Working on your messaging
Writing clarifies my thinking.
Or rather, it exposes my thinking to be a sink full of dirty plates. Incoherently placed and smeared with all sorts of things that were tasty at the time.
Putting anything into words is hard and, as that last paragraph proves, can go badly wrong.
The hardest words for an agency are on the home page. The “messaging”. Anything on the surface where your writing meets your customer.
Let's understand why and ask how we can do it better.
Here’s how it goes
Here’s how a normal founder deals with messaging
- Tell clients and anyone that will listen how important messaging is
- Attempt your own messaging
- Complete crisis
You should have seen this coming, it’s the part of every client project that takes the longest. Getting them to decide on “the words”. Now it’s your turn to feel the pain.
Because we aren’t just deciding words, we are deciding what we do. And if we aren’t clear, then the words are awful, generic, blah.
Like every other agency’s homepage.
And we’re not like every other agency. We aren’t blah.
Our agency has purpose and we are going to capture what makes it special.
Difficulty deciding on messaging is the symptom, the exposure of a lack of clarity. It brutally highlights that you haven’t ever decided on:
- Your positioning
- Your ideal client
- Your vision
- Anything, actually
Or maybe you did decide on those things once. And now everything has changed.
But you asked for that change when you decided to grow a business and have new ideas.
Maybe the way to deal with it is to decide where you are going and then write that.
However, now you have to decide where you are going and get clarity on that.
…
Maybe ChatGPT can help? 🧐
It’s hard for everyone
People that work in messaging have to treat their clients like small children learning to read. They give them exercises like:
We are a ____ that helps ____ solve ____
just to get people to say in a sentence what it is they actually do.
And people still can’t do it.
They’ll spend hours on that one alone.
I remember the workshops; are you an agency, a studio or a consultancy? Urgh. When can we go to lunch?
The problem is that people write their content like they are planning a wedding
Spend a long time deciding who to invite, what to wear and who to thank in your speech. Try lots of things on. Receive advice from people who are plying you with alcohol. Keep things within the norms of weddings you’ve been to. Do it once (or at least plan to).
This way of doing it makes it hard because it elevates the importance of every decision and it’s all done in isolation.
You are searching for the words in your own head and, if they aren’t perfect, it fails.
How to make it better
Treat messaging as the place where you and your ideal client come together.
If paying an invoice is an exchange of value then messaging is an exchange of ideas.
Messaging may seem passive. You write it and a potential customer reads it to decide if you are for them.
However, you aren’t in a silo, you are part of a business and an economy. You receive constant feedback, and give off signals and ideas all day long. This isn't just explicit feedback like reviews or client complaints. It's the ambient feedback from your last sales call. It's about the problems you are currently solving, or being asked to solve, by existing clients.
Just by operating, thinking, and communicating daily, you are testing your messaging with the people that are important.
If you are going to communicate you are going to have to notice what resonates.
The words come from inside you but the messaging comes from the outside where the words meet the world and either fall flat or create a connection.
Your homepage should mirror this meeting of minds.
If it works, your audience recognises it. They have been trying to explain what they want and define their own problems.
When they reach out it should feel like the conversation already started.
So when you next sit down to work on those tricky words put your eyes and ears into action before you start thinking things up.
The start of that conversation is lying around in emails, chats and messages.
Questions that were asked and those you noticed needed to be asked.
Find those and you’ll find the words that are uniquely yours.