging strategy:

  • Establish Clear Metrics: Define success for each message (clicks, conversions, changes in perception).
  • Gather Data: Use web analytics, surveys, or direct feedback to measure your message’s performance against your metrics.
  • Analyze and Adapt: Review the data to identify areas for improvement and refine your messaging accordingly.

Strategic messaging is an iterative process. Through a combination of persuasive techniques and continuous evaluation based on feedback, you can craft messages that inform and motivate your audience to take the desired actions.