Strategic messaging can be defined as a form of communication that is commonly used within the context of a marketing campaign to convey specific points and achieve predefined goals. Essentially, it is the process of developing content that is compelling, creative, and captivating for the exact audience that it’s intended for. Messages are sent in more ways than just text. You might think that a brand’s website or product descriptions are the key factors that determine their messaging, but there are also subtle signals that consumers notice which also sends messages, such as reputation, design, and pricing. In this guide, we’ll talk about ways startups are using strategic messaging to achieve desirable digital marketing results.
Targeting an Audience
According to Saint Paul marketing agency Upswing Creative, the most important step in developing a strategic messaging plan is to first identify and refine the keywords, demographics, and topics that you should be targeting. This can be done by simply noticing patterns within the analytical interfaces of PPC platforms like Facebook Ads. However, effective targeting and re-targeting can be a complicated process, especially if you’re trying to achieve reliably consistent results. Once you know who you’re trying to direct the message towards, it’s time to get to know your target audience even further, which brings us to our next tip.
Understanding the Psyche and Preferences of Your Customer Base
As you continue to explore topics that are trending and interesting for a specific demographic or subset of the population, you’ll become more familiar with what they like and what they want. This is important because as a salesperson or marketer of any kind (which is what you’re doing during strategic messaging), you can never lose sight of the fact that you’re only supposed to tell a prospect what they want to hear. Obviously, discussing something that is not what a reader or viewer wants to hear will not be a pleasing experience, and they may not want to consume your content again as a result. Essentially, strategic messaging involves catering to preconceived notions and stereotypes that do actually exist within identifiable markets online.
Knowing When and Where to Publish Content
You can write the world’s greatest article or produce the highest quality video ever seen, but if it’s not put on the right website, it will never see its true traffic potential. For example, let’s say you made a video that was by far the most informative overview of a very specific DIY process, and you then published that on your home improvement blog which you just launched yesterday. Without any extensive external marketing, it’s very unlikely that your video would receive more views than it would if you had posted it on a YouTube channel that had 1 million subscribers.
Research Applicable Content Publishing Platforms for Maximum Outreach
As an additional effort to make sure your messages are distributed in a diversified manner, be sure to check out lists of the top social media sites and make an effort to publish content on all of them equally. This will give your strategic messaging campaigns maximum outreach potential.