Why is it important to ensure your key messages are locked down? In the current media landscape, audiences are exposed to thousands of brands every single day. Of course, it’s impossible to remember them all, so you must have consistent core brand messaging to break through the clutter. This is achieved through keeping your written, visual and audio communication consistent. Doing so, increases awareness of your brand and what it offers over time – the first step to encouraging someone to act.
What exactly is a key message?
Key messages are the most important points of information you want your audience to hear, understand, and remember. Think of them as bite-sized statements that paint a picture of what your brand does, how it does it, how it’s different, and what value it can bring to stakeholders.
Key messages are used in a variety of ways. They can be designed for a specific campaign objective, a certain segment you are trying to appeal to, or for the entirety of your brand. These messages can then be used in collateral moving forward, in press releases, media statements, on web copy, for speeches, and as to ensure your media spokespeople are singing to the same brand hymn. They are like a detailed map capable of guiding your brand’s entire content journey.
“Key messages are the first thing you want people to say when they tell someone about your brand.”
How Lush can help
Lush’s editorial team crafts key messages that have the power to transcend any communication output – advertising, social media, articles, press releases, media interviews, speeches, internal comms, stakeholder relations and more. We aim to create messages that not only align with your brand values, but also align with your audience’s values so that your brand slips seamlessly into their conversations. There is no more powerful tool for brand awareness than word of mouth.
How our brand messaging workshops are run
Key messaging workshops can only begin once your brand’s identity is firmly established. If this is not the case, then an initial strategic workshop session that focuses on working out your exact brand identity will have to be worked through before we can work out your core brand messaging.
Once your brand’s identity is established, we will then try to surmise what your brand’s core objectives are and who your target audience is. Whether these be campaign specific, or big picture, they will become the foundations for your key messages. If you have multiple varied target audience segments, key messages will change accordingly, yet, stay firm with the direction of your objectives.
Sometimes, the audience segmentation goes even further and we break down a business first by product category or service offering and then by audience to create a matrix of key messages. These messages work by first completing a needs analysis for each group. Why do they care? We need to answer this before we can speak to them with any kind of relevancy.