Are Your Key Messages Forgettable? Here’s How to Improve Them

Let’s play a game: I give you a company’s headline marketing copy, you tell me what’s trying to be communicated.

Protection for who and what matters.

Ask yourself: What does this company want you to remember? What’s the main takeaway? What convinces you that you need this?

If your answer is “Umm, I don’t know,” you are correct.

This phrase fails to tell us who matters, what matters, what they’re being protected from, and how they’re being protected.

Would it surprise you to learn that this phrase is selling identity theft protection?

This is not a writing problem — it’s a key message problem. And any solid brand or content strategy must begin with solid key messaging; otherwise, all your content is just jargony word soup that isn’t memorable and doesn’t convert.

People are tired of not knowing what you do

Do you ever meet people who look at your site and later tell you “I’m still not sure what your company does”? Do your employees avoid sending prospects to your site because it doesn’t explain anything helpful? 

Yeah. You can produce all the great content you want, on the fullest most regular content calendar, hosted on the world’s shiniest website, but if your content creation doesn’t support the main messages you want to convey, what even is the point?

What is a key message?

A key message is a specific thing you want your audience to remember about you that also explains, even just a little bit, the value and/or service you provide. Your business can have more than one key message, but they should all be short and somewhat related.

How many times have you heard “15 minutes or less can save you 15% or more on car insurance” in Geico commercials in the past 20 years? That’s a sticky key message. It tells you exactly what you get: Cheaper car insurance in just a few minutes.

A key message is not the same as a slogan; “I’m lovin’ it” wasn’t a key message. “I’m lovin’ it” may have made you think of McDonalds, but it doesn’t tell you anything about what you’re lovin’ or why.

Key messages straddle a product explanation and a brand promise. They must reflect brand messaging, but tell you more than just the fact that you’re lovin’ the elusive “it.”

How do I create a solid key message?

Determining your key messages is arguably more science than art; it’s a process you must go through. It involves understanding product capabilities and offerings, brand messaging, target audience, audience pain points, and business objectives. 

You must know what you are offering and to whom, what problems the offering solves, and for whom. One message doesn’t have to address all of that, but there should be a messaging ecosystem that accounts for all offerings.

It’s not a simple process, which is why many clients ask us to take them through a workshop and develop key messages for them. 

A workshop, you say?

That’s right! We run key message development workshops. It’s a process that takes a few days from start to finish, but the actual active time we spend with you in a workshop is about two hours. We do initial fact-finding up front, then we do the workshop, and then we need a couple of days to process everything. Depending on how complex your product or space is, we will ask you to explain your product and its capabilities. This ensures we keep crossed wires to a minimum. 

The purpose of the workshop is to create clear, consistent messaging for your leads and customers. The goal is to build a handful of key messages that convince leads and customers to meet the company goals/objectives that we document in the workshop. This can be: converting new leads, renewing existing customers, reactivating lapsed customers, and more. 

If necessary, we break down your products and group them and add some simple bullet points that explain the offering (this is usually done according to the pre-work you send us).

Then we discuss the pain points each of your customer personas face, and map the pain points to your offerings. 

During our time, we want to extract enough data to build strategic content that achieves your goals. When the workshop is done, we’ll take about a week to review everything and put together initial drafts of key messages for your offering overall and then for each different product you offer, if applicable.

From there, we get your feedback on what works and what doesn’t in the drafts we presented. You know your company and your product better than anyone, and you are key in helping us get this right.

Finally, we refine and get started using those key messages in your content! It helps in everything we or your teams write, from site copy and landing pages to blog and social media posts.

Example key message improvement

Here’s an example of actual improvements we can make to key messages:

Before: Are your legacy skills passé — or more valuable than ever?

After: Your legacy skills are more valuable than ever.

We focus a lot on pain points when it comes to key message development. It’s easy to write shiny, happy, punchy marketing messages, but those are meaningless and forgettable. We don’t want that. Pain points connect with the reader and draw them into finding a solution to a problem.

The original message above is for a product that supports another legacy product, but is still invaluable in its market. The message leaves the reader wondering, “Are my skills passé? What if they’re not valuable anymore!” Our rewrite points out that the skills are, indeed, “legacy” (pain point) while also reinforcing that they’re valuable.

What’s the point of leaving a reader feeling insecure? Will they remember your product as a result? Of course not. Maybe they’ll remember, “Oh that’s the brand that made me feel like I have nothing to offer anymore.”

When we have a good key message, we can reinforce it in the website copy, blog posts, social media posts, and more. It’s important to have several of them and to reuse them, reword them, and develop a reputation around them.

Why is this so important?

Key messages aren’t vanity items or nice-to-haves; they’re critical. Strong messages are crucial to a successful brand, an effective content marketing strategy, and yes, even better lead generation.

How? Because not only will people know what you do and what you offer, they’ll know why they should buy from you.

Don’t go the route of bland and forgettable, even if you think it sounds good. Provide bold, clear statements that entice your audience to do something. Even if they don’t act immediately, strong key messages will ensure they remember you and come back when they are ready to take action.

Enticed by having memorable, pertinent key messages to drive your marketing? We offer free 30 minute consultations, and we’d be happy to help move your marketing from “What do you do again?” to “I need that pronto.”