What is messaging (and why does it matter?)

My bio says I help growth businesses find their voice. But more accurately, what I do is help them find something to say.

Because actually, startups aren’t shy. They usually really want to talk about themselves. A lot! And to almost anyone that will listen!

I respect the confidence. And since I’ve insisted on starting this blog, I’m clearly no stranger to the impulse. But content marketing is a lot like dating. Just turning up and listing all your good qualities at the other person is unlikely to lead to a deep and meaningful relationship. For it to go anywhere, you need good chat.

What is messaging?

Messaging is one of those words that’s been chucked about so much it’s just noise now, I think. All it really means is: what’s your story?

Story’s a good way to think about it, because if you say messaging, people default to talking about features. And to go back to our date analogy, that’s just telling people that you’re 6’2, have brown eyes, can run a 5k in 25 minutes. Attractive? Yes! Interesting? Not really. A meaningful articulation of who you are, and why the other person should care about you? Also no.

Nevertheless, it’s what a lot of startups put out into the market. In a former life I did PR, and I still get people asking me about it.  But what they typically say is “we would like to do PR”, and then when I ask them what they want to talk about, or what news or insights they have to share, they gesture vaguely at their product. That’s not a story. What’s a journalist going to write, that you...exist?

How do you define messaging?

So, messaging is product plus story. The concept is quite straightforward; defining what that story is is harder. There are a couple of common mistakes you’re going to want to steer clear of.

1. Your messaging should be pulled out of your product, not stuck on top

In my last post I said that messaging is a vehicle for articulating all the good stuff about your brand. It’s not your product or its features, but it should tie back to them. There are any number of themes that you could talk about and which might be interesting to your audience – but if you don’t have a clear mandate for talking about them and a clear opinion to express, they’re better avoided.

Back to the date analogy. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there have been a lot of POLITICS happening lately. So you could turn up and talk a bit about politics – it’s interesting, and it’s topical, and you know a little bit about it. But would either of you get much out of that conversation? Would regurgitating opinions you got from Twitter tell your date anything about who you are? If yes, great and crack on. If no, you should probably stay in your lane and talk about how you can run that 5k in 25 minutes. It’ll be more engaging because you actually got something to say about it, and more meaningfully demonstrative of who you are.

2. Your messaging should be something your audience wants to hear

The obvious issue here is that nobody wants to hear about running on dates. Just like your product, your messaging needs market fit. A good story can’t just be ‘stuff you want to say’. There has to be a ‘so what’ – a reason other people want to hear it, and why they should care about hearing it from you.

It’s easy to over-correct on point 1 and end up here. I do customer research for clients sometimes, and it’s surprising how often what they’re buying is not what startups are selling. You need to look for those communication gaps and close them – either by adapting your messaging, or changing it altogether. Because maybe that date was actually really into you, but you kept banging on about running and now they’ve lost interest.

3. Your messaging should flexible, but consistent

Which brings me to my final point: you have more than one audience, and they won’t all care about the same thing. You need to build flexibility into your messaging so that you don’t end up either a) hammering home one message that isn’t relevant or b) trying to cover so many that nobody knows what you actually stand for. Your messaging articulates the fundamentals about you, and those shouldn’t change. But there should be some nuance in the way you express them.

Again with the date. Say you have one really great story about a marathon you ran for charity in Spain. Your date loves running (weird), so you can talk to them about how fast you ran, how you trained for it, whatever. On the second date they introduce you to their mate, who doesn’t really care about running but has a dog. So now you tell the same story, but instead of talking about speed and training, you mention that you were running to raise money for the RSPCA. On the third date, they introduce you to their parents, who have a holiday home in Madrid. Now you can talk about how beautiful the countryside was, and how Spain has a special place in your corazon. They’re three different versions of the story, but it’s still the same story.

Why does messaging matter?

A good story isn’t just ‘what’s interesting’, but what’s interesting, plus your unique perspective on it, and what that says about you.

You need those filters because there aren’t necessarily going to be loads of new, interesting topics to talk about. Every startup says they want to do something totally different when it comes to content, and not cover the same ground as their competitors. That’s a noble ambition, and one you should absolutely throw your energy behind. But at the end of the day, unless your product has literally reinvented the wheel, your content won’t be able to. Your competitors probably talk about whatever they talk about because your target audience cares about it. You shouldn’t talk about something else just to be different – instead, leverage your messaging to find new angles on what’s already out there, and start to own those conversations.

Messaging is critical for later content ideation, too. It gives you a framework you can plot ideas against to make sure they talk about your brand even when they don’t talk about your brand. On the subject of frameworks – I’ll cover a few and give you some exercises for developing your messaging in the next post.