Messaging is a compass for you to know who you are, what you’re about, and what you’re trying to do. Everything you do, if you do it right, should have a message behind it. It doesn’t matter if you are a politician, a city tourism board, a nonprofit, a small business, or a vast conglomerate. Everything you do, from your social media to your strategy to your employee engagement to your marketing; it all must have messaging behind it.

Messages makes sense

Messaging forces you to ask yourself what you’re really doing when you talk about your company, or your campaign. Messaging is the thing that drives you forward. It can be a list of a few phrases that help drive your campaign. It can be the thing that informs the script you write, the film you produce, the event you put out, or the marketing campaign. Messaging works everywhere

When to bring in messaging

When do you bring in messaging? This is a simple answer – everywhere. Messaging has to be the first thing you think about when you’re doing anything. When you’re putting together a marketing campaign, what is the message behind it? Let’s say you’re a bio-health firm and you want to talk about a new project you’re implementing; you start with a message. You have a company and you have a new product that’s ready to hit the market. Great.

What’s the messaging? How are you going to be talking about this product? Why does it matter? What is interesting about it? What does it make people feel when they get in? How do you want people to feel? What do you want them to do? You want to do a big event, lovely. What’s the message behind it? You want to make something big? Great, bring a message into it.

Why start with messaging

If you’re thinking about these questions, then I hope you’re seeing how messaging is the fundamental starting point of everything you do, or at least it should be. Messaging is what defines your brand, your look, your mood, your focus, and your intention. 

A message is the building block of everything you put out into the world. It is the thing that says, “this is who I am, this is what I’m about, this is how we’re talking about the thing, and this is what I hope audience get out of the thing.”

A message gives you a reason for being and it gives you direction. Messaging is your gateway to a better understanding of what your company is doing. When I speak about messaging, I speak specifically about those foundational elements that drive business; what are you about, what are you saying, why are you saying it, and what is the meaning behind what you do. Businesses thrive, marketing works, and office culture is improved when people understand what their message is. 

Everything is the message

You may not recognize it, but everything you face in a single day, all the images you come across, they are either bolstered by strong messaging or hampered by poor messaging. The news you follow, the coffee place you go to, the delivery app you chose to get dinner from, the ice cream shop you visit with your family; it all has to do with messaging and these messages are working on you constantly. We choose our go-to restaurants, coffee shops, and pharmacies because of the power of a company’s message.