Four tips for writing your brand’s key messages
How to write your key messages for brand growth
There’s one key difference that sets brands apart from those who grow and those that don’t – and it’s mastering how to write your key messages, and using them effectively.
Your key messages are what set you apart from your competitors – and help build connections with your target audiences.
Your key messages are the absolute foundation of public relations (PR) and content marketing generally.
They’re fundamental to building your overall brand position, nurturing trust, and cultivating recognition and recall among all your target audiences.
How brands can get it so wrong
One of the biggest mistakes I see among brands is having inconsistent messaging shared across their owned and earned channels – from their PR, to their socials to their website.
They say completely conflicting messages to different audiences – saying they’re one thing to media, but another to their employees or investors.
This is a fast-tracked way to brand dysfunction, mistrust and worse, getting you in hot water.
So at a time when 42% of consumers say they distrust brands you need to make sure you have a clear, concise brand message and that you deliver on everything that you promise.
So how do you avoid this from happening? Here are our top tips to make sure you nail them first time!
Top tips for creating your key messages
When coming up with your key messages there are five tips to think about:
1 – Tie them back to your overall strategic positioning
Make sure your key messages are tied back to your why in business, your reason for being, why you do what you do and how your different.
You need to think about who your target audiences are, and what you want your audiences to know, feel and do in relation to your brand.
What core challenges do you help them with and how – this is part of your unique selling proposition?
Neil Patel gives some great insights into how you can understand your customer challenges.
2 – Make sure your key messages are based on reality and backed by evidence
There’s no point saying you’re something you’re not. Your target audiences – in particular media – will sniff out a lie faster than that. So make sure your messages can be tied back to research or evidence.
If you don’t know, get cracking on proving what you think are your key message claims.
3 – Keep them short and sweet
Lost in translation stars
They need to be simple, clear and easy to understand by anyone! The more convoluted, the more likely they are to get lost in translation. And likewise, if they’re not positive, then there’s not much point to them!
4 – Be consistent
Your key messages should be threaded across all your PR and marketing efforts. From your tag line, to your media releases, to your website, to feature stories to contributed pieces, your key messages should make up the essence of every touch point of your brand.
While they don’t need to be literally word for word the same – you ain’t a robot – but the essence or theme should be consistent.
If you’re stuck for ideas – check out ours as a reference!
Use Croft PR’s key messages as an example
For Croft PR, ours are:
PR is vital for growing a brand your tribe love and thrives with.
While we know many marketers and business owners feel overwhelmed or awkward with doing your own PR, we also know the key to tackling these challenges is having the right know-how, tools and support community to help.
And this is exactly what we do for the many purpose-driven brands we support.
Croft PR helps brand big and small create and drive simple, smart and stellar PR and communication strategies to become a brand their target audiences love and thrive with.
So if you’re ready to take the incredible leap to becoming a cult brand – creating PR your audiences need and crave – we can’t wait to hear from you at croftpr.com!
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