May 2021: Is Your Messaging Working?
Happy May, friend!
I ran a LinkedIn poll last month to let you pick the topic for this edition of The Good Stuff. I found it telling that “Is your messaging working?” won out. It’s a question that seems so simple, yet we marketers know better. It’s a hairy beast.
What I find both amusing and frustrating about this topic is, it’s so easy to tell whether someone else’s messaging is working—but never our own.
As consumers, we gravitate toward brands and causes with messaging that supports our understanding of our own identities. We skim emails, blogs, websites, social media posts, and products and decide in an instant: like that, don’t like that, hate that, love that.
And yet, choosing the right words and stories to describe the work we do can feel like an impossible task.
This phenomenon has a name. It’s called The Curse of Knowledge. Essentially, we know too much about our own work. Our brains are steeped in nuance. The more we know and care about the work, the more we subconsciously believe other people know and care about it, too. We are cursed.
The longer we live with the Curse, the more we bury our core messages in embellishments. Without realizing it, the way we’re writing and speaking about our work becomes, over time, more cluttered than Great Aunt Iris’s tchotchke collection.
What’s more: When there are too many cooks in the communications kitchen, all shaking and stirring while deliriously cursed, the messaging sauce becomes over seasoned, over mixed, and overcooked. Our taste buds adapt due to overexposure so we think it tastes fine—even great—but no one on the outside can digest or enjoy that sauce.
These are all signs that your messaging has become a murky mess:
It’s too complicated: Every time someone asks you, “What do you do for work?” your gut squirms as you struggle to assemble the right words. You talk for a while and they nod politely... as their eyes glaze over.
It’s not starting a conversation: You very rarely hear directly from email subscribers and receive very few comments on your blog or social media posts (mom doesn’t count).
Your team doesn’t agree: If you work with other people, you’re constantly debating how to talk about the work. Every department has its own variation, and every time a new piece of marketing collateral needs to be created it goes through multiple rounds of revisions.
Your website is dense and not properly guiding people: You keep adding web pages—and adding to them—in an attempt to answer people’s questions, but the questions keep coming.
You’re drowning in weird contact form submissions: You frequently receive inquiries from people who are misunderstanding what you do.
Your fans aren’t adopting your language: You encourage your customers or supporters to use specific language, but they’re not adopting it and tend to word your work differently—if they share about it at all.
Some of these red flags are actually measurable (e.g. email responses, social media engagement, contact form submissions) but most are not. To determine whether you have a messaging problem, you must tune in—to your gut, to your team, and to your interactions with your customers or supporters. Tuning in often requires user research.
Remember, your messaging isn’t for you.
It’s critical to remember that your messaging is for your customers, donors, supporters, leads, and fans. Think about it like giving someone else a gift; you want to get them something you know they will love, even if you would never choose it for yourself.
Because your messaging is not for you, it needs to be simple and consistent. Nobody on the outside knows or cares as much as you do, and they won’t thoroughly read anything you write, either. I know you don’t care about this email as much as I do! In fact, you may never read this sentence, and that’s OK.
So, with your users top of mind...
Here’s how to identify and fix a messaging problem:
Conduct user research in the form of a survey, interviews, focus groups, a digital audit, or all of the above to understand current perceptions of your work, the language your fans like to use to describe you and their common points of confusion
Hire a partner to develop a messaging guide that is informed by your user research and will be adopted by your entire team
Get your team on board (whether it’s staff, board members, ambassadors, volunteers) because they will need to start writing and speaking about your work differently, for the betterment of your business or organization
You can hire me or another fabulous consultant to develop a research-informed messaging guide for you. This process must be led by someone outside of your business or organization—someone who is not Cursed—or the result will be a new flavor or your same murky stew.
If you choose to conduct your own user research, surveys should be anonymous and qualitative research should be conducted by someone the interviewees don’t know. This gives them the freedom to be fully honest.
You can also audit your own content. Which social media posts received the most positive comments, reactions, and shares? Which emails or blog posts sparked a conversation with your subscribers? How high is the bounce rate across your website? Which pages are converting well, if any? What did you put into the world that you thought was awesome, but it fell flat?
And lastly, just ask people. Don’t ask Great Aunt Iris what she thinks of your messaging if she isn’t even close to your target audience. Ask people who could potentially become a customer or supporter and don't know much, or anything, about your work yet. Give them your schpiel or send them your website and ask them, “What do you think? What is your gut reaction? What is your key takeaway? What's confusing?”
Got questions? Comments? Feel free to reply! Then I’ll know this message resonated with you. :)
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