It starts with great messaging...

Let’s say you don’t have a senior brand strategist or a director of lead generation or social media manager. But your executive team understands there is value in all those things and somebody taped a message to your back when you weren’t looking that says "Kick me... I love marketing!"

So where do you start?

The sales guy wants leads... “send out some emails or start a pay per click campaign or something like that” he says.

Your CEO wants that sexy PowerPoint presentation he’s never been able to quite pull together. And everyone and their mother is clamoring for “social media.”

Well, before you jump in with all that fun stuff, start with your messaging.

Get the messages about who you are and what you do fully worked out. But what does that actually mean?

People at your company might already feel they understand who they are and what they are doing. After all, they already developed a product or a service and you’re already selling it to happy customers. It could be that when asked about it, your sales guys and executives have a ripe and ready answer to the question “what does your company do?” That’s all well and good and should make preparing a messaging framework easier, but it certainly doesn’t preclude doing it.

Having a formal, agreed upon, messaging document is a very valuable tool. It sets a baseline framework for marketing efforts to come. All those tasty goodies everyone wants to have, the social media, the trade show materials, the killer website.... all of it is now more coordinated, more efficiently produced, and more effective. You may find yourself working with a whole bunch of vendors at some point and a well produced messaging document about your company can make coordinating their efforts much easier. And most importantly you have an agreed upon criteria to evaluate all your marketing work going forward.

So what exactly constitutes a good messaging framework varies, but some foundational elements you'll want to consider includes:

• Vision statement
• Mission statement
• Value proposition statement
• Tagline (or mantra)
• Positioning statement
• Elevator pitch
• "About Us" statement
• 50-word boilerplate
• Core promise(s)
• 5 key messages (preferably benefits statements)
• Differentiators from competition
• Writing style and tone
• Voice

It can certainly be much much more and there are a lot of great resources for learning more about it (just run a search on creating messaging frameworks).

Whatever you do decide to include, make sure producing it is a clearly defined project with a timeline and meetings and reviews and sign off and all that good stuff. The point is everyone should be crystal clear that getting the messaging right (all of its parts and pieces, writing it down, and getting consensus from stakeholders) is a “real” thing with a tangible outcome. We’ve seen companies over the years time and again, who forgo this step or postpone it. That's a sure way to wind up with slippery inefficient efforts. You wouldn’t start your journey without a map or build your house without a blueprint. Make sure you’re setting yourself up marketing in the same way with a formal messaging framework.

Want some inspiration? Check out a few messaging framework examples.

Whether it's developing a messaging framework for your company, product, service or program, there are several strategic actions you can implement to improve your chances of success. Consider bringing a full-service B2B marketing/creative/branding agency like BayCreative on board to implement messaging best practices and get it done right (as we've done for our clients Salesforce, Cisco, ServiceNow, Airship, Twitter, Google, Docker and more!) 

Stay healthy! -- Scott, Arne and Team BayCreative